Not a replacement; just a great experimentation system for doing a mix of work, electronics, game emulation, IoT. Let's compare to used laptop: It has uart an

Not a replacement; just a great experimentation system for doing a mix of work, electronics, game emulation, IoT. Let's compare to used laptop: It has uart and i2c which require a ftdiH dongle or arduino to use on a PC. Plenty of pwm and motor controller shields not available for PC. Up to date wifi and Bluetooth on the model 4, which you won't get on a 5 year old laptop. You can try a couple different OS setups by merely swapping the sd card, or start from scratch in a couple minutes There are no proprietary batteries that might die; instead you can run off a usb supply or battery brick which you can get anywhere. Dual HDMI on the 4 Different form factor; can clip on your belt for some sort of wearable Frankenstein project But yeah, I'd be sure to have a working conventional system first Edit: forgot i2s digital audio and camera ribbon port