> What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today? does one stop being a consumer once the GPIO is touched? Intel boards with a unified GPIO ar

> What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today? does one stop being a consumer once the GPIO is touched? Intel boards with a unified GPIO are pricey industrial units, and I don't consider pinning out a serial port or parallel port to be a very clean solution; and I consider an attached sister-board Arduino to be even less tidy. Having a desktop with that type of IO is just handy for the things that I do as hobbies, just as my multimedia Intel-based laptop is handy for when I want to consume media. the unit price is ridiculous for RPis right now though, i'll certainly agree to that.