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But no ethernet port, no GPIO, no fanless.

It's comparing two completely different usecases.

I can get a (used) fanless laptop and a USB GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN/whatever adapter for that money. Raspberry Pis started at ~$30 for a minimal configuration. They were so cheap that they killed the whole overpriced range of $100 to $200 dev boards by vendors that tried to make money of dev boards for their chips.

They have to be cheap enough that tinkers leave them in their projects.

But the result is huge, you cannot 3d print a custom case for that and put it somewhere at home…

You might be surprised how small a laptop motherboard can be. Once you take away screen, keyboard, battery, speakers, daughter boards and all that, you can have an actively cooled motherboard as slim as a pi and not much bigger.

If you need something really tiny, an esp32 can do a lot of what we used to use a pi for. Driving an eink display for example

Could you 3d print a case for the usb dongle and the breadboard, and then Velcro that to the laptop?

I mean… yes… but you still have a laptop sitting there :D

Plenty of laptops have Ethernet, and as for fanless, a lot of people choose active cooling for a pi5

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