It's useful if you need GPIO but not $350 useful. Nowadays you can get used office mini PCs with a 10th gen Intel and 16GB RAM for like $200 and they'll come with an SSD. No idea why anyone would buy an expensive Pi.

▲

giobox 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.

▲

ianburrell 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What are you wanting to use it for? There is using Pi as desktop, which was only option for a while, but now mini PCs are much better. There is using it as server, where mini PCs are better for homelabs and multiple services but Pi is good for lightweight single service. Then there is hobbyist use, where Pi is cheap when get lightweight one and has ecosystem of hardware and software.

▲

xnyan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not the GPIO, it's the software ecosystem for anything you would want to connect to the GPIO.

▲

baby_souffle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but none of the hardware peripherals routed out to those pins are exclusive to that pin header.

If you need a few i2c or SPI or uart buses or even just general purpose IO then AliExpress has a gazillion little USB based modules that will get you exactly that.

If you're still very new to electronics and not at all comfortable going outside of well-established curriculum that explicitly says use this raspberry pi with this sensor attached on these pins with this library configured in this way... Yes. But that can't be most of the people paying this price?

	▲	justin66 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most of the people buying raspberry pis are industrial customers who are not on the fence about whether to buy an SBC or someone’s trashed PC.

▲

5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]