[coolliquidcode]

If you are hobbling with a PI it's all about the community support, form factor, low power and the header pins. Hopefully if you are buying a Pi you already have a specific project in mind.

For example: I use a few zero 2 w's with shairport-sync to make Airplay stereos. I use the header pins to control a relay to turn on and off an audio amp. Pi 4+ would actually work a lot better for this especially when playing audio on multiple of these setups at once. A Lenovo mini pc wouldn't be as easy to hide.

[baz00]

I wouldn't go too far down the "community support" thing with the RPi foundation. Careful if you say anything negative, even in a constructive tone, in case Liz shuts your threads down. I had some problems with brownouts on the RPi 2 and posted a technical thread. It was deleted and my account terminated. There are various reports of this from community refugees who switched to other platforms.

[coolliquidcode]

I guess by community support is if you want to build something you'll find 100 tutorials on how to do it or it will even be part of the GitHub project. I never visit the official forums. These community mods are crazy with the little bit of power given. I had similar issues with arstechnica.com before it became an echo chamber.