It depends on when big companies throws out their pcs, like when they are 5 years old, or so it feels.
I did a quick search on ebay, it probably depends on where you live but I stumbled upon a 55€ one here
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service, usually has place for a 2'5 drive plus a nvme and had two sodim slots, plus some funky stuff like small cards and CD player and so on so eventually it might cost more than 50€...
The problem with tinkcentres (tiny here) is that they are really easy to open and service,
Is that really a problem 😅
I'm actually in France, but somehow ebay is not really in my mind, so u totally miss those, I'll have a look because it sure looks like less trouble to go this way than with the raspberry pi, even the OS as it would be a 64bits and not ARM (if I looked well on the specs)
(edit) also, now that I look at my setups I realize that I don't even use much of the GPIo on the rpi4 because I have a stupid amount of Esp32 spread everywhere in my place that fulfill the need
I always thought about the raspberries strength as small mobile devices. If I want IO on my PC I could buy an adapter/card. Or use my raspberry because I have one or two ofc. It sure is easy with them.
Best adaptor out there, atm. Is a pi zero with gpiozero on it. There really is not much in the way of adaptors with the support and flexibility for beginners that pi provides.