If you already have a laptop with a board you can extract, and a 3D printer you can make a custom case with for a couple of quid, you'd rather reuse parts of the old laptop than let it go to waste, and you'd enjoy the whole project, why instead spend $50-100 and have to deal with the [censored]s on eBay?

> Unless you're just doing it for the love of the game

Isn't that way a lot of people do the home-lab thing and related projects what would need the Pi these ideas are talking about replacing? It is why I do it [or used to be before working in tech for decades killed a lot of the enjoyment I had for playing with tech].

> or happen to have a lot of laptop boards sitting around you can sell

You are the first in this thread to bring up what any of this is worth on a larger scale, selling the results. Everyone else is talking about putting together one simple computer or jumped-up microcontroller for a task of their own, and maybe more later for other projects. Some of us find this sort of thing fun, and in the shit world we are all living in right now having a bit of fun and achieving something [sort of] practical out of it, can be priceless.