And used intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They're pretty handy and upgradable actually.
I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2 cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs.
PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new, new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a particular use.
Pis are awesome if you have PoE+ or better. I have two pis one of them using the nvme+poe+ hat connected with just an ethernet cable. It also has serial UART port that counts as an offline remote access of sorts.
I also just sent a Rockpro64 on a NAS case with 2x25TB disks overseas to my parent's home where it runs as a low powered backup server.
Mkay but what is the advantage of Mac Mini over HP Elitedesk? If it's for running servers like CasaOS etc., you will have to deal with one problem after another. It's my biggest gripe with Apple's hardware: it's deliberately obsoleted after a few years (as opposed to what MS is doing - they only started playing this game with Windows 11) and at this point you are more or less limited to what was available at that time. (You can get around this with Dosdude etc. for some time but you hit the wall at some point.)
I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2 cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs.
PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new, new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a particular use.