The other awesome way to do this is old thin clients. You can get a HP t620 or t630 (or the Wyse equivalent) for <$75. They usually have AMD SoCs and can take M2 SSDs.
I used to be super interested in thin clients, after some small DEC units got popular-ish for being turned into Linux wifi APs. And I'd follow every embedded core release with anticipation.
But these days I mostly have a bitter outlook towards this segment. They are exceedingly slow at adopting new cores, even when say AMD has a drop in replacement for them. The commonly seen AMD GX-420GI is a 2016 release, a 28nm final/4th generation Bulldozer, which isnt terrible, but isnt power efficient & pretty underwhelming. Thin clients are no longer mass-market items, now kind of botique gear, and costs are correspondingly high.
The one liter business mini pc market has, in my view, completely overtaken this plodding botique field. It refreshes designs regularly, there is huge volume/good resale, a little more expandability, better features. The more modern cores mean way better power efficiency (albeit there is usually an 8w idle which isnt fantastic).
100% agreed. At the “high end” it’s a licensing play to avoid the Microsoft license. At the low end, it’s a weird volume business.
I buy lots of 10,000 and get 50-60% discounts for the cheaper Linux devices. At the low quantity price they don’t make any sense as you can source quantity 1 shitty PCs within a few dollars of a thin client at low volume. Also Chromebooks can help you deliver a much cheaper solution by reducing server side concurrency.
I always suspected that Microsoft did something in the backend to poison the product as PC management is such a PITA and cash cow. For task users, my company is replacing PCs soley because of Windows support. (Aka $30-50/unit to MS)
I have a little Dell 3040 that only has 8GB of storage that’s a pita to upgrade and do this. I use a Samsung external flash drive to store surveillance video in a friends barn.
Model dependent, but a lot of “thin” clients are just x64 PCs with Atom or AMD GX CPUs, with M.2 disks, BIOS menus and all. Zero clients are usually more exotic in unique ways.
