Not all workloads can be "completed" by throwing hardware at them. The sort of thing this kind of hardware is ideal for is things like home automation.

I run Home Assistant on an Xeon ITX PC with a micro-PSU for example, it's at ~40-60% CPU and ~80% RAM (of 16GB) running inference on my camera streams, handling Zigbee and Z-Wave devices etc, running automations, handling all of the sensors for the doors, lights etc in my home. This isn't a bursty problem you can simply get a more powerful CPU for, the goal here is to keep power down and performance up because it's a constant load. A smaller, lower power micro-PC would save me a bit in energy costs if I wanted to.

For real work, people like me (us?) use real servers like you say; I run a Ryzen 9 12c/24t, AsRock Rack, 2 M.2 NVMe, HBA, 8 SAS bays, 128GB RAM, 6 GbE NICs, with dozens of VMs and containers on, a few Kubernetes clusters, and a bunch of services (git, Harbor, Argo, etc) it uses about 100-150W with my CPU downspecced to 65W TDP.

Now that's a system that has bursty workloads, but it's in a different class to these low power machines that "normal" home users are looking for.

> Now RAM on the other hand! > Free RAM is wasted RAM!

Can't argue with that.

ZFS will take care of that for you.

Even my i3 NUC isn't that much heavier, consuming 15ish W (IIRC again) idle.