I would not have considered artificially-working the SOC to maintain a steady temp! When the wattage is that low, however, it makes sense to burn a few extra bucks a year versus some kind of overengineered cooling system.
It's kind of crazy that they insist on doing basically one of these every year. A lot of people complain that the iPhone stopped changing (meaningfully) between updates several years back. I think Apple Silicon is bound to be the same. I will say that the M4 Mac Mini was groundbreaking in terms of a budget-friendly Apple product -- I hope they recognized why it was loved and continue to iterate in that direction.
Because people have fun creating those sorts of setups. There are many tutorials for those setups, the hardware can be found relatively affordably, and it isn't something someone needs to have experience in enterprise networking to build. The purpose of the hobby is to have fun. If you aren't having fun, or if other people's fun is ruining your day, consider finding a new hobby. I suggest fly fishing. You could probably use more vitamin D.
You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).
I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt.
And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc.
Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to do what you need.
Maybe five years from now we will see ARM or RISC-V mini PCs further narrow the Venn diagram for raspberry pi systems.
I've had a ton of fun with CasaOS in the past few months. I don't mind managing docker-compose text files, but CasaOS comes with a simple UI and an "App Store" that makes the process really simple and doesn't overly-complicate things when you want to customize something about a container.
This scandal comes to mind any time I see amyloid plaque research. Not sure if I misunderstood the scandal or if Alzheimer’s research has too much momentum to pivot. My dad was diagnosed a few years back and seeing stuff like this is always encouraging and infuriating because of this science article.
this is a solid argument against the open-source purists that I've never heard before and really appreciate. Many people would like to make money on the things they spend their time building. Some percentage of those people also love FOSS. Fair source is the middle ground where they can share their work, open it up for criticism, issues, and fixes, but ensure that their business is secure. It's a solid middle ground that shouldn't be demonized just because it isn't open source.
I think because providing commercial support for such a software is not allowed by the license, there is a strong vendor lock-in. That‘s a big drawback for users.
