Entrepreneur: Why This Tiny Cube Might Be Your Next Office PC
xi3.com
xi3.com
This has been around for 2-3 years now and while nice to look at, it isn't that great. I never really understood what niche market they were trying to target because their hardware choices aren't all that compelling. To explain:
The choice of CPUs (the only thing that you would want to upgrade since network and power won't matter that much) is pretty sparse - Athlon 3400E, 3100, or 2000+ are your "current gen" choices. The performance of these CPUs is comparable/worse than some of the Atoms present in nettops which cost much less than $850. Once you factor in accessories (vesa mount is extra on the xi3 as are the keyboard/mouse - also the default SSD is pretty small @ 16GB), the price of one xi3 is comparable to 2, maybe 3 nettops.
Over 10 years, how often would you upgrade a basic workstation computer or HTPC (the only real use for a computer with this type of power)? Probably only 2 times. So why buy an xi3 instead of a nettop at half the cost? Presumably so you can upgrade at a smaller cost. However you can just buy an entire new nettop when you do decide to upgrade, which would also have a better CPU at the time, and still manage to break even. You even get to keep the old nettop working instead of having a useless extra CPU lying around.
Overall, the idea is interesting but the final costs simply don't make sense for a workstation/HTPC. You would need to do CPU upgrades > 2-3 times in 10 years to beat the cost of just buying a nettop.
The one thing they do have going for them is the Z3RO Module (you need to pay for the software to run this as well @$100) but this too isn't a great solution. One of these will let you use one xi3 for 4 people at roughly the same cost as 3 nettops (a bit over but not enough to get 4). This seems to be a good price if you don't need much computing power to run your software (remember, this is about the same power as an Atom so it is fairly weak already). If you get another module to double to 8, the price will seem even better but what can be run by the users will be severely limited as they are all sharing a single computer.
A better solution than this would be to forgo the hard drives in your nettops to cut cost and instead use them as thin clients. You get more computing power and can still scale at a somewhat reasonable cost compared to the xi3 + Z3RO Module. Or, you can just go with cheap laptops (portable, same power, prices are dirt cheap for low end ones, and they come with OEM licenses for Windows, and don't require monitors) and beat out the xi3 + Z3RO Module completely.
As long as Xi3 still exists. Once they die, you own a cool historical curiosity.