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pzo

What I would want to have some company to make one device that would at the same time be:

1) router

2) smart tv (airplay, chromecast, miracast)

3) smart speaker

4) smart home gateway (matter)

5) wireless charging pad

6) private cloud (nextcloud)

7) private backup (removable nvm)

8) private vpn / dns / pihole / adguard

9) mini server

Everything in a nice package and preconfigure and ideally modular (upgradable ssd, wifi).

UmbrelOS [0] is interesting but its quite expensive and its only for home server (no router, no smart speaker, smart tv, wireless charging pad). Apple TV has a great hardware and cheap but so limited for 3rd party. Wish they made it modular that you could attach magnetic speaker, wireless charging pad and had some usb for attaching 4g modem.

[0] https://umbrel.com/

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Please check Synology products, a Taiwanese company. They have affordable products and solutions that provide all your listed requirements and then some more [1],[2]. Not sure if they have one device or several devices integrate together to perform the functions you've listed, more likely the latter.

[1] Synology Products A - Z: Applications:

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products-a-z

[2] Synology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synology

Openwrt ticks a lot of those boxes if you add storage. For me, the location of my router makes using it as a charging pad, speaker, and TV device impractical anyway, and I can imagine I'm not alone in that.

Yes I understand in US where a lot of people live in houses this makes less sense but in asia and europe a lot of people live in apartments and they have their router and smart tv box in living room on tv desk. Such router covers whole apartment and direct wired connection to TV would reduce latency with airplay. Many also use 4g usb modem since mobile data providers are cheap there (e.g. in poland you can get 300GB for $7 with 5g included and no contract.

Used Lenovo Tiny PCs with VMs, iGPU and 4-port NICs get close.

Got any specific recommendation for 4-port NIC?

Depends on your preference for hypervisor/host, network performance, SR-IOV partitioning, need/avoidance of AMT vPro remote mgnt (e.g. Intel vs. Broadcom), OEM NIC firmware. I've used low-profile Dell quad-port NICs in the past.

Intel I350-T4. Make sure it’s a genuine one.

BananaPi R4 + some storage + OpenWrt + native packages and Docker for everything that's missing from native packages.

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