That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose.
As I mentioned in the post, the M4 mini is only $50-100 more (though RAM upgrades quickly negate the price comparison past the base model), and it's many times more efficient—and powerful.
And while you can't do everything with Thunderbolt... there are some halfway-decent external PCIe docks you can use with some devices on macOS now.
You do need a little testing because ARM is different, but the odds that are are doing something where it matters are low. I've been doing the above for years and only found two things. First was a bug in GCC (already fixed in a newer version by the time I traced it down). Second was x86 has a strong stronger memory model for sharing data between threads - hopefully you are not doing that (I only hit it because I maintain our cross thread message system).
You also can't test anything that uses GPIO type things - but this computer has different setup and so you couldn't with this anyway. (and you should abstract your GPIO for testing anyway so this because a small test case when you do switch to real hardware)
Probably won't end up buying this, but it's not hard to imagine a small number of other people would find it useful.
Like I said, a niche, but not one that's nonexistent. I know Minisforum was hyping the Android angle a bit, though in my small amount of mobile app dev, I was happy enough doing that on my Mac.
I’m just thinking that the Mac Mini might also be better for that usecase, even with the virtualization in place. If you need to support a specific processor, you probably want to work with that exact processor. But if you want to use any ARM, a virtualized Linux running on a Mac isn’t a bad option.
The downside is that it eats into power usage. Even then, I’m averaging just 6.4w over 30 days.
The homelab niche always surprises me for how many people are willing and able to buy hardware they don't really need.
I'm sure it's still a small niche, but I wouldn't be surprised if minisforum was selling a lot of devices to homelab builders looking for the next toy to add to their collection.
That's a challenge this machine has, it has to compete with things like a used 64GB M1 Max Mac Studio for $900 when the equivalent config is $700. The M1 Max would be wildly faster in everything.