I live right next to a micro center and remember when they started offering that deal... still so pissed at myself for not buying one. I ended up just buying a raspberry Pi for what I was doing, but seeing as where the prices are now, I messed that up a bit. Also my worst sin was not buying 64GB of DDR5 when I was doing my computer upgrades back in August last year.
I returned an M4 Mac mini, 64GB, unopened... because I thought it was excessive for my needs then. I swear it'll be one of the things flashing before my eyes when this all ends.
Mac mini aren't that good for home made server, raspberry sure ain't powerful but there are in-between.
Not being able to upgrade the SSD or the ram is a big issue, not so much on a portable laptop.
Out of all of my home servers, the M4 Mac Mini is probably my favorite and runs many workloads even though it sits on a 96 core Epyc server now (needed the massive amounts of PCIe for something else). I was able to upgrade my SSD with a 3rd party one, not that sticking an NVMe drive on one of the thunderbolt ports would have been a bad pick. About the only place it didn't make sense is if you wanted a ton of RAM.
I feel so incredibly lucky I chose to overdo it a bit on RAM when I upgraded last year... though I remember deliberating to go for 192GB (it's 96GB now) but motherboard support was somewhat more complicated and it felt like a waste of 300 euros...
Yeah. One place I worked went down under and they offered to hand out on-prem servers for free. These were 192 GB DDR4 each. I was moving houses and lazy, so I declined. I still think what would've happened if I just rented a car and went downtown.
Should have grabbed two.
Should have grabbed 100.
The creator of the Overcast podcast app grabbed 48.