People who find this small device useful must just not want to spend their (likely high $/hour) time with mundane things getting their expensive toy home servers working or something
But you can't justify $300 for installing and configuring free software. As you say, you can get a much more powerful computer for even less than they are charging.
It's the same CPU because inside it is a Raspberry Pi 4. We publish instructions for people to build their own.[0]
>he has a privileged background (worked at Google) and somehow that helped him tap into a market of people who don't know that a good price for a Raspberry Pi 4 is $35, not $350 or $400. I can see $65 with a nice case and shipping. Maybe up to $100? But $400 is ridiculous.
$65 isn't even enough to pay for the raw materials. If I sold for $100, I'd barely cover the cost of raw materials and the labor to assemble devices, test them, and fulfill the order.
There are a lot of expenses to running a hardware business, and I listed them in the post. How do I pay software engineers, hardware engineers, support engineers, and customer service staff if I'm selling a product whose profit margins are only a few percent?
[0] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/build-a-kvm-over-ip-under-100
So I think I figured out the secret to him making almost a million dollars a year: he has a privileged background (worked at Google) and somehow that helped him tap into a market of people who don't know that a good price for a Raspberry Pi 4 is $35, not $350 or $400. I can see $65 with a nice case and shipping. Maybe up to $100? But $400 is ridiculous.