[phkahler]

>> Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

>> something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.

As nice as M.2 would be, AFAICT it's not supported by the SoC which is what allows these things to be so inexpensive. Go with USB then.

IMHO an AMD APU could be under clocked to not need a fan, and would allow things like M.2 in a keyboard form factor. That might be amazing but would probably cost 2x to 3x the price. Also, at the higher price people would then complain about the keyboard.

BTW I thing SFF designs and keyboard computers should have a couple USB or SD on the top to make it easy to plug in storage devices.