[djhworld]

this whole saga is having ripple effects even in the second hand market. in 2020-2022 there was a glut of those 1L mini pcs on ebay and other resellers which were WAY better value than the RPi4 at the time which was in short supply due to COVID. these mini PCs were pretty affordable and could be upgraded with extra RAM, new SSD/NVMe drive etc to make perfectly good little home servers. I still have mine which has been running for a few years now, Intel 6th Gen CPU, Lenovo thinkcentre.

nowadays the price of these 2nd hand mini PCs has shot up, and even if you do get a chance to get one, upgrading it with more RAM is gonna be painful

[zozbot234]

If you can't find mini pc's at a resaonable price, there's always old enterprise SFF desktops or even thin clients, which have very low specs (and are usually not upgradable) but can be loaded with a custom lightweight OS.