Honestly, I’m becoming convinced that crashing the availability of meaningfully performant consumer-purchasable machines is an intentional and explicit element of the plan. The captains of industry are predicating a HUGE part of their value proposition on making “edge compute” live in datacenters, and never on client machines, full stop.
The dream of the Captains of Industry is to sell us subscriptions for literally everything and anything they can. You can already see this happening with PC remote gaming services getting more and more prevalent.
Go on eBay (or <insert-regional-equivalent-here>); look for good condition enterprise components; build a homelab. The cloud is just someone else’s computer - be your own cloud.
Also, check out and get into mesh networking.
You don’t need to become convinced. This is the plan - full stop.
I would like to throw some caution in the wind about this. Before getting anything be very to sure to check
- how power hungry the platform is (even on idle)
- check the drive types used by a mobo always
- make sure you get something of which memory is normal as expected
Aside from that, by all means always try to make a small home lab first (a laptop with a broken monitor can work for this, even a phone really) and then commit to something bigger once use cases are found
