I took a risk on a Beelink and so far it's been the best piece of hardware I've owned. Affordable, quiet, reliable, excellent performance, versatile for development & light gaming.
I did a thorough audit for bloat- spam- & mal-ware due to their reputation, and it came up much cleaner IMO than my HP.
Given that they compete in price with Raspberry pi with far more capability, everyone should have one.
The daily driver I am using to write this post is a Beelink with Linux installed. Very happy with it. Switched out the original 128GB SSD with a 1TB SSD. FFMPEG and light gaming run fine. My only minor regret is not starting with more memory, but I could probably switch that if I was motivated enough.
I've got both Beelink and Minisforum units running Linux as daily drivers. Great platform for my kids to learn Linux on as the hardware is well supported. Also great for SFF gaming rigs and platform emulation - especially with the graphics horsepower native to the newer AMD procs.
But, yes - smart to just max these systems out right away. Most easily support 64GB which is more than enough for almost all use cases. I'm hoping that AMD continues to develop for optimizing local model usage. Currently that's the only area that Apple's Unified architecture really shines over these. If I could run reasonably sized models on these that would open a number of additional use cases.
I use a Beelink N100 as a local Docker Compose host for various doodads, inc. and esp. smart home software. I am blown away by what a high-quality value it is. My only complaint is that it defaults to stay off after a power loss, and the setting to reverse that is confusing in the BIOS - quite the nit pick.
It’s interesting to me how when a Chinese company makes a great product at a great price they get accused of being too incompetent to rip their customers off with customer-hostile features like their Western brand counterparts.
But when Western companies load up their hardware with spyware and adware they are smart and savvy at business.
Isn’t this a little bit backwards? The correct statement is that Dell and HP too incompetent to make money off their computers without spying on their customers.
Maybe at some point we have to just drop the dogwhistling and admit that the Chinese hardware market is a dynamic, competitive market that seems to focus on delivering useful products to their customers rather than trying to make public shareholders happy by squeezing every last time out of them to the edge of their tolerance for such inconveniences.
It's not as overt as I describe it. It's often a subtle bias.
A great example in my own life: people have expressed concern to me when I tell them how I own a Chinese robot vacuum that can map my house. They think it's Chinese spyware.
And yet, iRobot, an American company now owned by Amazon, was the one caught in a privacy and data collection scandal related to test units that leaked interior photos of homes. [1]
I did a thorough audit for bloat- spam- & mal-ware due to their reputation, and it came up much cleaner IMO than my HP.
Given that they compete in price with Raspberry pi with far more capability, everyone should have one.