I also could not justify the expense, it's just a poor price/performance ratio. You can get a sub $500 nuc with one of these in it instead, if you want a hotrod, why pay above the odds for one that's going to lose a race?

I expect the reason for the part choice is that supplies of the 12th gen chips are wholesale restricted to larger vendors such as lenovo, hp etc - but this is merely a suspicion and not something I have proof of.