>I looked up the CPU for one of the devices. It's the same one used in Raspberry Pi 4.

It's the same CPU because inside it is a Raspberry Pi 4. We publish instructions for people to build their own.[0]

>he has a privileged background (worked at Google) and somehow that helped him tap into a market of people who don't know that a good price for a Raspberry Pi 4 is $35, not $350 or $400. I can see $65 with a nice case and shipping. Maybe up to $100? But $400 is ridiculous.

$65 isn't even enough to pay for the raw materials. If I sold for $100, I'd barely cover the cost of raw materials and the labor to assemble devices, test them, and fulfill the order.

There are a lot of expenses to running a hardware business, and I listed them in the post. How do I pay software engineers, hardware engineers, support engineers, and customer service staff if I'm selling a product whose profit margins are only a few percent?

[0] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/build-a-kvm-over-ip-under-100

I just bought a mini PC for $350 that has 32gb of ram, a windows 11 license, and is not much bigger than these devices by the looks of it.

People who find this small device useful must just not want to spend their (likely high $/hour) time with mundane things getting their expensive toy home servers working or something

I can't tell if you are trying to prove my point or discount it.

But you can't justify $300 for installing and configuring free software. As you say, you can get a much more powerful computer for even less than they are charging.

I was agreeing with you that it seems overpriced and relying on a niche market that doesn't care about being cost effective hardware-wise.

It's sort of apples and oranges because the mini PC you purchased almost certainly can't capture HDMI video and can't emulate a USB device.