I'm glad I'm not the only weirdo like this. I dropped an unfathomable $800 on a Jetson AGX Xavier in early 2020 simply because I was obsessed with SBCs at the time and couldn't stop thinking about it. This was before the Raspberry/Orange Pi 5 and Apple Silicon. I still use it as a graphics development workstation.

I dunno, I kept working on projects and at shops that had an Aarch64 deployment scenario that ended up involving cross compilation anyways. Either in the cloud in docker images on Aarch64 VPS, or on SBC for embedded systems. To me it was partially about eating my own dog food to have an ARM workstation without giving up Linux. And to have a giant amount of RAM and high speed networking at the same time.

Also a chance to learn some of the serving stack for inference.

In the end, it's worked out. It is power efficient, it shipped with a vendor supported Ubuntu. I can run Qwen 3.6 27b reasonably well on it. And it basically does everything I need applications wise.

It's also small and convenient enough I can toss it in a backpack and take it with me on trips when I'm staying at my elderly parents, just needing monitor/keyboard/mouse.

A laptop with same chipset would be nice but has its own downsides.