My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

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

So I think I figured out the secret to him making almost a million dollars a year: 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.

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.