Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.

Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.

I got an old Mac mini 2014 like 5 years ago, 2nd hand, installed Debian on it, and after the first few days smoothing out bugs, it's worked rock solid since. On 24/7. Never heard the fan ever spin up either. Not sure if that's just broken in Debian or the fan just doesn't speed up unless really hot. But either way, seems to not effected it thus far.

I mostly went this route vs Pi because I didn't want the pain of working with ARM. x86 "just works" with 99% of things. Where are a lot of cases with ARM you end up compiling code just to do what you're after. Anything off the popular apps.

Things are better now, but still a risk.

Hey, I thought of getting the same machine recently! What’s the power consumption? And what about things like remote turn on? I have a beefy server that doesn’t work 24/7, but when I need it, I wake-on-LAN it from a Raspberry Pi. What about something similar with Mac minis? And what about power loss, will it turn on back again? I value that a lot from these SBCs.

Looking at some old photos from 2018 on idle it takes around 7.7-15W, don't recall what I had running on it at the time. Probably Plex.

Not sure on remote turn on. I've got it on a UPS which usually holds it over any short power cuts. I don't think it auto powers on after extended power cut, but I've also not looked into if it's possible to enable.

Edit, looks like you can enable auto boot: https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/vf8cv4/mac_mini_au...

Also, according to this https://wiki.debian.org/WakeOnLan, I checked my Mac, and both Supports Wake-on and Wake-on was "g", so in theory, WoL should work too.