Reolink sells reasonably priced PoE camera and NVR kits. Check their official store on eBay for deals. Last I checked it was all local, no cloud BS. I’d still isolate it though.

An Escalade is objectively more powerful than my car; doesn’t make it better at getting groceries, and it cost eight times as much.

Anyway, enjoy your thing, I guess.

Right, so it does basically the same thing mine does, and I don’t need an external DAS, and I can upgrade hardware, and it cost me a fraction of yours. I don’t know how much power mine uses because it’s a non-issue. My bill is the exact same as before I deployed it.

I wouldn’t have even thought to purchase a new Mac anything as a server. That is definitely not their target use case.

What are you running at home that requires “insane power?” I’m running a servarr stack on an old Xeon that cost a fraction of a Mac mini and it works just fine. And I have room in the case for full size HDDs.

I’ve heard of people using old Mac mini as servers, and I guess whatever makes you happy. I definitely don’t see how they’re the ultimate home server.

The Mac Mini M4 is unbeatable as a home server imo.

How do you figure that?

Why not use the NAS as a NAS and pick up a cheap SFF or mini workstation for the compute tasks? Only reason I would ever consider running your endpoint as a server 24/7 is cost/availability of just adding a dedicated box.

If you can, I’d skip the laptop and go for a used workstation SFF now. $250 or so would buy you plenty of server.