Here's what's wrong with Canada. I know you were wondering.

If you want to know what's wrong with Canada, I've got the whole thing in a nutshell right here.

Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers.

Here's an example of Home Client, their really sweet home theatre/NAS/router appliance.

The Home Client is a Linux-based, small-form-factor personal computer by 45HomeLab (not primarily a storage device).

 

The Home Client is a single-board-computer-based device, with a pre-installed Linux operating system. It has an extremely small footprint, making it perfect to stick on a TV stand or fit onto a desk. It is fanless, so it will remain quiet and unobtrusive while staying in a sleek, small-form-factor low profile.The Home Client is built in North America with an aerospace-grade aluminum milled chassis.

 

We see the Home Client as functioning best in virtualized environments, where it can stream applications from your lab. It can also be great for light office work, streaming, and other similar applications. But it is completely open, so it is up to you to make whatever use of it that fits best into your home environment.

Very nice indeed. Canadian made, by (one presumes) Canadians.

The problem? It's $800 bucks. Competing single-board, low power competitors? The first one I looked up with the same motherboard, ~$200 bucks. I'm sure there are many more that are cheaper.

There you go. Not double the price. FOUR TIMES the price.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what's wrong with Canada.

Oh, and why is it four times the price? Because regulation, tax, tax, tax, tax and tax, and also every input from labor to fuel to electricity is four times higher than it ought to be because of regulation, tax, tax, tax, tax and tax,and of course real estate costs. Which are much more than 4x what it ought to be.

Prediction, nobody is going to pay $800 bucks for a $200 headless compute appliance. They're just not going to do it. Except the government. If they make friends in the Liberal Party, government offices might standardize on these things and then 45 Drives might very well make some money on this thing.