I will never understand why people think $456 is affordable. What does affordable mean? good price for the hardware or someway cheap regardless of its use? if it's the first option, I agree, if it's the second, I totally disagree. We are not in 2009 anymore when mini computers were expensive, we are in 2021, where mini computers under $200 are powerful enough for daily tasks without issues. AMD will never be cheap in the mini computer range, so Intel it is. I think AMD is just playing dumb because Intel didn't catch up, so they have excuse to charge you $500 for a mini computer.
I don't like Intel at all, and for regular desktops AMD is aeons better, but for mini computers it's just Intel or nothing. I hope the new low cost Tiger Lake's punches AMD in their face so hard that they start to make low power cheap CPU's for that market, because the price of the AMD embedded CPU's are just a joke.