If we talk about remote storage, then I think it’s notable to mention that for cellular connections this is not feasible if we talk about storing/retrieving large amount of files, as even in my country where high speed cellular internet is dirt cheap, you will pay 30$ for 100GB of traffic.
D4no0
AstonJ
I did not mention mini towers:
Just so happens that the cheapest Mac is called a Mac mini.
Just add another drive for Time Machine backups - which I expect most people have/are doing anyway.
TimeMachine is one of the best backup solutions around - and a major factor why so many people love macOS.
You can do way more with ARD. I need to verify this when I test it but from my understanding you can:
- Access your files securely (copy to/from your remote machine)
- Use any of the programs on your remote machine
- Send/receive email from your remote machine
- Browse the web from your remote machine
- etc
There are many, many advantages.
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AstonJ
Because that would be Linux or a PC not macOS (and I expect you’d also lose the advantages I just put in my post above) 
Again, see the advantages in my post above, afaik you’d get none of them via your method..
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dimitarvp
I don’t disagree with your scenario per se. I simply think it becomes physically intractable and annoying to manage USB / TB4 external disks at one point.
And the Mac Mini is a classical Apple trap: the baseline option is cheaper but who will go for the baseline option? 250GB SSD is almost nothing and many devs will need more eventually. And don’t get me started on 8GB RAM… 
As for macOS vs. Linux, eh. You know I am still in the Apple ecosystem and that’s still an informed choice, right? 
But I believe both of us agreed that Apple’s pull is getting weaker with time. They might not have reached the tipping point for many but that point is fast approaching for reasons we already discussed.
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AstonJ
I don’t see this an issue at all. Even less of an issue if you’re away.
If you really hate the look of them get a thunderbolt monitor and hook them up to that (I had several drives behind my monitor and a single cable to my Mac - completely clutter free 
) or mount them under your desk, or get a dock, or unit. Plenty of options.
As mentioned in a couple of these threads now, just buy the base machine and run macOS of an external drive, it’s the cheapest way to run a Mac and 16GB is plenty for most people 
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dimitarvp
All of that is viable but not very future-proof so it’s no longer good enough for me. Whoever finds it good, more power to them. I am no longer in that group is all.
And yeah I am not looking forward to fiddling with Linux, that’s why I am taking it slow. Lately burned about 3 hours configuring my KDE Plasma desktop environment as I like it and am 50% there. Might be another month before I get in that mood again. 
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dimitarvp
Sure but we’re not talking streaming gigabytes from your home NAS, right? We’re talking just RDP or any other remoting protocol traffic which shouldn’t be much. And the occasional rsync, too.
From my limited experience, something like 5-10MB an hour when coding more intensely.
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AstonJ
I’d argue it’s more future proof because your hard drives can be used with your next computer, but each to their own - if your current set-up/Linux works for you that’s all that should matter
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dimitarvp
I would argue they are reusable only insofar as they are not getting annoying to manage. I already have 2x NVMe SSDs at 250GB each and I have to use them with external closures, otherwise they are just e-waste, and I don’t like the amount of boxes behind my Mac already. 
I really would like to buy a motherboard with a lot of PCIe lanes at one point and reuse an old CPU and 32GB DDR-3 RAM that are laying around to assemble my next server. We’ll see.
As said, I am not disagreeing with you here, I just started hating physical clutter and I can no longer make myself be okay with it. 
Like you, I am a big fan of reuse! One of my ZFS-based NAS redundancy disks is 1TB… dating back from 2013 or so. 
All my disks are used until they physically fail.
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