I suppose I don’t have enough experience or interest in the Shield as a server, so I’ll take your word on that part. I don’t disagree that purely as a client, it’s overpriced today, although I’ve always been satisfied with mine. It’s always outperformed most other clients I’ve ever tried. What would you suggest as an alternative now, just a mini pc or something?

How does that make them useless? They may not work for a use case where you’re mounting network drives, but still work perfectly fine if you’re using them to connect to a media server.