As far as I know, Purism hasn’t commented on this, but Eglobal Tech is probably the OEM of Purism’s Mini. MrChromebox commented at r/Purism that Purism asked Supermicro to make some modifications to its standard design when manufacturing the Librem Server. The same may be true with the Librem Mini, so I wouldn’t assume that the Mini is the same as the MU01-8565U sold by Eglobal Tech. One obvious difference is that Purism is offering an optional WiFi Atheros ATH9k M.2 card, so you can have 802.11n without proprietary drivers/firmware in the Linux file system.
I had hoped that Purism would offer the same Redpine Signals RS9116 M.2 card in the Mini that it is using in the Librem 5, because it reportedly has better reception and is more energy efficient than the Atheros ATH9k WiFi/BT. It appears that Purism had to do a special order, because I can’t find anyone selling the RS9116 on an M.2 card. I had hoped that Purism would use the RS9116 in the Librem 13/15 v5, but if it isn’t happening in the Mini, we probably won’t get it in v5. Shorter-range WiFi reception isn’t as big of a hindrance on a NUC as a laptop, since you don’t carry around a NUC, but I’m sad that we will still have to deal with the crappy Atheros ATH9k WiFi in the Mini.
This question is how does Purism pay the salaries of Matt DeVillier (MrChromebox) who does the Coreboot porting work and the people who work on PureOS (Jeremiah Foster, Adrian Alves and Arno Bauernöppel). Software devs are expensive, especially if they work in the San Francisco area, and Purism can’t spread those costs over millions of units like Apple does. Even if Purism offers a barebones model, it will still have to charge a lot for it.
Purism so far has gotten $91,284 in preorders for the Librem Mini, meaning roughly 121 orders in 2 months. If Purism only gets 60 orders per month when it launches, then we can guesstimate that it will only get 30 orders per month in the future when there is no pent-up demand and no publicity from its launch. If we guesstimate that Purism charges a markup of $350 per unit and sells 360 units per year (12x30=360), then that is $126k per year in extra revenue, which is basically the cost of employing 1 software developer (remember the cost of living in the San Francisco area and health care).
Maybe COVID-19 is suppressing demand, and Purism will get 60 orders per month in the future, but that still only means $252k in extra revenue per year.