Why stop at a $500 device?

I think it should also have NVMe and SFF-8644 for external disk shelves. At least 6x 10GbE, with 4 on SFPs and 2 on copper. A GPU with excellent hardware transcoding, and slotted VRAM for that local LLM fun. Plus an 8k projector for movie nights at the office.

And a pony; every single one of these fucking kitchen timers must also come with a pony.

I think you're missing the obvious play to subsidize the price by making that LLM enabled with a mic and then selling all of that training data. The price could then come down to $19.99.

I forgot the phased 32-element microphone array! How silly of me.

It will listen in all directions at once, 24/7/365, and send the recordings home to mother.

If done right, that should keep the end-user price below $10.

The sub $10 unit will also include cameras for the additional training data

At some point, it starts to make sense to pay people to take these things.