I'm clearly late to the party, but let me give it a try.
I'm interested in SFF for pretty much everything
except small sizes... Which, I know, sounds weird, but I'll try to explain.
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What I like about building SFF systems is the attention it gives to focusing on what you want. That focus is forced, because of an external constraint of "get your build to be as small as possible", but the consequence of that constraint is that builders must spend
a lot of time understanding what's most important in their computers. And that means that builders are invariably spending a lot of time understanding
themselves.
With a monster ATX enclosure, you have all the room in the world to install whatever you want, so you don't really need to think critically about what 10% of functionality you use 90% of the time, when you're first planning your build. You have more room than you know what to do with, after all. Furthermore, since you can just add more storage or cooling or PCI devices willy-nilly later on, you're incentivized down the line to grab hardware the moment it becomes affordable, rather than when the cost-to-utility ratio is optimal.
This dynamic isn't limited to PC building, either - it has strong corollaries in the rest of our lives. Take a look around the room you're currently sitting in, for example, and recognize and count all the belongings you have. Now, ask yourself - how many of those have you used today? How many have you used this past week, month, or year? I'd be willing to bet that you can't even remember the last time you used or appreciated half of the stuff that currently surrounds you. I'd also wager that an even smaller subset of that stuff has actually given you happiness, joy, fulfillment or meaningful utility.
That's where the problem lies, and what SFF solves for me, because when you have a lot of stuff that you don't use, it gets in the way of (and diminishes) the stuff you
do use. Imagine how much better the room you're in would be if you took the money spent on the not-so-useful stuff, and poured that into getting better versions of the really-useful stuff. Imagine the benefit to PC builders, if we were all able to cut out the cruft of non-useful functionality in our builds, and pour those resources into maximizing the things we rely on every day.
The cost of absence is easy for us to wrap our heads around, but the cost of presence is much higher than we realize.
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I personally believe that most people would be better off if they spent more on fewer things, and PC building is merely another area in which this is true. In fact, that philosophy is perhaps partly responsible for why
Cerberus (the enclosure James and I have been working on) is as expensive as it is, relative to the market - it's the option for enthusiasts that want to spend the money where it counts, and realize the absolute best manifestation of the build that fulfills their precise needs or wants,
and nothing else.
TLDR: SFF isn't a size, it's a philosophy. Count me as a believer.
