> so they’re most of the way there already

Reading comments like this makes me feel like I live on a different planet from some people.

The Coral USB dongle is from 2019 - it is a dev kit, not a souped-up edge inference unit. It was not designed to compete with the Macbook Mini (???) and is not some sort of touchstone or landmark in AI development. It's a tiny TPU that Google made to prototype technologies for their own SOCs like Google Tensor later down the line.