Oh look, they made it more expensive, how unexpected.
At least specs wise it's not an expensive paperweight anymore. Now they just need to give it a proper gpu... although that probably would add at least 500€ to the price.
Your new machine doesn't have to be Intel powered. Ryzen mobile chips give pretty much the same performance as Intel parts but don't suffer from the security flaws as Intel does. Only Spectre which also affects basically all modern cpus.
It's too new, expensive and undeveloped for average consumers. Maybe after some development and a serious drop in price we'll see it become more common.
That's normal, just browser and few other programs open i already have 5.7GB of my RAM used.
It'd probably help if you swapped from Chrome to Firefox as it uses less ram.
I don't think a person who installs one of these in their home values their privacy that much anyway.
I mean you're literally giving these big companies a way to listen to you 24/7.