Apple Mac mini review

Their machines have always lasted. I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.

> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last.

So do Toyota and Honda, and their sales seems be pretty steady.

I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.

This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.

Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.

> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last.

When they can justify it, they will add features to macOS which bog down the older systems. Eventually they will say that older systems just don’t have what it takes to run macOS and stop supporting them

Apple has never had an issue with taking machines that can last out of the market

See iOS for a great modern example

Problem? Aren't they selling like cake because of how good their MacBooks are? Other companies aren't that good and I imagine they don't sell as many laptops as Apple does.

We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips

> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last

There has always been a healthy used apple market

Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...

Yeah, my M1 mini with 16GB is great as a daily driver even on Golden Gate. Noticed some slowness recently indexing a huge mail archive, but otherwise I don't even really notice slowdowns.

I got the M4 mini and then bought a refurbished M1 MacBook air so I could ssh/remote desktop into my mini from the couch. Love that MacBook Air, cost like 200 bucks and is super-fast.

The deciding factor is the battery.

When it balloons, it's time to ditch the machine.

> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last

No worries, they will be unsupported by the software pretty soon

Ranking SSDs by random-access performance, where Apple’s costly storage has typically excelled, shows prices ranging from 300-600 USD with cheap and costly outliers; the third-best drive is $360 USD, but the second-best at $450 has IIRC uniquely better thermals among highest-performance SSDs and so can be used at full speed in compact systems like a Mac Mini. That’s perhaps 390€, which is only a 2.8X price multiplier, rather than the 3.6X perceived if only comparing with high-heat, low-cost drives — but, in the live euro market, to the best that I can tell from overseas, this drive is only available at 450-500€, suggesting that in a direct comparison on the open market, Apple is only selling at a 2.4X-2.2X multiplier rather than at 3.6X as claimed.

I have no position on whether this ought to materially alter the outrage, but the point about low-heat components tends to get lost when comparing PC parts and Mac parts, so duly noted.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm...

What would you cut? The Mini has become more expensive because of RAM and SSD prices. There isn't much you could cut to get down to Neo prices.

You'll be looking for a while, looks like they're going for $600-700 used currently. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $350 though. Macs don't depreciate nearly as quickly as PCs do.

Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.

I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.

Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.

$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.

did you consider the depreciation of your windows machine? A mac is easy to re-sell.

I'm pretty darn happy with video games on my Mac. It can play the only two video games that I play: World of Warcraft and Baldur's Gate.

> I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.

For me, the advantage is not being on Windows or Linux. If my PopOS/Manjaro setups hadn't introduced so many random issues with WoW on raid nights that it became a meme for my raid team, I might still be on Linux.

In the future we will all have screens only and a internet connection.

We'll stream everything, so "computers" will exist in the cloud and users won't have to worry about upgrading their machines.

They'll just pay a monthly fee like for mobile data or whatever, and you just connect via screen.

All these data centers and shit around it (internet, etc.) will be actually useful to every day consumers.

Why should I have to upgrade my GPU every 2-3 years? I should just be able to pay to get 4k streaming top of the line graphics.

And <25ms ping latency will become a human right. Only back water countries will see their people having to suffer loading screens and 150ms+ ping

/s btw (in case you're oblivious or something)

Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.

That would be ~$1,995 today due to inflation. That's basically what the entry-level 14 inch MacBook Pro costs today. You're comparing the Pro to the Air's pricing.