[roqi]

> The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well.

As a long time Linux and macOS user, I don't agree. Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup. Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD. Moreover, a Mac mini tops up at 24GB of RAM, and for that you need to pay an additional 460€ for your weak 256GB HD box.

[nl]

I think to compare prices you need something with adequate GPU performance (which the M2 has).

The M2 GPU is roughly the performance of the notebook edition of the RTX3060.

To get a MiniPC with one of those it is over $1200! https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771159431.html

[roqi]

> I think to compare prices you need something with adequate GPU performance (which the M2 has).

I feel your comment reads too much like fanboy excuses. CPU is not the only or even main requirement. I personally want to max out on RAM and HD. I can buy a mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB nvie for 400€. With a Mac, I need to spend almost twice that to only get 25% of te RAM and 50% of that HD space.

This was the norm since Apple shipped Intel core i5 Mac minis.

There is no way around this. Apple price gouges their kit. It's irrelevant how you feel they fare n artificial benchmarks.

[musicale]

It's a bit of a different design point.

The M2 Mac mini's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, which has some advantages (good memory bandwidth, no copying between CPU and GPU RAM) and disadvantages (expensive, non-upgradable DRAM tiers.) Internal flash storage is basically non-upgradable as well (though you can easily plug in external thunderbolt m.2 storage.)

It also doesn't currently run Windows natively, nor does it support eGPUs.

I'm not sure any Mac mini model was ever much of a competitor to cheaper PCs, but mini PCs have gotten a lot better over time, probably inspired somewhat by the Mac mini, while the mini has followed in the footsteps of other Mac models by adopting Apple Silicon and unified memory.

The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac, and compares favorably with the older intel Mac minis in terms of performance, but I'd spring for 16GB of RAM (at least) for my use cases.

[roqi]

> It's a bit of a different design point.

I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.

> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac

That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.

Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.

[rasz]

Flash is upgradeable, but the only source of proprietary NAND chips with special firmware is Apple itself :/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR7m4aUxHcM

[erremerre]

Where can you buy that miniPC?

[kidfiji]

After doing a quick search, a couple brands that have miniPCs that meet these specs include "Beelink" or "Minisforum"

[happymellon]

I just priced the Ryzen Lenovo ultra small form factor, which is smaller than a Mac Mini and only slightly larger than a Playstation 2 slim, and it was £500 rather than £400 but other than that those numbers didn't seem far off the mark.

[krger]

>Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup.

It's justified if people pay it.

>Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD.

So what's the problem?

If you like running Linux on your Ryzen5 miniPC with 32GB of RAM for 400€, you're more than free to do that. Apple's not stopping you.

[chc]

The original point of this thread is that they'd like to be able to get an M2 PC like that. So that's the problem.

[the_watcher]

The markup is because I can go to apple.com, pick the RAM and storage I want, and not really have to figure out anything about flavors or distros, knowing that it comes with the best chip on the market. This is leaving out that it just works with my phone and tablet.

[adventured]

The markup is because Apple can command it based on a long history of quality and building a tech luxury brand. It's solely about keeping margins high and the brand status high.

Even if they could make the same money by lowering prices (and increasing volume), it'd be a terrible idea based on how consumer behavior and status seeking actually works. If the quality were the same and the product were far cheaper, consumers wouldn't want it as much. The absolute worst place to be in any market tends to be the middle, you go to the middle to die. High margins provide a margin for error in business, it's invaluable.