8mo ago

The $600 Mac Mini is a Steal—Until It’s a Scam

I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple's RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I'd be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.

This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there's a part of me that's convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.

33 comments

Tl;dw Default config is 16gb ram, 256gb ssd
32gb ram is 450$ upgrade, 2tb ssd is 800$ Amazon prices are 120-150$ for 64gb ram or 2tb nvme ssd
So maxing out both costs 1250 for a ~300$ (retail) upgrade, if that were possible.
- ~~It might be possible. The mini uses socketed ram, though the connector is revoltingly proprietary.~~
  
  Ram is on the soc, the SSD isn't really an SSD. It's just nand chips on a pcb. The controller is on the soc.
This does make me wonder whether the entry level mini is something of a loss-leader at this point. Literally just a way to get people into the ecosystem.
- Might be yeah. Some of it is getting people in the door who then buy another model. Some of it is getting new people into the ecosystem. Their MacOS business is tiny compared to iOS these days. I scratch my head a lot wondering what they’ll do with it long term.
  
  iOS (and android) is also propped up by phone payment plans. My carrier offers me a new phone every two years for like $10/month which works out much cheaper than buying the phones outright.
  If they were offering a Mac for the same deal every two years, people would upgrade those more often too.
  
  I’m no expert in business, but I guess that maintaining the Mac side of the company goes a long way towards the popularity of the iOS side. What they make from Macs might be tiny in comparison, but it all helps towards the amount they make from iPhones and iPads. It’s all symbiotic, y’know?
FWIW, not all flash memory is created equal. Apple does tend to use premium chips with better error correction, etc. All that said, it’s still not worth it for most of us, most of the time.
- Sure. But the price is maybe 2x. Apple wants you to pay almost 10x.
- I wouldn’t have thought Apple are using flash chips that are two or three times more expensive. They’re just price gouging at a point where consumers have literally no option.
  
  A big part of it is that Apple literally places the memory on the same package. It's literally inside the black package that has the CPU, GPU, and some other dedicated processing units. This system-in-a-package configuration allows the M series chips to have memory bandwidth that basically no other system can match.
  Intel tried to put memory on package, but has announced that it won't be doing that anymore, probably because it's so expensive to do so.
I will hold on to my upgradeable 2018 mac mini which I put 64gb into for as long as I can (which will likely be pretty long since RAM is the only bottleneck in most macs and 64gb makes everything instant), then I will probably leave the Apple ecosystem.
- Wait… the 2018s are upgradable?
  
  Yes the RAM is. For SSD I have all my home folders on an external 3TB SSD RAID array that's about the same speed as the internal storage. This allowed me to buy the base model and save a few thousand $$ by upgrading it.
  
  Weirdly. I don’t know why they went back to upgradeable RAM for one generation.
- When the software ecosystem gets too old, slap Linux on it for a fresh lease of life. Did that with my old macbook pro back in the day. Got years more out of it.
  
  Yeah I've had a lot of old Mac mini Linux servers around. Ran home assistant on it for years.
- Just take a look at the comments in this thread haha
You can buy a Ryzen 9 32Gb 2 Tb mini pc that seems to have a similar form factor. It's capable of running 3 4K diaplays, not too shabby. at Amazon in Europe for 446€. Or, if you'd prefer, a Ryzen 5 pro 16 Gb 512 SSD for 289 Link so half the money and you get 2x storage... Link sure, no thunderbolt, but considering the specs, I know what I'd buy.
- What's the power draw at idle for both systems? My money is that the M4 mac mini blows away the Ryzen into space
  
  Probably not as far off as youd think. A lot of the efficiency comes from the smaller node that apple uses. If both amd and apple silicon processors are being compared and that are using the same node, then they are pretty equivalent. 6900hx is still tsmc 7 nm (later version) while the new m4 is on 3 nm. Both are still pretty efficient. It's not like tiger lake levels of inefficient.
- Linus has made a video about this recently trying to build an equivalent machine. There’s really nothing like the base Mac Mini for its price, but that stops being true as soon as you make any upgrades.

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