Quite a while ago (~2007) I bought a Mac Mini which I used as my main machine for quite some time (until 2011 or so, I think). I did a lot of programming on it.

Quite a while ago (~2007) I bought a Mac Mini which I used as my main machine for quite some time (until 2011 or so, I think). I did a lot of programming on it. It was a very good machine and frankly, if Apple were to upgrade it to a decent spec (for 2017), I'd buy one on the spot. I don't need a laptop and, consequently, I don't want to pay a single penny for portability. My previous monitor was almost ten years old when I gave it away, and I'd have kept on using it if I hadn't had to buy a larger one (tl;dr small desk, got a big 1080p monitor and hung it on the wall behind the desk for extra space). Unless an iMac is going to last me 10-12 years, there's no point in paying a single penny for a monitor that I'm going to stop using when the computer it's glued to goes obsolete. Sexy design, stupid engineering. That leaves me to choose between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro. I don't need a Xeon machine, but a three year-old dual-core i5 machine with a crawling hard disk isn't quite on-par with what I need, either. My current machine is a five year-old quad-core i7 that's running just fine. My only beef with it is that between 2012 and 2017, a bunch of things happened on Linux and now I'd really, really rather use OS X (hell, I'd rather use Windows if it didn't shove ads down my throat...). An up-to-date Mac Mini would be exactly what I need -- small, runs OS X, doesn't come with a bunch of hardware that I don't need, can run Emacs, compile C programs, run Perl/Python/whatever scripts, plays music and ssh-es into other boxes (my current machine does all that, too, except its OS keeps breaking)