When I was only 15 years old, I'd received an inheritance from the passing of a relative to the tune of $2000 USD. I was living with my Father at the time, who

When I was only 15 years old, I'd received an inheritance from the passing of a relative to the tune of $2000 USD. I was living with my Father at the time, who worked for Microsoft in networking (he now works at Azure), and he had nurtured my interest in programming from the age of 8 or 9. He agreed we could put half aside for my college fund, and I could use half to buy or build a new computer, among some other niceties. So I basically had an $800 USD budget for a computer, including any RAM or HDD upgrades I wanted to do, or any extra peripherals I wanted. I had a vast interest in moving away from Windows, and a continued interest in audio production/recording already - I fell in love with the original iMac G4, and, while it was definitely out of my price range, being an all-in-one starting at, I think, $1,199 - but all I wanted was to make music with GarageBand, movies with iMovie, and try to explore MacOS and learn about xCode and Objective-C. So, at $499, the original 1.42ghz G4 Mac Mini was, for me, as a high school student - who literally would've had to save months for it had they not been so lucky - well, it might has well have been a Lamborghini to a 15-year-old. But, I was fortunate, and, given my desire to explore in the Apple ecosystem, I was willing to invest in what my Father thought was a very underpowered machine for the money. What makes me sad is that today, that same 15-year-old kid could not have walk into that store and have the same experience. Today, I'm a professional iOS developer at a major bank, when I'm not running an independent music label with artists that exclusively run on Logic Pro X systems that I configure for them, so collaboration is seamless. Everyone loves them. But I exclusively use 2010-2013 MacBook Pro hardware for my artists that I purchase, upgrade, shove an SSD and the most RAM I can in them and often experience better performance, or at the very least certainly a more enjoyable experience, than the 2017 15" Touch Bar Macbook Pro I'm 'typing' on right now. (While I was writing this post, I accidentally brushed the lock screen button and was temporarily locked out.) The Mac Mini was a very important and crucial product in their product line. Something at least reasonably affordable. Something you could basically justify with, well, hey, it's got a $100-200 Apple Tax on it, but at the end of the day, it's still something affordable for education and low-income markets who may otherwise simply need to turn to other hardware. The $999 MacBook/Air was also a crucial piece of hardware in this position. tl;dr: an increase of price of this magnitude would've probably have robbed me of my future career of an iOS developer if it'd happened to me when I was younger.