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> I recently bought a Dell Precision T1700, about 5 years old (EDIT: from 2013) for $199. Besides throwing in a better video card to run my 4k monitors, I haven

> I recently bought a Dell Precision T1700, about 5 years old (EDIT: from 2013) for $199. Besides throwing in a better video card to run my 4k monitors, I haven't hit a point where I wished I had bought a better machine. IMO, the new Mac Mini is a pretty killer deal for that use case. At $600, you get a modern CPU that: * sips electricity * is whisper quiet * supports 2 4k monitors * comes with a pretty good SSD The price is pretty close to what you paid if you need to install a graphics card and an SSD (although to be fair you'd probably get a lot more capacity with a 3rd party device), and the modern CPU gives it a lot more longevity than a 10 year old machine. Of course, a potential downside is that you have to run MacOS. But I've found that it isn't that bad.

_fat_santa 4y ago
Yeah I considered it, and TBH I might end up getting one at some point. Personally for me I just needed the cheapest thing that would get the job done (JS programming). And as far as electricity consumption, that's just something that wasn't on my radar.
sofixa 4y ago
macOS is pretty bad, IMO, coming from Windows or Linux, but the biggest problem with Apple hardware is the total lack of extensibility coupled with the highway robbery prices of extra RAM/SSD. You're either paying massive premiums or taking the risk that the machine will have insufficient RAM or storage and would need to be replaced sooner rather than later (compared to any random PC or even most laptops where upgrading the RAM or SSD to prolong the life is east).
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > the biggest problem with Apple hardware is the total lack of extensibility coupled with the highway robbery prices of extra RAM/SSD. You're either paying massive premiums or taking the risk that the machine will have insufficient RAM or storage and would need to be replaced sooner rather than later IMO, it's not nearly as big of a deal to use an external drive with a mac. But the ram thing - for sure. 8 GB seems like it should be pretty limiting. In practice I don't find 8 GB to be very limiting - I think probably because the SSD is so fast and makes up for it. I suppose no one knows what the future has in store. To be fair, I don't tend to run a lot of electron based apps, so I probably have less memory pressure than many people.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Yeah I considered it, and TBH I might end up getting one at some point. Personally for me I just needed the cheapest thing that would get the job done (JS programming). And as far as electricity consumption, that's just something that wasn't on my radar.

sofixa 4y ago

macOS is pretty bad, IMO, coming from Windows or Linux, but the biggest problem with Apple hardware is the total lack of extensibility coupled with the highway robbery prices of extra RAM/SSD. You're either paying massive premiums or taking the risk that the machine will have insufficient RAM or storage and would need to be replaced sooner rather than later (compared to any random PC or even most laptops where upgrading the RAM or SSD to prolong the life is east).

nordsieck 4y ago
> the biggest problem with Apple hardware is the total lack of extensibility coupled with the highway robbery prices of extra RAM/SSD. You're either paying massive premiums or taking the risk that the machine will have insufficient RAM or storage and would need to be replaced sooner rather than later IMO, it's not nearly as big of a deal to use an external drive with a mac. But the ram thing - for sure. 8 GB seems like it should be pretty limiting. In practice I don't find 8 GB to be very limiting - I think probably because the SSD is so fast and makes up for it. I suppose no one knows what the future has in store. To be fair, I don't tend to run a lot of electron based apps, so I probably have less memory pressure than many people.