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Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1 Mac Mini). Right now a Mac mini – Apple M2 Chip 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Si
by ChumpGPT 3y ago
Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1 Mac Mini).
Right now a Mac mini – Apple M2 Chip 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Silver is $499
Hard pressed to buy a decent NUC for less.
- questionable922 3y agoThey would have to run Mac OS, and that's likely a no sale for many people. There is Asahi Linux, however it's not really ready for day to day use, by comparison it would make the amount of time an Arch Linuxer spends trickering seem trivial in a business setting. Also for many a large benefit of the NUC was the ability to swap out persistence and memory at will, supported, warrantied, and in most non-starter kits what you had to do. Mac minis is soldered everything.
- sleepybrett 3y agoUntrue, at least for the older intel ones. Have put linux and windows on a few of them over the years. The m* line one sure.. but linux support is coming and honestly macos isn't so bad if you are just using it to run homeserver stuff like file sharing/plex/etc. I do hope that apple reverses some of it's recent 'lets just solder everything to the board' tendencies (especially in regards to storage), maybe they can start with the minis/studios and move down until the thiness of the air line means they can't anymore. Maybe the EU can sue the shit out of them like they did around the lightning cable. It's less clear to me if the soldered in RAM is a requirement of the design of the m* platform or not, but the storage certainly should certainly move to a standard like m.2/m.3/u.2. I managed to wear out the storage on a touchbar intel powerbook and getting the storage replaced basically meant getting a refurbed laptop, it took several days.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago256GB seems pretty small for an HTPC, unless it's just pulling from a server in another room
- lockhouse 3y agoThe key is to use an external SSD via USB. Much better bang for your buck than Apple’s storage pricing.
- jojobas 3y agoOr, just as a wild thought, stay away from overpriced hardware.
- lockhouse 3y agoWhat’s overpriced about the base model Mac mini? I agree that Apple way overcharges for upgrades, but the base model looks reasonably priced to me.
- afavour 3y agoWhile that’s true it kind of ruins the point in getting a small factor computer like a Mac Mini. You want as small a footprint as possible. Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and my HTPC just grabs files over the network.
- lostlogin 3y ago> as small a form factor as possible This is what I want. And the Mac Mini does it better than the nuc as the power bricks the Nucs use are big, ugly and annoying to deal with.
- kcb 3y agoHaving to spend $200 per 8GB of RAM and $200 per 256GB of storage like it's still 2012 pretty much destroys any value proposition from Apple.
- adastra22 3y agoYou can put a 4tb drive on a USB port.
- tjoff 3y agoSuch hacks just to get trapped in apples ecosystem? How can that be appealing?
- criddell 3y agoHow are you trapped in the ecosystem? A Mac Mini can run more software than any of their competitors (you can’t install macOS on a VM on a Windows or Linux host but the reverse is possible). Even on the hardware side you are free to connect third party drives, monitors, keyboards, etc…
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoYou can actually install Mac os in a VM on Linux or Windows. It's not a technical issue, it's that Apple tries to make it hard to do so.
- jojobas 3y agoJust checked on ebay, a 12500H NUC with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD is $518. You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.
- lostlogin 3y agoOr price is of little consequence and you just want a nice machine. I have several Nucs and would love a Max mini server. I think I’d prefer that option but the price is too high to justify it. The bits I like are the built in 10gbe and the huge transcoding power.
- speedgoose 3y agoThe Intel creates a lot more heat though. If the noise/performances ratio is important or if energy consumption is something you care about, the Intel solution doesn’t seem that interesting.
- Symbiote 3y agoFor noise, you could budget about $100 for a fanless case for the NUC.
- speedgoose 3y agoWouldn’t it run slow? The Intel CPU data sheet says it emits 95W of heat in "turbo" mode. Is there fanless NUC cases capable to dissipate that amount of heat, without even thinking about the other sources of heat?
- tjoff 3y agoYou don't design your cooling system to maintain peak turbo consumption. Thermal Design Power is 45W.
- speedgoose 3y agoWhy not? With max 45W it would throttle a lot under heavy loads.
- goosedragons 3y agoNot a NUC, but there are loads of competitive mini PCs for $500 or even less. Amazon has the Beelink SER 6 Pro for $500 after coupon with 32GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 2.5Gbe and an 8 core Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon 680M.