unironically yes. i donate computing power to use my pc as a heater for a good 30% of the year, because its impossible to keep the house properly warm due to the shit insulation. course, i also like low wattage in summer because once again... bad insulation.
@@abb0ttIt’s a pretty terrible analogy. No one is dropping $600 on the base model and then upgrading it for $600 more later when they realize they need more storage and RAM. That’s not how apple silicon Macs work.
@@NeilLavitt you do realize analogies aren’t meant to be absolutely perfect…. They’re meant to help you further understand the situation…. In this case, the purpose of the situation is to understand how scummy Apple is, and what their plan is for their product….. It’s not about the legality.. If you think the purpose of an analogy is to be absolutely perfectly describing everything and being exactly the same kind of situation then you’re missing the purpose and point of an analogy….
Why time I can, I always just tell people to max out their memory and just install MacOS on an NVMe SSD in a decent USB/thunderbolt enclosure. Why pay a kidney for storage?
@@shapelessed "@daveied Woah, 128 gigabits of ram... A total of 16GB!": Actually, 128 gb = 128 gram bits. Whatever that is. 128 Gb would be 128.000.000.000 bits, which is 119.2 GiB. I suppose deveied ment 128 GiB.
Soldering on RAM for more performance is almost excusable. Socketing the storage, but with a proprietary connector and no upgrade path, is inexcusable. It's like they're mocking us.
the NVMe controller is on the SoC for power efficiency reasons. They could likely add an additional socket for m.2 expansion but it would be ridiculous to not have the special connector available to make use of the in built controller that was added to the SoC for laptop use. Totally agree with the old mac ssd connectors tho (it does have to be said though that those predated m.2)
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I hope in couple of years there will be start-up company making their own storage for macs. Or maybe apple has patents for their own SSDs, then it's over
You said the excuse yourself, it's more performance. The SSD controller is on the SoC and there's no industry standard connector for storage modules without SSD controllers afaik so Apple has to use its own thing (but fair enough they could always open source and propose what they made themselves as an industry standard).
I would disagree - you cannot say in 1 sentence that the computer is garbage and in another say it's performance literally cannot be rivaled by *anything* in it's price range. 256 in storage is not right, I agree, but for people who live on the cloud or use external storage solutions, (most casual video editors in the first place), it's enough storage. Not to mention, the unreal speeds of it's USB ports means things run flawless off external drives.
@@TheRealJonsMind if Apple treats their customers this bad being anti-consumer; why should we believe them when they say they treat their suppliers and supply chain well?
@@huckleberryfinn6578 Yeah and what people ALWAYS miss is that these prices are before taxes even in the US, so people don't buy it at 599$ (depending on state ofc but still)
@@huckleberryfinn6578 Actually not. It's a larger relative increase in most of Europe. But who cares tbh, nobody should buy anything but the base model anyway.
Marketing in a nutshell: create a product that is genuinely incredible not only in performance but also in value at $600. Emphasize your marketing on how good it is for $600. Create variants that people actually want to buy (if they want to future proof themselves at least) for at least twice as much, if not more, at which point the value is no longer the same and thus you get incredible profit margin, whilst the user enjoys a computer that is remarkable at $600 for the price of $1200.
So much this. Quinn's plead for Apple to "do the right thing" is simply naive here. It's not that they only want to squeeze money out of buyers because they can, at this point I think this upgrade pricing model is literally the core of their business model. It's how they make most of the money. A reasonable pricing model would NEVER produce absurdities such as an addition of mere 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costing as much as the entire computer costs including those same 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. As you say: create a deceivingly tempting product that appears as great value, but undercut it just enough that most people will want an upgraded version, at which point the value proposition collapses, but ultimately it doesn't even matter because you created a new press release cycle in which all the tech dudes say how your new product is an amazing value product and, to quote MKBHD: "one of the best deals in tech". I don't need to tell anyone how influential and instrumental MKHBD is when it comes to people forming opinions, and obviously, he's not the only person saying the same thing. I'd totally get those upgrades if it was like $900 for 32GB + 512GB over $600 for the base model. Still too expensive but not an outright ripoff. But double the price of the base model? Not a chance in hell.
Tbf you don’t need to do anything to future proof the baseline mac - but it doesn’t mean the price of upgrades is simply absurd. 16gb is plenty memory for most use cases, even into the future ish. The 256gb of base storage is ugh, but you can buy a 2TB USB-C SSD for like $150 This isn’t a defense of Apple! Just wanted to say this because if you want a Mac and you don’t need ram, the Mini is an amazing deal. Absolutely livid I can’t get more memory tho
@@zee-fr5kw R&D and top engineering talent costs a loooot of money lol I'm p confident those are the main things eroding their margin each quarter, considering only bill of materials vs MSRP they've got some of the biggest margins in the business (especially now that Macs are all on their own silicon so they're not losing part of their cut to Intel)
The M chips. They are selling flagship chips at mid range price. Its not guarantee that a 600$ chip only by amd or intel could beat m4. So they have to upsell ram and storage. @zee-fr5kw
Just bought a base configuration M4 Mac mini just to see if I could hang with 256GB of storage. I learned within 60 minutes of configuring it that I cannot.
I remember them selling a base model Mac Pro with only 3GB of RAM. My boss bought one and hated it. I got it 2 years later. Upgraded with some second hand Dell 32GB, a PCIe SSD card, second Xeon for 12-cores and a MacVidCards 1080 and it still is a great computer 14 years later. 3GB of RAM on a 6-core Xeon!!!
I literally had one Apple consumer tell me that he'd rather pay $400 for a 1TB upgrade than have a small Thunderbolt 4 enclosure with a 1TB SSD in it (total $120) hanging off the back, cluttering his desk.
@@EnglishMike I find that fairly reasonable; I'd _hate_ to have some stupid bag stuck on the side of my mini-PC just to get it to an adequate level of storage. (That said, I doubt your Apple consumer would approve of my solution to the problem, which was to buy an AMD mini-PC. It's slightly slower, but saving literally a thousand dollars was worth it.)
@@NineteenEightyFiveyeah, but not with historical comparisons. Next video should be Quin showing how to move the home directory to an external drive, and going over the reasons to do that (on a non-portable machine) instead of just using external storage, and instead of booting from the external drive directly. And he could go over using a 10 Gbps enclosure vs a much hotter USB4 enclosure.
@@ahgflyguy That isn't a requirement though, we can see how bad the price is by comparing it to similar upgrades now, in the current times, alongside speed/quality etc. That was a nice touch, and I enjoyed watching this as any other snazzy labs vid they're pretty good, but let's not crap on other youtubers for not including all the same points about the product pls.
Apple gets away with it because its mostly professionals who are ordering the models that have their predatory pricing strategy applied to. they don’t have easy pathways out of the Apple landscape so they hold their nose and pay the extra.
@@playerguy7 "regular customers" are the majority of customers buying the mini Pro models (previously M² Pro now M4 Pro) with maxed out RAM and SSD (or close to)? ok, that's news to me. the only users I see talking about the high end "pro" chip Mac minis are pro users (at least video or photography if not music, developer etc) how about the MBP Max models? My point was , the people who will suck it up on Apple's Predatory Pricing are those who can justify is as the cost of running business. I guess there's plenty of consumer type users who need to buy the top model just to inflate their egos. (the BMW marketing theory that some mistakenly think Apple is all about).
Outside of the RAM upgrade, you can be more than perfectly fine with the base model as long as you use an external SSD, they're more than fast enough and way cheaper and allow you to move files between devices super easily as well
@@SuperM789 my desktop pc dual boots Linux/Windows. My work laptops for the last 6 years are all windows. For my music production and video production needs Apple always floats to the top.
The last Mac to stick with the hard drive was actually not the Mac mini. It was the 21.5 iMac, which still came with a default option for a hard drive until 2021 and that didn’t change until the introduction of the M1 iMac.
the criminal part about that though is that Apple continued to sell the awful 2017 21.5" dual core iMac (18,1) until October of 2021, six months *after* the M1 iMac was introduced. why apple didn't just kill it off back in 2019 beats me.
@@ToraSapphireThey probably just had stock in a warehouse, the real disgusting thing is that they dared sell it after the 2011 one had twice the cores and much higher performance
@@My_Old_YT_Account my sister has an older intel i5 iMac and has a nice large "Retina display" as she referred to it (I'd forgotten what that meant!) and she can't plug it into a new Mac mini as a UHD display. Apple hadn't added that option in 2015 or whenever she bought it. she still uses but beachball all day long (she has no free HD ether!) Total her M4 mini is a no brainer for her. Get a Dell 4K without factory calibration, a gamer model or one of the cheaper ones.
I remember when I was getting my EE degree in the late 90s I had to take a microcontroller course. I remember the teacher talking about how a washing machine company would sell a no frills base unit for a low price but then they could spend an extra $10 to $20 on a microcontroller and LEDs to make a fancier control and charge the customer an extra couple of hundreds of dollars for the deluxe model.
Another weird engineering design quirk I can think of is when vacuums cleaners were originally quiet, but people were complaining that the vacuums weren’t sucking enough dirt and debris. Engineers intentionally made them louder so it’s obvious that they work. Then Dyson comes around and made expensive vacuum cleaners that are quieter as a premium feature.
Well, the SSD problem is not that bad. It can easily be solved with external storage. The non-upgradeable 16GB RAM is much more annoying. At first glance, 16GB may seem sufficient these days. But at the latest, if you want to use your Mac Mini as a gaming device, you will inevitably run into the RAM limit.
I just purchased an M4 Mac mini base model. I slapped on a 1TB external thunderbolt 4 SSD (which I built myself) for less than $200CAD. I configured it to be my home drive and man, this thing is smokin'!! I can at last download ALL of my photos, files, music and movies off the iCloud storage and have nearly instant access to all my stuff, for less than the 1TB Mac mini configuration.
you built a TB4 drive yourself.. amazing.. thats some hardcore skills.. or did you mean to say that you put a NVME drive into a enclosure and tightened a couple of screws?
@@islanddev4893 I just popped an external nvme m.2 drive with thunderbolt 4 connectivity, went to the Users & Groups settings and changed the location of the home drive to the external drive :P No rocket scientry needed :P
@ Wrong. First you can choose any spot on the boot drive or external drive. Second, since I already created my home folder on an external drive before I logged into my Apple ID, all music downloads defaults, including Spotify, goes to my external drive. And with data throughput of more than 2000mbps, I’m more than happy.
The only silver lining is that you can now move your apps and your home folder to an external drive, so if you've got a 256 base mac mini, just get an external drive and just literally don't use your internal drive for anything but the OS.
What happens if you try to login with the external drive disconnected? Also apps are typically stored in /Applications, not your home directory, so you'd need to move them across as a separate step. Or maybe move the ones you've installed to $HOME/Applications/. I assume MacOS apps aren't hard-coded to only run from /Applications/. And typically audio plugins for Logic and GarageBand etc are stored in /Library/Audio. I think they can be moved to $HOME/Library/Audio/ and still work. From memory HomeBrew on Apple ARM installs to the /opt directory. Maybe a symlink to the external drive would work.
@@zoomosis you can't login with the drive disconnected, so it's good to have a recovery account for this. Apple apps will stay on the native drive, all other apps can be installed onto the external drive
On a 2018 Mac mini a memory upgrade from 8 to 32 GB had cost me around 100 USD because I was able to upgrade it myself. Now I don’t have that option because apple solders the RAM to the board.
I’ve got 64GB of RAM in my 2018 Mini - chipset can support more i think but at that time there was no affordable 64GB sticks. As my 2018 mini still does everything I need I’ll keep on using it.
RAM is not soldered on the board on any M1 or faster CPU equipped Mac, it is integrated into the SoC like it is on new Snapdragon and Intel based systems. So upgrade RAM at purchase if needed but upgrade only the RAM and perhaps the Ethernet, never ever upgrade the nternal SSD on any Mac with Apple Silicon, it is never worth it. Always go with an external SSD for storage upgrades.
and probbaly boast how they "care about th eenvirement" yet removed 3.5mm jack so now HEADPHONES have to have BATTERYS and be WORSE for envirement! when they say they "care about the envirement" they are talkign about the luxary of there yacht and/ or ivory tower, when they talk about "eco friendly" they mean "ecomy friendly for the elite"
@@altseason_musik But somehow, everyone who says this seems to think that we, the consumers, are a charity, and should just tolerate whatever garbage corporations shove at us. "X corporation isn't a charity" is only an acceptable talking point when followed by therefore, consumers should be organized to boycott, push for regulations,, or otherwise force the corporation to adopt more consumer friendly practices. The whole idea of a free market only works when everyone involved is both perfectly informed, and perfectly rational... which is why the free market is kind of a stupid idea.
I got a base mini and added an external Thunderbolt drive. Because it works fine, not because I don't know any better. I think the "base" mini Pro is a fairly decent deal, too. Quite a bit more, obviously, but you're getting 24 GB of RAM, a 512 GB drive, Thunderbolt 5, as well as the CPU and GPU upgrades.
I agree, the RAM is double the bandwidth and the RAM upgrades are at $12.50/GB on the Pro and $24/GB on the base model M4 Mac mini. SO twice the price for half the bandwidth, on the RAM that Apple is probably ordering in chip quantities that are 10-100 that of the pro models, go figure… Apple finance and marketing departments know what they are doing (and should know it's potentially illegal if a Trump controlled Congress wanted to go after Apple to make an example of tech company that "liberals" love).
My take has always been that they make the upgrade prices so expensive to recoup costs from the base model being so cheap. But as someone who needs a ton of ram for the work I do on a mac it is absurd how expensive things get. That being said with the m4 pro you can probably cheap out a little bit on storage since it comes with 512gb and with TB5 external storage is blazing fast and not much slower than internal storage. Still if you aren’t doing games the processors perform well above their weight class and are some of the most powerful CPUs on the market (the pro/max versions at least).
What if I buy a base model and a 2TB external Thunderbolt SSD? Should solve the storage problem and RAM is enough 👀 I can run programs off of SSD right?
@@franzpleurmann2585 I believe apple Inteligence will still work with apps on external drive. Apple Intelligence won't work if you put the OS on external drive.
Yes, you can. You can also pay Apple some money for iCloud if you have a good wifi connection and offload a lot of your stuff to it, or use OneDrive. My work portable laptop is an original M1 MacBook Air with only 256GB and 8GB. I use OneDrive to store all of my work and it’s not a problem. It automatically removes things that you are not using from the local drive.
As someone who almost never interacts with youtube comments and likes, I had to leave a comment this time. Really appreciate the non-partisan review and pricing comparisons over OS and years. Typing this on a Mac Air M1, mostly using Windows for everything else. Thanks!
did a similar calculation, because I intended to get my sister a Mac Mini, but stopped making sense literally with just one upgrade…. great video Snazz
Unlike with a MacBook, with a Mac Mini you can at least do one little trick - Install MacOS on an external SSD. Any middle of the road NVMe SSD + a decent USB/thunderbolt enclosure will do just fine and not cost a kidney! I know right? You can keep both of them!
why install MacOS on an external ?, you can't buy a Mac with no SSD. 256 GB is plenty enough for MacOS. Put your data, your user folder and eventually apps on the external.
Here is my 2 cents. the base model is probably aimed at institutions where the MDM policy does not allow files to be saved on the local device. when they purchase, they buy in thousands. in that case, 256 makes sense. For consumers, probably kinda make sense to Apple, as they could easily up sell the larger storage.
probably, it's fine that Apple makes it useless base model SSD (less so 8 GB RAM for last 5 years). why people complain is because the cost to upgrade to get to a realistic* RAM and SSD capacity for your non-upgradeable (even at APPL), non-third-party-repairable Mac is not cost reflective in the slightest. For example to go from 16 GB → 24 GB on the base model the ticket price is t a rate of $25/GB. To go from 24 GB to 48 GB on the M4 Pro Mac mini its at $12.50/GB (for memory built with double the bandwidth!). That is not cost reflective, especially so given Apple is buying the slower RAM for all their phones and Macs in volumes that are probably 10-10,000 what the Pro RAM chip volumes are. * what is realistic for most people who use Macs professionally in arts/engineering/science/design fields means lots of pro apps on the drive and running concurrently or Xcode/whatever else for devs. then you need to including more RAM and SSD than you need today just to future proof for macOS AI bloat that is coming soon. just so you don't brick your Mac in terms of resale value.
With only 256GB a larger % of buyers will subscribe to iCloud storage. And they know that once a user is on iCloud storage, they get lifetime revenue of X.
Wait until this guy learns about external SSDs. $55 gets you a Thunderbolt enclosure and $70 gets you a Samsung 990 Evo Oh no... I have to have something plugged into my computer that is stationary. The absolute horror
It's obvious what's happening: Apple sells the base model either at cost or just below cost, knowing they'll make the profit because most sales that have upgrades on them.
@@bradhaines3142no. You are either looking for volume sales or high margin sales. Why would apple sell a product for $500 to 100 people when they can sale a product for 2000 to 50? The goal isn’t to dominate the market by total user base but by profits. That’s why the iPhone which has 16% of worldwide market share consumes 85% of worldwide smartphone profits. Apple positions itself as a lifestyle brand. Its prices have been set accordingly. Granted they use better materials in some cases, they don’t need every person to buy it. That’s why they keep flashing to the world’s most valuable company. If Nvidia wasn’t killing it in AI hardwares, it would be apple by a good stretch always
And if you live in a capitalist society, take a paycheck or generate income, so do you. And you will seek the most that the market will bear for whatever it is you contribute.
I looked at getting an upgraded M4 Mac Mini but just bought the stock configuration and with the money I saved on the ram and ssd upgrade I was able to buy a Ferrari SF90 Stradale.
I found a hack for this. I bought the M4 base version, and connected a 1TB external NVME SSD drive through the thunderbolt port and set that as my home folder. All my apps and home folder are running off the 1TB drive.
For anyone curious of the best use case for thunderbolt, it’s music production. The only way to get completely latency free monitoring from the DAW rather than direct monitoring on the audio interface itself is with a thunderbolt interface like the Universal Audio Apollo Twin.
if I were going to get one today, I'd go low end w/32gb RAM, $999, use the 256 ssd as the boot drive, and go external ssd 2tb (sandisk / samsung / etc) for $150 - save ~$650.. enough to buy another base mini :)
I have been a Mac user for over 15 years but only used the base Mac. I only change to a new Mac every 2-4 years. It is always enough for my needs. I only do light web development. Some video editing. But my browser always has over 50 tabs opened cos I manage several servers remotely and I run several VMs in my homelab.
You’re assuming they haven’t hardware bound them to the machine. Look at iPhones, they can’t be fixed with none Apple parts without features being disabled.
I stuck with the base unit with a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure and a 4TB Crucial Gen 4 drive. All I need and it's plenty powerful enough. You gotta be a fool to pay for a single "upgrade" from Apple.
External storage is slower, you'll end up with a lot of stuff on your desk (instead of on the ground with a tower model) and the memory cannot be upgraded. Furthermore, it is likely possible to recover flash memory even after destruction with high end tools, so not every company wants to have computers with integrated drives.
@@owlstead slower? nvme from apple has 2500 mbps reads and 1500 writes. my samsung 990 pro has 7500 mbs reads and writes..its 5x faster! thunderbolt 4 supports 40gbps.
I just got my base spec M4 Mac Mini, and with all the software I need, there's still 190GB free. I'm a web developer who needed an Apple test system (to run Safari and emulate an iPhone) all I really need is XCode, VSCode, and NodeJS along with a pretty small set of tools. But if I ever do need more storage, then I'll simply plug in a Thunderbolt 4 SSD enclosure ($60) with an 1TB (or more) Gen 4 NVME SDD inside ($60) and I'll have all the storage I need, and it will run just as fast or even faster than the internal SSD (around 3000 MB/s). I wish the video had mentioned that. You do not need to pay the Apple tax if you want to upgrade your storage. Thunderbolt 4 is your friend, and they want to save you money!
Good that you mention it. Also, any responsible computer user needs to be backing up their files anyway. So adding external storage should be a no-brainer.
I was with you until your last line of Apple wanting you to save money due to thunderbolt 4 being your friend. No, Apple wants to extract as much money as possible from you. It’s all about their profit margins. We’re just a number to make other numbers go up.
Instead of trying to build a custom made PC, why not buy a minipc like the Aoostar Gem 12 that for $579 comes with a Ryzen 7 8845HS, 32 GB Ram and 1 TB SSD and has an Oculink port that can be connected to an external egpu? The M4 processor might be a better chip, but the above mentioned machine has a way more functional base storage (256 GB SSD on the Mac Mini is simply not enough today). Plus the expandability of the Aoostar with another SSD is reasonably priced and it becomes a powerhouse if you connect a desktop egpu.
I don't get how entire tech yt decides to compare m4 mini to full tower builds, drool at the size of it, and completely ignore that 399$ ryzen mini pcs exist that have double the storage of base m4 mini, performance that's enoguh for most people, and often smaller size too.
I did look at a video that compared the mini pcs, they were slightly slower in general. They were equally slower (%) than the base m4 in cpu and gpu performance. For the price, the base Mac mini is still more powerful, until you look at ram and storage options.
@@thepgo666because cpu is the most important part of any PC. Ram and storage is secondary. If you just do web surfing and basic doc. M4 is overkill. But any editing/production, m4 win hands down at that price point.
you can buy premade/preconfigured mini PCs for the same price or less that perform just as well and in most cases have better components (more RAM, storage, gaming performance), so what's the big deal with this mac mini?
"As consumers we are going to tolerate this for much longer" I mean, the consumers have been tolerating it since forever. The base mac mini is incredible value. But my workflow requires at least 32GB of RAM, and at least 512GB of storage. There the value falls apart.
I would literally buy several Mac Minis and iMacs if the pricing on storage and RAM was reasonable. Unfortunately, the needs always require those upgrades and selling a new computer with less than 1TB of storage is laughable. Until Apple stops scamming with their storage and memory pricing i can't justify buying any of these.
@@onecleangti i understand people do that because they make the flush capped SD cards that look seemless. But even if they were fast, they're not a reliable storage device. There's a hierarchy of memory quality at the production level. And it gets sold and later packaged at prices based on how good it was on the waffer. Obviously enterprise stuff gets top tier, and we're not in that realm. High performance SD cards sit only above microSD and good quality USB thumbdrives 😅.
I never comment on videos, probably my first one honestly but this is one of your most enjoyable videos to date. The delivery, the jokes, the good intro music, this feels very passionate and like others said, the right take on this stuff. Keep it up :)
The Mac mini four is a slap in the face to those that purchased the Mac mini predecessor for double the price for less power. This is how they treat their loyal customers. And this is the kicker they only offer you $200 for a trade-in.
You have to look at this from the perspective of the chief bean counter. Timmy has to eat like the rest of us, not to mention he has hungry fat cats meowing for seconds.
I got the base Mac mini m4 with the education discount and at 499 before tax, it’s an insane deal. I can add storage via thunderbolt nvme enclosure. The 16gb ram is enough for what I use it for (writing, RUclips, Stata and R, and listening to music via roon). It’s a steal at 499.
But did you really need an m4 for those purposes? E.g, why not get a cheaper laptop so you also have the benefit of portability, while also having upgradeable ram and interal expandable storage options?
You can do all that with a chromebook ffs. 256 gb storage is absolute lunacy and the way the media has swallowed this garbage is hilarious. External drives are never the same as internal drives.
@@r.s.w.k4569I also have a windows gaming pc that has 64gb of ram and three different ssd’s two of which are nvme pcie 4. I’m not apple pilled, I just like the new Mac mini.
Added a $79 thunderbolt drive enclosure and a fast m2 stick, moved most things to that 150gb free out of the 250gb. Just need to make sure you create a backup profile. Ssd transfer speeds closely match the internal drive.
@@angosalvo5734 16GB is far less of a restriction for most users than the SSD size. We can push for base 24 but realistically it takes a backseat to the offensive storage. My Windows PC's 2TB Gen 4 NVME was only $120 2 years ago
@@xavalongamesx9535 most users should be happy with a g4 mac . What's interesting about this new hardware is the performance and that's what all this fuss about.
So it has multiple negatives? Everything is expensive and you get system where you have to pay external developers for basic features, like good window management?
@@michael_c2lunar lake and snapdragon do not "nuke" apple at all. They are barely catching up. M4s are still faster and more efficient. Unfortunately. I hope they do catch up eventually and make something faster and more efficient than apple
@@forthphoto well what about Mac downsides? Like the fact that you essentially need to plug every port in the dang thing just to get more than 1 monitor.... Snapdragon PCs don't seem to have this problem
As someone who is on a 128-gigabyte M1 MacBook Air... I 110% agree that having too little storage is the most nightmarish and debilitating problem that just keeps coming back to haunt me no matter how much storage I "free up"
With Thunderbolt 4 ports, you can plug in external SSD storage that is just as fast as the internal drive and many times cheaper. You can install apps on the external drive, and you can even move you user's home folder to one.
@@EnglishMikeThat's a really clunky solution. No matter how much external storage you can add 256 or 128 at the base model is still an incredibly inconvenient experience.
@@EnglishMikeFor the Mini, it’s more doable as the system isn’t going anywhere. Having to lean heavily on external storage sucks for laptops though. Once in a while to move some larger projects around, fine. But to have to external storage every time I want to fire up a project or game, is a dealbreaker. My current daily laptop (Lenovo Legion Slim) uses a pair of SSDs with several Terabytes between them, to give an idea of how much I value storage. To get a similar config on a MacBook is not at all cost effective, no matter how good their laptops are otherwise.
so happy I decided to build a new PC instead of switching to a mac mini with the new m4 pro. windows is annoying, but at least I didn't pay £400 for 48gb ram and £600 for 2tb storage
3:00 but seriously, who cares about Thunderbolt? people who need faster external storage because you can't simply put an M.2 SSD inside unlike any PC from past 10 years? people who need external display and pretend USB-C is better than DisplayPort, while being just a different physical connector? people who are making music and for some reason think USB 3.0 or even 2.0 can't do it all for fraction cost (see RME)? if Thunderbolt is so important then why iPhones have USB 2.0 only?
Seriously, this. In my life, I've seen maybe a singular person using a thunderbolt for what it offers, and it was because they are a producer, and like to store his files on an external drive instead of the cloud. Reasonable use case, but like, out of hundred+ people, he's the only one I know who has used that port.
@@yarkee8128 Yeah, that's again, one valid use, as a connection to an external drive. But why is it presented as very crucial when comparing computers for most people?? Like, I would be fine if he said that a plus of the Mac is that it has multiple thunderbolt ports for people that use external storage, but instead he pretended like it was godsend for everybody using a computer, and that not having it on a cheap PC is really bad.
I have the smallest version of the Mini and can say: it's perfectly adequate for office and multimedia, dock a large SSD via USB and you're done. Price/performance is not sensational, but it's okay! I just hope that the durability is also convincing, it should work for at least 10 years.
You should buy a thunderbolt or USB external SSD and using to expand the storage. You can DIY it and use a high quality and fast SSD. You can even use it as a boot drive!
Unfortunately, you can't add RAM via USB. External drives add cables and devices to the desk and aren't practical for notebooks. For the older ones, there are these small USB-drives that hardly stick out but it looks like Apple removed USB-A. The funny thing is that building a better PC that matches the price of the Mac mini is super easy: 32G RAM, 2TB SSD and we have 2079€.
Defeats the idea of a SFF if you have loads of cables and extra boxes hanging out the back . Even velcro-ing a small M.2 enclosure to the case is ridiculous.
@@jochenkraus7016Having cables or external devices on a desktop computer isn’t really an issue unless you’re really ocd about that stuff, most people aren’t.
@@akiko009 Most likely, the chips are sourced from Chinese recycling operations. Though so long as the chips used are MLC or TLC, there isn't really any problem. QLC is the one that falls over and dies with writes
@@Demopans5990 QLC flash provides many *many* *MANY* times the write capability of the *VAST* majority of users. Stop being a sheep who thinks the *WARRANTY* value is the actual *WRITE ENDURANCE*. It's set up to artificially segment the product. Blind idiots look at the TBW value and think "herp derp, diz won iz thre timez az gud" and pay extra for only a marginal increase in actual write endurance. If nobody told you what the write endurance was, you'd be in the ultra-ultra-ultra slim minority of people to ever face an SSD death due to write operations and you'd happily use your drive without issue, likely for years.
I love my MacBook Air but yeah the upgrade pricing is insane. One quick amazon search and I was able to find laptops half the price for twice the specs.
What I did is just upgrade to 512 Gb storage, for an extra 200 bucks. Enough ram, enough space for all the apps (which indeed, are taking more than 256 Gb, and installing apps on an external drive is not an option for me) and the drive is faster too. It’s the perfect sweet spot before Apple politic kicks in. Who cares about spending insane about of money just to go up to 2TB storage? Just get an external drive at that point.
in 2011 I was able to upgrade both my ram and HDD to SSD because Apple didn't solder the memory chips to the board. I just upgraded to the new MacBook pro 16 inch and I love it. I just wish they would let you at least add a NVMe secondary drive.
It's so frustrating... "Wow! This computer is perfect for my needs in the M4 Pro + 48GB configuration. Sp much value... wait a minute! How come it is 2129€ now? WTH?"
"Wow, I massively upgraded the CPU, GPU, storage and RAM and now it's expensive! I'm totally shocked by this because I have the mind of a squirrel." -David
@tim3172 it's triple the price of the base model. Specs are not even near the triple. Well, RAM is, I give you that. I was expecting ~1250€ after upgrades based on base model price. I thought this explanation wasn't needed to understand my comment, Mr huge brain. BTW that price is with the 512GB SSD. Massive isn't exactly the adjective I would use to describe it in late 2024.
IMO, You made a mistake on this build right at the very start. the 7600x is not the right CPU for this build I would recommend instead switching to a 8600g or 8700g, which comes with its own cooler so you wont need an aftermarket one, and ditching the GPU entirely as its not needed as your comparing integrated graphics to integrated graphics. Either one would be a suitable upgrade. And if you did it this way, you could even conceivably get an ITX build in for this size.
Also that'll have the advantage of unified memory (although probably not with as much memory bandwidth as on M4, but it'll at least solve the VRAM capacity bottleneck)
The upgraded version at $1,200 is still an incredible purchase. If you need it, you pay for it and get double the RAM, double the drive space, and double the drive read/write speeds. A couple of years ago we required: 4T/32GB M2 Pro for $3,300, and it is the best business purchase we have made to date. Today we could buy: 4T/48GB M4 Pro for $3,100 or 4T/24GB M$ Pro for $2,700 (enough RAM for our purposes) We cannot justify buying an M4 Mini because the M2 is blazing through all of our processing needs. But note we could spend less and get 50% more processing power in some use cases.
Microsoft gets a break because their SSD is a standard M.2 thats very easy to swap out. I bought a Surface recently with only 256GB and then out a 2TB ssd in it no issue.
Completely agree, I bought the base model thinking I could be savvy and use an external SSD, it took me 4 days before I gave up packed it up and begrudgingly went back to the store to exchange it for a 512GB. I have a feeling the refurbished store is going to be flooded with base model Mac mini's from other people that did the same thing. I would really of liked 1TB but like you say the pricing is crazy and I just can't afford that at least until someone makes a 3rd party module. I'd also be happy if apple offered these modules in the store to buy separately or as part of the self service program even if they're the same cost at least you have an option of upgrading it later when you don't have the advantage of the generous return policy when you buy from apple.
@@snazzy When you showed how the upgrades were in the past, you proved that now we have the best options that we ever had. Because if you factor in inflation, all the other upgrades are between more expensive and MUCH more expensive. And on the RAM side, the one we have now it's MUCH faster than DDR4 at 2666 MT/s, since now Apple uses 4 to 16 channels (which to this day is SORELY missing on PCs, unless you go Threadripper and up) of DDR5. Don't like being an Apple apologist, as I hate them with a passion, I just wanted to point this because I'm pedantic :D Sorry for being off-topic on this comment chain, couldn't find another.
I got the mac mini but tbh idk why you picked ryzen 5 7600X when i5 with ddr4 ram is cheaper. I would even try AM4 with 9 5900X for renders since the mobos are like $80 for a B450 with good power delivery
40 watts under max load? How am I supposed to stay warm all winter?!
Exactly! Haha
Especially when you're in Regina Canada
its a laptop cpu with proper ventilation figures
unironically yes. i donate computing power to use my pc as a heater for a good 30% of the year, because its impossible to keep the house properly warm due to the shit insulation.
course, i also like low wattage in summer because once again... bad insulation.
@@mfjae acquire a cluster of four m4 mac minis to warm your feet., eh?
Apple is acting like a drug dealer...want a hit, it's a cheap $599...need more? empty that wallet....
Exactly. That is the best analogy I have read.
Love that analogy 🤣
😭🤣🤣
@@abb0ttIt’s a pretty terrible analogy. No one is dropping $600 on the base model and then upgrading it for $600 more later when they realize they need more storage and RAM. That’s not how apple silicon Macs work.
@@NeilLavitt you do realize analogies aren’t meant to be absolutely perfect…. They’re meant to help you further understand the situation…. In this case, the purpose of the situation is to understand how scummy Apple is, and what their plan is for their product….. It’s not about the legality..
If you think the purpose of an analogy is to be absolutely perfectly describing everything and being exactly the same kind of situation then you’re missing the purpose and point of an analogy….
Just don’t worry about the RAM. You can always download more.
Why time I can, I always just tell people to max out their memory and just install MacOS on an NVMe SSD in a decent USB/thunderbolt enclosure. Why pay a kidney for storage?
Yes i just download 128 gb of ram last night im never going to buy ram ever again
@daveied Woah, 128 gigabits of ram... A total of 16GB!
@@shapelessed "@daveied Woah, 128 gigabits of ram... A total of 16GB!": Actually, 128 gb = 128 gram bits. Whatever that is. 128 Gb would be 128.000.000.000 bits, which is 119.2 GiB. I suppose deveied ment 128 GiB.
16GB is plenty for everyone who isn't a scientist or an 8K video editor.
Soldering on RAM for more performance is almost excusable. Socketing the storage, but with a proprietary connector and no upgrade path, is inexcusable. It's like they're mocking us.
the NVMe controller is on the SoC for power efficiency reasons.
They could likely add an additional socket for m.2 expansion but it would be ridiculous to not have the special connector available to make use of the in built controller that was added to the SoC for laptop use.
Totally agree with the old mac ssd connectors tho (it does have to be said though that those predated m.2)
@@robot_madness3164 "the NVMe controller is on the SoC for power efficiency reasons." cost reasons *
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I hope in couple of years there will be start-up company making their own storage for macs. Or maybe apple has patents for their own SSDs, then it's over
@@robot_madness3164 BS, they knew exactly that they would force people to buy their storage.
You said the excuse yourself, it's more performance. The SSD controller is on the SoC and there's no industry standard connector for storage modules without SSD controllers afaik so Apple has to use its own thing (but fair enough they could always open source and propose what they made themselves as an industry standard).
This is all correct. There is a difference between "expensive upgrades" and "oh my god this is insane". Unchanged SSD pricing since 2012? Madness.
I would disagree - you cannot say in 1 sentence that the computer is garbage and in another say it's performance literally cannot be rivaled by *anything* in it's price range. 256 in storage is not right, I agree, but for people who live on the cloud or use external storage solutions, (most casual video editors in the first place), it's enough storage. Not to mention, the unreal speeds of it's USB ports means things run flawless off external drives.
Think hell would freeze over before Apple ever gave us better pricing on upgrades.
why are you waiting for Apple to do something that they don't do?
Buy a PC and go on with your life. Crocodile tears in your direction.
Hell will definitely freeze over before i give Apple any of my money. PCMR.
@@TheRealJonsMind if Apple treats their customers this bad being anti-consumer; why should we believe them when they say they treat their suppliers and supply chain well?
I* think
And those prices are even crazier outside the US.
its cheaper at my place though
Tbf, it's mostly because of taxes.
@@huckleberryfinn6578 Yeah and what people ALWAYS miss is that these prices are before taxes even in the US, so people don't buy it at 599$ (depending on state ofc but still)
@@huckleberryfinn6578 Actually not. It's a larger relative increase in most of Europe.
But who cares tbh, nobody should buy anything but the base model anyway.
a little bit higher in my place, probally because of tax + apple always round up/down the number to make it expensive in a fancy way
Marketing in a nutshell: create a product that is genuinely incredible not only in performance but also in value at $600. Emphasize your marketing on how good it is for $600. Create variants that people actually want to buy (if they want to future proof themselves at least) for at least twice as much, if not more, at which point the value is no longer the same and thus you get incredible profit margin, whilst the user enjoys a computer that is remarkable at $600 for the price of $1200.
So much this. Quinn's plead for Apple to "do the right thing" is simply naive here. It's not that they only want to squeeze money out of buyers because they can, at this point I think this upgrade pricing model is literally the core of their business model. It's how they make most of the money. A reasonable pricing model would NEVER produce absurdities such as an addition of mere 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costing as much as the entire computer costs including those same 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
As you say: create a deceivingly tempting product that appears as great value, but undercut it just enough that most people will want an upgraded version, at which point the value proposition collapses, but ultimately it doesn't even matter because you created a new press release cycle in which all the tech dudes say how your new product is an amazing value product and, to quote MKBHD: "one of the best deals in tech". I don't need to tell anyone how influential and instrumental MKHBD is when it comes to people forming opinions, and obviously, he's not the only person saying the same thing.
I'd totally get those upgrades if it was like $900 for 32GB + 512GB over $600 for the base model. Still too expensive but not an outright ripoff. But double the price of the base model? Not a chance in hell.
Tbf you don’t need to do anything to future proof the baseline mac - but it doesn’t mean the price of upgrades is simply absurd. 16gb is plenty memory for most use cases, even into the future ish.
The 256gb of base storage is ugh, but you can buy a 2TB USB-C SSD for like $150
This isn’t a defense of Apple! Just wanted to say this because if you want a Mac and you don’t need ram, the Mini is an amazing deal. Absolutely livid I can’t get more memory tho
@@zee-fr5kw R&D and top engineering talent costs a loooot of money lol I'm p confident those are the main things eroding their margin each quarter, considering only bill of materials vs MSRP they've got some of the biggest margins in the business (especially now that Macs are all on their own silicon so they're not losing part of their cut to Intel)
The M chips. They are selling flagship chips at mid range price. Its not guarantee that a 600$ chip only by amd or intel could beat m4. So they have to upsell ram and storage. @zee-fr5kw
I just want the base
Just bought a base configuration M4 Mac mini just to see if I could hang with 256GB of storage. I learned within 60 minutes of configuring it that I cannot.
I remember them selling a base model Mac Pro with only 3GB of RAM. My boss bought one and hated it. I got it 2 years later. Upgraded with some second hand Dell 32GB, a PCIe SSD card, second Xeon for 12-cores and a MacVidCards 1080 and it still is a great computer 14 years later.
3GB of RAM on a 6-core Xeon!!!
I guess I'm probably the only one who looks at this situation as a fun challenge...
@@julian.morgan My friend at Polysoft Services is already on it... He's already done it for the Mac Studio.
Just get an external ssd and move your home folder onto it.
really need that internal storage upgrade for my Mac Studio so I can stop running it off an external NVMe
@@ThatKomputerKat Hopefully those custom modules should be ready for sale somewhat soon!
I hope we find a way to upgrade the RAM as well.
You’re wrong about one thing… Apple consumers WILL tolerate it.
I literally had one Apple consumer tell me that he'd rather pay $400 for a 1TB upgrade than have a small Thunderbolt 4 enclosure with a 1TB SSD in it (total $120) hanging off the back, cluttering his desk.
Not only will they tolerate it - they'll get angry at you for even questioning it.
Wrong. You don't 'speak for Apple consumers. The bullshit 256GB hard drive is nonsense. Not upgrading from my M1 Mac mini.
They tolorate everything agd defend everything. Stockholm Syndrome 😂
@@EnglishMike I find that fairly reasonable; I'd _hate_ to have some stupid bag stuck on the side of my mini-PC just to get it to an adequate level of storage.
(That said, I doubt your Apple consumer would approve of my solution to the problem, which was to buy an AMD mini-PC. It's slightly slower, but saving literally a thousand dollars was worth it.)
Nice to see someone review this product correctly.
This was a great video but most major reviewers have pointed out how overpriced the upgrades are
I've actually done a review on it on my page as well.
@@NineteenEightyFiveyeah, but not with historical comparisons. Next video should be Quin showing how to move the home directory to an external drive, and going over the reasons to do that (on a non-portable machine) instead of just using external storage, and instead of booting from the external drive directly. And he could go over using a 10 Gbps enclosure vs a much hotter USB4 enclosure.
Don't be a sheep. I've seen your exact comment in other videos too. Everyone is recommending the base model.
@@ahgflyguy That isn't a requirement though, we can see how bad the price is by comparing it to similar upgrades now, in the current times, alongside speed/quality etc. That was a nice touch, and I enjoyed watching this as any other snazzy labs vid they're pretty good, but let's not crap on other youtubers for not including all the same points about the product pls.
The M4 Mini is $499 at my local MicroCenter. It's even less since I do have the store credit card -- $475. That's a pretty impressive value.
"Because as consumers, we won't tolerate this for much longer"
I wish... But I don't think so.
If I had a dollar every time I heard this, these upgrade prices wouldn't matter 😁
Apple gets away with it because its mostly professionals who are ordering the models that have their predatory pricing strategy applied to. they don’t have easy pathways out of the Apple landscape so they hold their nose and pay the extra.
@@alastairleith8612 As someone workin in an Apple Store, i cn whole-heartedly disagree. It is in fact mostly regular consumers.
@@playerguy7 Why doesnt Apple have the macmini on stores yet?
@@playerguy7 "regular customers" are the majority of customers buying the mini Pro models (previously M² Pro now M4 Pro) with maxed out RAM and SSD (or close to)? ok, that's news to me. the only users I see talking about the high end "pro" chip Mac minis are pro users (at least video or photography if not music, developer etc)
how about the MBP Max models?
My point was , the people who will suck it up on Apple's Predatory Pricing are those who can justify is as the cost of running business. I guess there's plenty of consumer type users who need to buy the top model just to inflate their egos. (the BMW marketing theory that some mistakenly think Apple is all about).
I’ve needed a new Mac for the past 4 years or so. Every time I go to pull the trigger their obscene prices on reasonable upgrades push me away.
Relatable. Might be worth buying used
Remember to use the student discount page for 100$ off, or wait for the mini to appear on the used market is my recommendations.
Outside of the RAM upgrade, you can be more than perfectly fine with the base model as long as you use an external SSD, they're more than fast enough and way cheaper and allow you to move files between devices super easily as well
then switch to PC
@@SuperM789 my desktop pc dual boots Linux/Windows. My work laptops for the last 6 years are all windows.
For my music production and video production needs Apple always floats to the top.
The last Mac to stick with the hard drive was actually not the Mac mini. It was the 21.5 iMac, which still came with a default option for a hard drive until 2021 and that didn’t change until the introduction of the M1 iMac.
Well, last Mac line
the criminal part about that though is that Apple continued to sell the awful 2017 21.5" dual core iMac (18,1) until October of 2021, six months *after* the M1 iMac was introduced. why apple didn't just kill it off back in 2019 beats me.
@@ToraSapphireThey probably just had stock in a warehouse, the real disgusting thing is that they dared sell it after the 2011 one had twice the cores and much higher performance
@@My_Old_YT_Account my sister has an older intel i5 iMac and has a nice large "Retina display" as she referred to it (I'd forgotten what that meant!) and she can't plug it into a new Mac mini as a UHD display. Apple hadn't added that option in 2015 or whenever she bought it. she still uses but beachball all day long (she has no free HD ether!) Total her M4 mini is a no brainer for her. Get a Dell 4K without factory calibration, a gamer model or one of the cheaper ones.
@@alastairleith8612 Even worse, it was there and they removed it, another feature my 2011 one has and much newer ones don't
I remember when I was getting my EE degree in the late 90s I had to take a microcontroller course. I remember the teacher talking about how a washing machine company would sell a no frills base unit for a low price but then they could spend an extra $10 to $20 on a microcontroller and LEDs to make a fancier control and charge the customer an extra couple of hundreds of dollars for the deluxe model.
Microcontrollers that control the machine are harder to repair too lol
@@yarkee8128 Which only makes the upcharge even more of a ripoff
Another weird engineering design quirk I can think of is when vacuums cleaners were originally quiet, but people were complaining that the vacuums weren’t sucking enough dirt and debris.
Engineers intentionally made them louder so it’s obvious that they work.
Then Dyson comes around and made expensive vacuum cleaners that are quieter as a premium feature.
@@yarkee8128 yeah but who sells washers without a microcontroller today?!
@@robster7787 except Dyson's cleaners "scream like a [high pitched noise]". not a fan.
Well, the SSD problem is not that bad. It can easily be solved with external storage. The non-upgradeable 16GB RAM is much more annoying.
At first glance, 16GB may seem sufficient these days. But at the latest, if you want to use your Mac Mini as a gaming device, you will inevitably run into the RAM limit.
Yeah I opted in for the 32GB with 512 SSD but then I bought an external drive. I think it’s the best thing that’ll hopefully last me a decade 😭😂
I just purchased an M4 Mac mini base model. I slapped on a 1TB external thunderbolt 4 SSD (which I built myself) for less than $200CAD. I configured it to be my home drive and man, this thing is smokin'!! I can at last download ALL of my photos, files, music and movies off the iCloud storage and have nearly instant access to all my stuff, for less than the 1TB Mac mini configuration.
you built a TB4 drive yourself.. amazing.. thats some hardcore skills.. or did you mean to say that you put a NVME drive into a enclosure and tightened a couple of screws?
@@islanddev4893 I just popped an external nvme m.2 drive with thunderbolt 4 connectivity, went to the Users & Groups settings and changed the location of the home drive to the external drive :P No rocket scientry needed :P
But itunes doesn’t let you backup to anything other than the main drive, by design of course 😂
@ Wrong. First you can choose any spot on the boot drive or external drive. Second, since I already created my home folder on an external drive before I logged into my Apple ID, all music downloads defaults, including Spotify, goes to my external drive. And with data throughput of more than 2000mbps, I’m more than happy.
@@islanddev4893 That counts as a build for most apple users
The only silver lining is that you can now move your apps and your home folder to an external drive, so if you've got a 256 base mac mini, just get an external drive and just literally don't use your internal drive for anything but the OS.
What happens if you try to login with the external drive disconnected?
Also apps are typically stored in /Applications, not your home directory, so you'd need to move them across as a separate step. Or maybe move the ones you've installed to $HOME/Applications/. I assume MacOS apps aren't hard-coded to only run from /Applications/.
And typically audio plugins for Logic and GarageBand etc are stored in /Library/Audio. I think they can be moved to $HOME/Library/Audio/ and still work.
From memory HomeBrew on Apple ARM installs to the /opt directory. Maybe a symlink to the external drive would work.
@@zoomosis you can't login with the drive disconnected, so it's good to have a recovery account for this. Apple apps will stay on the native drive, all other apps can be installed onto the external drive
@@zoomosisjust make a separate admin account that keeps its home directory on the internal SSD.
@@zoomosisoh, and you can just create a separate Applications folder on the external drive and install all your non-Apple software there.
which then means you permanently have 1 less thunderbolt port in the back
On a 2018 Mac mini a memory upgrade from 8 to 32 GB had cost me around 100 USD because I was able to upgrade it myself. Now I don’t have that option because apple solders the RAM to the board.
I’ve got 64GB of RAM in my 2018 Mini - chipset can support more i think but at that time there was no affordable 64GB sticks. As my 2018 mini still does everything I need I’ll keep on using it.
Technically the ram is on the die not the motherboard. For faster interconnect which is why they can get away with charging what they want.
RAM is not soldered on the board on any M1 or faster CPU equipped Mac, it is integrated into the SoC like it is on new Snapdragon and Intel based systems. So upgrade RAM at purchase if needed but upgrade only the RAM and perhaps the Ethernet, never ever upgrade the nternal SSD on any Mac with Apple Silicon, it is never worth it. Always go with an external SSD for storage upgrades.
You cannot compare that memory bandwith of the Apple silicon SOC
@@StardustOneReviews can i install programs on an external ssd?
A Trillion dollar company worries about (loosing money) the right to repair and the ability to upgrade a computer you Purchased. Shameful
That’s why we need regulations that require right to repair and upgradability
that is how you beecome a trillion dollar company lol, it is not a charity or smth
@ how is it charity? I purchased the Apple device.
and probbaly boast how they "care about th eenvirement" yet removed 3.5mm jack so now HEADPHONES have to have BATTERYS and be WORSE for envirement! when they say they "care about the envirement" they are talkign about the luxary of there yacht and/ or ivory tower, when they talk about "eco friendly" they mean "ecomy friendly for the elite"
@@altseason_musik But somehow, everyone who says this seems to think that we, the consumers, are a charity, and should just tolerate whatever garbage corporations shove at us.
"X corporation isn't a charity" is only an acceptable talking point when followed by therefore, consumers should be organized to boycott, push for regulations,, or otherwise force the corporation to adopt more consumer friendly practices.
The whole idea of a free market only works when everyone involved is both perfectly informed, and perfectly rational... which is why the free market is kind of a stupid idea.
Apple’s up charge on RAM and SSD is absolutely nuts
I got a base mini and added an external Thunderbolt drive. Because it works fine, not because I don't know any better.
I think the "base" mini Pro is a fairly decent deal, too. Quite a bit more, obviously, but you're getting 24 GB of RAM, a 512 GB drive, Thunderbolt 5, as well as the CPU and GPU upgrades.
I agree, the RAM is double the bandwidth and the RAM upgrades are at $12.50/GB on the Pro and $24/GB on the base model M4 Mac mini. SO twice the price for half the bandwidth, on the RAM that Apple is probably ordering in chip quantities that are 10-100 that of the pro models, go figure… Apple finance and marketing departments know what they are doing (and should know it's potentially illegal if a Trump controlled Congress wanted to go after Apple to make an example of tech company that "liberals" love).
My take has always been that they make the upgrade prices so expensive to recoup costs from the base model being so cheap. But as someone who needs a ton of ram for the work I do on a mac it is absurd how expensive things get. That being said with the m4 pro you can probably cheap out a little bit on storage since it comes with 512gb and with TB5 external storage is blazing fast and not much slower than internal storage. Still if you aren’t doing games the processors perform well above their weight class and are some of the most powerful CPUs on the market (the pro/max versions at least).
Yes, I think the expensive upgrades help subsidize the low base price.
12:28 "Do what's right for your customers"??? Are you delusional? EVERY company FIRST does what's best for their shareholders :)
and their bonuses and promotions!
What if I buy a base model and a 2TB external Thunderbolt SSD? Should solve the storage problem and RAM is enough 👀 I can run programs off of SSD right?
You can but certain features of macOS wont work anymore like intended (Apple Intelligence for example).
@@franzpleurmann2585 I believe apple Inteligence will still work with apps on external drive. Apple Intelligence won't work if you put the OS on external drive.
You have to be really rich or a clown to use Apple products
@@K4miSamasurely all windows machines are cheap and all user smarts … ( look at you, big IQ right? )
Yes, you can.
You can also pay Apple some money for iCloud if you have a good wifi connection and offload a lot of your stuff to it, or use OneDrive.
My work portable laptop is an original M1 MacBook Air with only 256GB and 8GB. I use OneDrive to store all of my work and it’s not a problem. It automatically removes things that you are not using from the local drive.
macOS: ~25 GB
DaVinci Resolve: ~7 GB
Adobe Photoshop: ~5 GB
Adobe Lightroom: ~3 GB
Google Chrome: ~1 GB
Spotify: ~0.5 GB
Discord: ~0.3 GB
Bitwarden: ~0.15 GB
Total: ~42GB
Projects and assets: Samsung T7 4TB
As someone who almost never interacts with youtube comments and likes, I had to leave a comment this time. Really appreciate the non-partisan review and pricing comparisons over OS and years. Typing this on a Mac Air M1, mostly using Windows for everything else. Thanks!
did a similar calculation, because I intended to get my sister a Mac Mini, but stopped making sense literally with just one upgrade….
great video Snazz
Unlike with a MacBook, with a Mac Mini you can at least do one little trick - Install MacOS on an external SSD.
Any middle of the road NVMe SSD + a decent USB/thunderbolt enclosure will do just fine and not cost a kidney! I know right? You can keep both of them!
why not just use the external ssd for everything else and leave macos on the internal storage
Doesn't that disable parts of the OS?
@@plythbirdsome apps don’t allow you to install on external storage drives unless you do some hacky stuff like symlinks
why install MacOS on an external ?, you can't buy a Mac with no SSD. 256 GB is plenty enough for MacOS. Put your data, your user folder and eventually apps on the external.
If you do that you can no longer use Apple Intelligence nor can you install third party kexts like (Tuxera NTFS or OpenZFS).
Here is my 2 cents. the base model is probably aimed at institutions where the MDM policy does not allow files to be saved on the local device. when they purchase, they buy in thousands. in that case, 256 makes sense. For consumers, probably kinda make sense to Apple, as they could easily up sell the larger storage.
probably, it's fine that Apple makes it useless base model SSD (less so 8 GB RAM for last 5 years). why people complain is because the cost to upgrade to get to a realistic* RAM and SSD capacity for your non-upgradeable (even at APPL), non-third-party-repairable Mac is not cost reflective in the slightest. For example to go from 16 GB → 24 GB on the base model the ticket price is t a rate of $25/GB. To go from 24 GB to 48 GB on the M4 Pro Mac mini its at $12.50/GB (for memory built with double the bandwidth!). That is not cost reflective, especially so given Apple is buying the slower RAM for all their phones and Macs in volumes that are probably 10-10,000 what the Pro RAM chip volumes are.
* what is realistic for most people who use Macs professionally in arts/engineering/science/design fields means lots of pro apps on the drive and running concurrently or Xcode/whatever else for devs. then you need to including more RAM and SSD than you need today just to future proof for macOS AI bloat that is coming soon. just so you don't brick your Mac in terms of resale value.
With only 256GB a larger % of buyers will subscribe to iCloud storage. And they know that once a user is on iCloud storage, they get lifetime revenue of X.
Wait until this guy learns about external SSDs.
$55 gets you a Thunderbolt enclosure and $70 gets you a Samsung 990 Evo
Oh no... I have to have something plugged into my computer that is stationary.
The absolute horror
It's obvious what's happening: Apple sells the base model either at cost or just below cost, knowing they'll make the profit because most sales that have upgrades on them.
Apple is all about profit margins. That will NEVER change.
I’d hope every single publicly traded entity will exist solely for profit margins 😅
Why should it? They're a business, not a charity.
understandable but wouldnt value drive sales? few people buy something knowing theyre getting a bad deal. if they dont buy that wont help profits.
@@bradhaines3142no. You are either looking for volume sales or high margin sales. Why would apple sell a product for $500 to 100 people when they can sale a product for 2000 to 50? The goal isn’t to dominate the market by total user base but by profits. That’s why the iPhone which has 16% of worldwide market share consumes 85% of worldwide smartphone profits. Apple positions itself as a lifestyle brand. Its prices have been set accordingly. Granted they use better materials in some cases, they don’t need every person to buy it. That’s why they keep flashing to the world’s most valuable company. If Nvidia wasn’t killing it in AI hardwares, it would be apple by a good stretch always
And if you live in a capitalist society, take a paycheck or generate income, so do you. And you will seek the most that the market will bear for whatever it is you contribute.
I like this presentation style. It’s giving Technology Connections
Enjoyed it really much
Not even close to Technology Connections, the best tech show on RUclips
@@quakerotisto be fair, tech conn covers an entirely different kind of tech
The gold standard
I looked at getting an upgraded M4 Mac Mini but just bought the stock configuration and with the money I saved on the ram and ssd upgrade I was able to buy a Ferrari SF90 Stradale.
I found a hack for this. I bought the M4 base version, and connected a 1TB external NVME SSD drive through the thunderbolt port and set that as my home folder. All my apps and home folder are running off the 1TB drive.
You can also install the whole OS on the ext drive if you want.
I installed the entire OS on a 2TB thunderbolt drive on my 2018 mac mini, the internal 256GB drive has not a thing on it.
For anyone curious of the best use case for thunderbolt, it’s music production. The only way to get completely latency free monitoring from the DAW rather than direct monitoring on the audio interface itself is with a thunderbolt interface like the Universal Audio Apollo Twin.
if I were going to get one today, I'd go low end w/32gb RAM, $999, use the 256 ssd as the boot drive, and go external ssd 2tb (sandisk / samsung / etc) for $150 - save ~$650.. enough to buy another base mini :)
Very much agree. I also think 16GB will be fine for a lot of people. If they run out of storage external is completely viable.
Why not boot from the external drive?
you also need a thunderbolt enclosure if ur going with a nvme ssd.
pretty much this, you cant fix the storage (yet) but you can buy external, but the ram? you are cooked
@@timothylowe8327 because... it's apple, man. good luck.
My 2009 Mac Pro 5,1 is still going strong. Not buying anything new for making music for a while. OpenCore Legacy Patcher ftw
12:34 yes they will
Thank you for being one of the very few reviewers with integrity.
I have been a Mac user for over 15 years but only used the base Mac. I only change to a new Mac every 2-4 years. It is always enough for my needs. I only do light web development. Some video editing. But my browser always has over 50 tabs opened cos I manage several servers remotely and I run several VMs in my homelab.
Just gonna wait until the ssd boards are reverse engineered and available and I'll max the storage of one out for cheaper than their prices
You’re assuming they haven’t hardware bound them to the machine. Look at iPhones, they can’t be fixed with none Apple parts without features being disabled.
Or purchase a 40Gbps SSD enclosure to connect a regular M.2. That machine is meant to be an octopus of dongles any way
It's already being worked on right now by the people who did the studiodrive (polysoft).
@@devonglide1830only if the parts don't actually work
@@ziokalco it is a cheaper option, but such a case cost up to 80 €
Just the usual Apple shenanigans
...and this will only get worse because people will continue to give Apple their money.
@@gabe_0xApple don't make bad products. But good products and services simply are not their main focus
@@nullptr_yt I did watch the video. That base model looks like a great product! I was referring to their predatory hardware upgrade practices.
Getting it for $499 with a student or workplace discount really pushes this over the edge! Which is what I did.
Same! I still have my .edu email but it didn’t ask for verification.
@@ColeBlack2Apple works on an honor system. They don’t verify for student status. Of course they lose some money for non-students but it drives sales.
256GB not enough for OS & apps? What apps are you running?
great great great story telling Quinn. very entertaining and very right!
I stuck with the base unit with a Thunderbolt 4 enclosure and a 4TB Crucial Gen 4 drive. All I need and it's plenty powerful enough. You gotta be a fool to pay for a single "upgrade" from Apple.
External storage is slower, you'll end up with a lot of stuff on your desk (instead of on the ground with a tower model) and the memory cannot be upgraded. Furthermore, it is likely possible to recover flash memory even after destruction with high end tools, so not every company wants to have computers with integrated drives.
@@owlstead In everyday use external TB4 SSD's are more than fast enough.
@@owlstead slower? nvme from apple has 2500 mbps reads and 1500 writes. my samsung 990 pro has 7500 mbs reads and writes..its 5x faster! thunderbolt 4 supports 40gbps.
your mac mini will worth way more with the 512gb upgrade after 5 year when you resale it.
@@RiverYucatan Exactly! And Apple charges 200 extra to go from 256 to 512 for their clearly inferior and less reliable SSDs.
I just got my base spec M4 Mac Mini, and with all the software I need, there's still 190GB free. I'm a web developer who needed an Apple test system (to run Safari and emulate an iPhone) all I really need is XCode, VSCode, and NodeJS along with a pretty small set of tools.
But if I ever do need more storage, then I'll simply plug in a Thunderbolt 4 SSD enclosure ($60) with an 1TB (or more) Gen 4 NVME SDD inside ($60) and I'll have all the storage I need, and it will run just as fast or even faster than the internal SSD (around 3000 MB/s).
I wish the video had mentioned that. You do not need to pay the Apple tax if you want to upgrade your storage. Thunderbolt 4 is your friend, and they want to save you money!
Good that you mention it. Also, any responsible computer user needs to be backing up their files anyway. So adding external storage should be a no-brainer.
I was with you until your last line of Apple wanting you to save money due to thunderbolt 4 being your friend. No, Apple wants to extract as much money as possible from you. It’s all about their profit margins. We’re just a number to make other numbers go up.
@@XxZannexX I think he was referring to Thunderbolt 4 being your friend who wants to save you money, not Apple themselves.
Instead of trying to build a custom made PC, why not buy a minipc like the Aoostar Gem 12 that for $579 comes with a Ryzen 7 8845HS, 32 GB Ram and 1 TB SSD and has an Oculink port that can be connected to an external egpu?
The M4 processor might be a better chip, but the above mentioned machine has a way more functional base storage (256 GB SSD on the Mac Mini is simply not enough today). Plus the expandability of the Aoostar with another SSD is reasonably priced and it becomes a powerhouse if you connect a desktop egpu.
I don't get how entire tech yt decides to compare m4 mini to full tower builds, drool at the size of it, and completely ignore that 399$ ryzen mini pcs exist that have double the storage of base m4 mini, performance that's enoguh for most people, and often smaller size too.
Because it's a LOT slower.
I did look at a video that compared the mini pcs, they were slightly slower in general. They were equally slower (%) than the base m4 in cpu and gpu performance. For the price, the base Mac mini is still more powerful, until you look at ram and storage options.
@@thepgo666because it’s not as performant, that’s the entire point
@@thepgo666because cpu is the most important part of any PC. Ram and storage is secondary.
If you just do web surfing and basic doc. M4 is overkill. But any editing/production, m4 win hands down at that price point.
Another excellent and informative video - but the funny voice you put on at 3:03 completely cracked me up
you can buy premade/preconfigured mini PCs for the same price or less that perform just as well and in most cases have better components (more RAM, storage, gaming performance), so what's the big deal with this mac mini?
"As consumers we are going to tolerate this for much longer"
I mean, the consumers have been tolerating it since forever.
The base mac mini is incredible value. But my workflow requires at least 32GB of RAM, and at least 512GB of storage. There the value falls apart.
I would literally buy several Mac Minis and iMacs if the pricing on storage and RAM was reasonable. Unfortunately, the needs always require those upgrades and selling a new computer with less than 1TB of storage is laughable. Until Apple stops scamming with their storage and memory pricing i can't justify buying any of these.
Same here, i want one but i boycott for the scam prices
I have a base m1 mbp that has a 1.5TB sdcard in it to bump the base 512
@onecleangti SSD is like 100x faster than an SD card
@@onecleangti i understand people do that because they make the flush capped SD cards that look seemless.
But even if they were fast, they're not a reliable storage device.
There's a hierarchy of memory quality at the production level. And it gets sold and later packaged at prices based on how good it was on the waffer. Obviously enterprise stuff gets top tier, and we're not in that realm.
High performance SD cards sit only above microSD and good quality USB thumbdrives 😅.
@@leaphardotnetnormal people don't need 100x speed. Most people just use it for documents, picture and videos. Its good enough, portable and cheap.
I never comment on videos, probably my first one honestly but this is one of your most enjoyable videos to date. The delivery, the jokes, the good intro music, this feels very passionate and like others said, the right take on this stuff. Keep it up :)
The Mac mini four is a slap in the face to those that purchased the Mac mini predecessor for double the price for less power. This is how they treat their loyal customers. And this is the kicker they only offer you $200 for a trade-in.
5:54 What is this graph? Something is not right 😅
definitely not to scale
This is Apple math. You have a performance delta of over 50% but on the graph you make it look like 20x less! Problem solved! 😂
1:20 You don't have to build a new PC. Since you already have half the parts from your old PC. Try that with a Mac.
And if you don't have an older tower pc? or if you only have laptops like so many people do?
@@mikitoburrito You can still keep the ssd or the memory. Which seem to be the most valuable lol.
Oh so what if your last pc is like 10 years old and none of the hardware supports modern operating systems or apps
I do that every year!
Scam =/= BAD VALUE. People need to stop using the word scam so incorrectly.
How fast is the single CPU, MHz speed wise in the Mac Mini Standard? and how fast is the single CPU, MHz speed wise in the Mac Mini Pro?
3:05
yes it has *3* thunderbolt ports
but can you get a usable amount of storage with the mac?
You have to look at this from the perspective of the chief bean counter. Timmy has to eat like the rest of us, not to mention he has hungry fat cats meowing for seconds.
I got the base Mac mini m4 with the education discount and at 499 before tax, it’s an insane deal. I can add storage via thunderbolt nvme enclosure. The 16gb ram is enough for what I use it for (writing, RUclips, Stata and R, and listening to music via roon). It’s a steal at 499.
But did you really need an m4 for those purposes? E.g, why not get a cheaper laptop so you also have the benefit of portability, while also having upgradeable ram and interal expandable storage options?
You can do all that with a chromebook ffs. 256 gb storage is absolute lunacy and the way the media has swallowed this garbage is hilarious. External drives are never the same as internal drives.
@@askeladden450I have a MacBook Air M3. The computers have different use cases for me.
@@askeladden450 laptops cheaper than 499? i doubt that they are any good.
@@r.s.w.k4569I also have a windows gaming pc that has 64gb of ram and three different ssd’s two of which are nvme pcie 4. I’m not apple pilled, I just like the new Mac mini.
Added a $79 thunderbolt drive enclosure and a fast m2 stick, moved most things to that 150gb free out of the 250gb. Just need to make sure you create a backup profile. Ssd transfer speeds closely match the internal drive.
Sure but what to do with the 16 gb of ram limitation?
@@angosalvo5734if you need that much ram, buy the pro
@@angosalvo5734 16GB is far less of a restriction for most users than the SSD size. We can push for base 24 but realistically it takes a backseat to the offensive storage. My Windows PC's 2TB Gen 4 NVME was only $120 2 years ago
@@xavalongamesx9535 most users should be happy with a g4 mac .
What's interesting about this new hardware is the performance and that's what all this fuss about.
@@angosalvo5734 Dramatic much lmfao
loving the directions the videos are taking
Can I joint 2 base model mac minis M4 with a thunderbolt cable and make it work like a M8?
12:33 Unfortunately, we WILL tolerate it for MUCH longer. Only devices with MacOS after all :(
But now you have lunar lake and Snapdragon elite which completely nuke apples advantages on battery and thermals.
So it has multiple negatives? Everything is expensive and you get system where you have to pay external developers for basic features, like good window management?
@@michael_c2lunar lake and snapdragon do not "nuke" apple at all. They are barely catching up. M4s are still faster and more efficient. Unfortunately. I hope they do catch up eventually and make something faster and more efficient than apple
@@forthphoto well what about Mac downsides? Like the fact that you essentially need to plug every port in the dang thing just to get more than 1 monitor.... Snapdragon PCs don't seem to have this problem
@@mrsai4740 stop poking the cultists, just smile and slowly back away.
600$, sure the mac is better, at 800$ it may be close, anything above is just a slaughter, pc wins.
As someone who is on a 128-gigabyte M1 MacBook Air... I 110% agree that having too little storage is the most nightmarish and debilitating problem that just keeps coming back to haunt me no matter how much storage I "free up"
With Thunderbolt 4 ports, you can plug in external SSD storage that is just as fast as the internal drive and many times cheaper. You can install apps on the external drive, and you can even move you user's home folder to one.
@@EnglishMikeThat's a really clunky solution. No matter how much external storage you can add 256 or 128 at the base model is still an incredibly inconvenient experience.
@@EnglishMikeFor the Mini, it’s more doable as the system isn’t going anywhere. Having to lean heavily on external storage sucks for laptops though. Once in a while to move some larger projects around, fine. But to have to external storage every time I want to fire up a project or game, is a dealbreaker.
My current daily laptop (Lenovo Legion Slim) uses a pair of SSDs with several Terabytes between them, to give an idea of how much I value storage. To get a similar config on a MacBook is not at all cost effective, no matter how good their laptops are otherwise.
So you solved 1 problem all the way instead of 2 problems half way? Or did you inherit the M1?
Tim's greatest innovation, charging the same amount for upgrades so that shareholders can live in the cloud
You're 100% right. Charging people so much just for a little bit more upgrade is insane.
"It's a great value so long as you only want the bottom configuration. And nobody should want the bottom configuration"
so happy I decided to build a new PC instead of switching to a mac mini with the new m4 pro. windows is annoying, but at least I didn't pay £400 for 48gb ram and £600 for 2tb storage
Same for me. Despite knowing M4 is a better chip, I would value ram and storage more than cpu for my work.
but you can buy a M4 Pro Mac Mini with just 512 GB and buy TB5 external storage and save money while staying in MacOs.
3:00 but seriously, who cares about Thunderbolt? people who need faster external storage because you can't simply put an M.2 SSD inside unlike any PC from past 10 years? people who need external display and pretend USB-C is better than DisplayPort, while being just a different physical connector? people who are making music and for some reason think USB 3.0 or even 2.0 can't do it all for fraction cost (see RME)? if Thunderbolt is so important then why iPhones have USB 2.0 only?
Seriously, this. In my life, I've seen maybe a singular person using a thunderbolt for what it offers, and it was because they are a producer, and like to store his files on an external drive instead of the cloud. Reasonable use case, but like, out of hundred+ people, he's the only one I know who has used that port.
Only base iPhones have usb 2.0
Useful for photographers/videographers dumping footage
@@yarkee8128 Yeah, that's again, one valid use, as a connection to an external drive. But why is it presented as very crucial when comparing computers for most people??
Like, I would be fine if he said that a plus of the Mac is that it has multiple thunderbolt ports for people that use external storage, but instead he pretended like it was godsend for everybody using a computer, and that not having it on a cheap PC is really bad.
USB-C is often worse, because it had 2 lanes of DP instead of 4, so you only get half of the bandwidth.
I have the smallest version of the Mini and can say: it's perfectly adequate for office and multimedia, dock a large SSD via USB and you're done. Price/performance is not sensational, but it's okay! I just hope that the durability is also convincing, it should work for at least 10 years.
Can you power it via USB-C and not the ac cable ‽
gold and white. i fell for the bait
You should buy a thunderbolt or USB external SSD and using to expand the storage. You can DIY it and use a high quality and fast SSD. You can even use it as a boot drive!
Unfortunately, you can't add RAM via USB. External drives add cables and devices to the desk and aren't practical for notebooks. For the older ones, there are these small USB-drives that hardly stick out but it looks like Apple removed USB-A.
The funny thing is that building a better PC that matches the price of the Mac mini is super easy: 32G RAM, 2TB SSD and we have 2079€.
@@jochenkraus7016 you can also use an Nvidia GPU and get CUDA. Which if you need it, is a big deal.
Defeats the idea of a SFF if you have loads of cables and extra boxes hanging out the back . Even velcro-ing a small M.2 enclosure to the case is ridiculous.
@@jochenkraus7016Having cables or external devices on a desktop computer isn’t really an issue unless you’re really ocd about that stuff, most people aren’t.
My local apple shop in Thailand offer 3rd party upgrade Macmini m4 to 2TB at around 250 USD
Great deal. But you need to be careful to make sure the chips they use are fresh and not used...
Is this in BKK? Can I have the shop name and address? Thx
@@akiko009
Most likely, the chips are sourced from Chinese recycling operations. Though so long as the chips used are MLC or TLC, there isn't really any problem. QLC is the one that falls over and dies with writes
@@akiko009 Derp. Only virgin NAND that has never been written to (not even firmware) can be paired with the security controller.
@@Demopans5990 QLC flash provides many *many* *MANY* times the write capability of the *VAST* majority of users.
Stop being a sheep who thinks the *WARRANTY* value is the actual *WRITE ENDURANCE*.
It's set up to artificially segment the product. Blind idiots look at the TBW value and think "herp derp, diz won iz thre timez az gud" and pay extra for only a marginal increase in actual write endurance.
If nobody told you what the write endurance was, you'd be in the ultra-ultra-ultra slim minority of people to ever face an SSD death due to write operations and you'd happily use your drive without issue, likely for years.
Minute 12:08 is priceless. Amazing video and discussion as usual.
Fun fact: You can buy two M4 Mac Minis with the same price of upgrading one Mac Mini. :)
“…we’re not gonna tolerate this for much longer.”
Yes you will and you know it.
No we won't, we wont buy. Simple.
I love my MacBook Air but yeah the upgrade pricing is insane. One quick amazon search and I was able to find laptops half the price for twice the specs.
Apples and Orang-Utans.
I always find super cringe when youtubers do things like this 4:19, why the need for that?
What I did is just upgrade to 512 Gb storage, for an extra 200 bucks. Enough ram, enough space for all the apps (which indeed, are taking more than 256 Gb, and installing apps on an external drive is not an option for me) and the drive is faster too. It’s the perfect sweet spot before Apple politic kicks in. Who cares about spending insane about of money just to go up to 2TB storage? Just get an external drive at that point.
Good point!
in 2011 I was able to upgrade both my ram and HDD to SSD because Apple didn't solder the memory chips to the board. I just upgraded to the new MacBook pro 16 inch and I love it. I just wish they would let you at least add a NVMe secondary drive.
It's so frustrating... "Wow! This computer is perfect for my needs in the M4 Pro + 48GB configuration. Sp much value... wait a minute! How come it is 2129€ now? WTH?"
"Wow, I massively upgraded the CPU, GPU, storage and RAM and now it's expensive! I'm totally shocked by this because I have the mind of a squirrel."
-David
@tim3172 it's triple the price of the base model. Specs are not even near the triple. Well, RAM is, I give you that. I was expecting ~1250€ after upgrades based on base model price. I thought this explanation wasn't needed to understand my comment, Mr huge brain. BTW that price is with the 512GB SSD. Massive isn't exactly the adjective I would use to describe it in late 2024.
Adding an external SSD for the storage of all your documents is way cheaper than upgrading internal storage.
And a lot slower. Getting an equivalent speed SSD is not cheap.
This is meant to be s desktop replacement. Heck even laptops have 1tb storage for minimal cost.
@@tonyburzio4107 actually it is called nvme
@@tonyburzio4107did you….even watch the video
@@tonyburzio4107 Actually a usb4 pcie SSD dongle will give better read and write speeds than the base Mac mini m4 can offer.
IMO, You made a mistake on this build right at the very start. the 7600x is not the right CPU for this build
I would recommend instead switching to a 8600g or 8700g, which comes with its own cooler so you wont need an aftermarket one, and ditching the GPU entirely as its not needed as your comparing integrated graphics to integrated graphics.
Either one would be a suitable upgrade. And if you did it this way, you could even conceivably get an ITX build in for this size.
Also that'll have the advantage of unified memory (although probably not with as much memory bandwidth as on M4, but it'll at least solve the VRAM capacity bottleneck)
The upgraded version at $1,200 is still an incredible purchase. If you need it, you pay for it and get double the RAM, double the drive space, and double the drive read/write speeds.
A couple of years ago we required:
4T/32GB M2 Pro for $3,300, and it is the best business purchase we have made to date. Today we could buy:
4T/48GB M4 Pro for $3,100 or
4T/24GB M$ Pro for $2,700 (enough RAM for our purposes)
We cannot justify buying an M4 Mini because the M2 is blazing through all of our processing needs. But note we could spend less and get 50% more processing power in some use cases.
Tim Cook: $ Laughs $ in $ do $ what's $ right $ for $ the $ customer $$$$
Microsoft gets a break because their SSD is a standard M.2 thats very easy to swap out.
I bought a Surface recently with only 256GB and then out a 2TB ssd in it no issue.
Completely agree, I bought the base model thinking I could be savvy and use an external SSD, it took me 4 days before I gave up packed it up and begrudgingly went back to the store to exchange it for a 512GB. I have a feeling the refurbished store is going to be flooded with base model Mac mini's from other people that did the same thing. I would really of liked 1TB but like you say the pricing is crazy and I just can't afford that at least until someone makes a 3rd party module. I'd also be happy if apple offered these modules in the store to buy separately or as part of the self service program even if they're the same cost at least you have an option of upgrading it later when you don't have the advantage of the generous return policy when you buy from apple.
What was wrong with external ssd solution?
Why didn't it work out? This was the solution a lot of people are suggesting.
what was your problem using an external SSD ?
Is there any sweet spot in the Mac mini config? E.g. the base M4 pro? Asking for a friend 🙂
Base M4 Pro is great, imo.
@@snazzy When you showed how the upgrades were in the past, you proved that now we have the best options that we ever had. Because if you factor in inflation, all the other upgrades are between more expensive and MUCH more expensive. And on the RAM side, the one we have now it's MUCH faster than DDR4 at 2666 MT/s, since now Apple uses 4 to 16 channels (which to this day is SORELY missing on PCs, unless you go Threadripper and up) of DDR5.
Don't like being an Apple apologist, as I hate them with a passion, I just wanted to point this because I'm pedantic :D
Sorry for being off-topic on this comment chain, couldn't find another.
The best use case for the $600 variant is to build a compute cluster in your garage
I got the mac mini
but tbh idk why you picked ryzen 5 7600X when i5 with ddr4 ram is cheaper. I would even try AM4 with 9 5900X for renders since the mobos are like $80 for a B450 with good power delivery
I think the best thing is to NOT buy Apple products. No headaches trying to beat the marketing scam.