I'm probably speaking for thousands of people. It's been complete frustration to see what Apple hasn't been up to on the Mac front. Apart from not updating a few ranges for years (and introducing updates that reduce or remove the kind of expandability the core Apple customer base wants), not reducing the price of old systems is highly insensitive on the part of the company. It looks like in another one or two years macOS won't support some of the aged hardware that Apple sells. That may be the time it'd completely junk those ranges. It's sad to see this.
Though lacking in certain ways, the HP Z2 Mini seems like a decent alternative for people who can move out of macOS.
The Z2 Mini is a completely different class of hardware.
People who are looking for an alternative to the Mac Mini would be well served by an Intel NUC, Zotac ZBOX [0], or Gigabyte BRIX [1].
If I was going to buy a Mac Mini, it's to have an affordable Mac that I can stick somewhere in my house to run occasional OS X software. I already have a few other computers, plenty of them running Linux. A Mac Mini is a great way to get a cheap OS X setup going.
Also, it's not low margin, they charge $200-$400 for each upgrade you make. So if you only want a 1.8GHz box with 5400rpm spinning rust, then you're still paying $500 and Apple can't be out more than $300 in parts and costs. Especially given that they've been selling this model for 3 years, the cost of production is quite low.
(Once you get ahold of the screwdriver it's actually not as hard as it looks. You can DIY the motherboard removal tool from a wire coat hanger and in 40 minutes of focused work you'll be done.)
[0]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/11/not-the-upgrade-we-wer...
"Mac mini (Late 2014) does not have user-installable RAM."
I still have a Late 2012 Mac Mini. The CPU is almost as fast as the 2014 and I put in 16 GB RAM when I bought it (you could just pop off the bottom without a screwdriver). Later I also added a 500GB SSD. It still runs great.
Still selling the 2014 Mini is even a bigger offense than if they'd sell the upgradable late 2012 flavor.
Hackers are more likely to build themselves a hackintosh and triple boot.
I haven't jumped into that ecosystem yet so I'm not sure how great they are or what the best ones are. I've been thinking of buying a few of them to replace the Rokus around my house.
I have the Xiaomi MiBox 3 and it's a pain to put other apps on it. Anything that isn't explicitly Android TV compatible won't be installable from the Play Store, and even if you sideload it, it doesn't show up in the menu. Amusingly, this is the most useful that "OK Google" has ever been (Xiaomi's remote+voice control is excellent)
I will say it's worth reading up and buying based on chipset+firmware. You probably want Android 5+, something that runs Kodi well, Ethernet and HEVC decoding. I'd recommend the Mibox but Google and Xiaomi have really made a mess of it.
If I'd needed something new for refreshing a couple of web pages, I'd have bought a Raspberry Pi or similar. Would anyone really buy a Mac Mini, new, to do this?
the really pricey trashcan Mac
I don't need a laptop and, consequently, I don't want to pay a single penny for portability.
My previous monitor was almost ten years old when I gave it away, and I'd have kept on using it if I hadn't had to buy a larger one (tl;dr small desk, got a big 1080p monitor and hung it on the wall behind the desk for extra space). Unless an iMac is going to last me 10-12 years, there's no point in paying a single penny for a monitor that I'm going to stop using when the computer it's glued to goes obsolete. Sexy design, stupid engineering.
That leaves me to choose between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro. I don't need a Xeon machine, but a three year-old dual-core i5 machine with a crawling hard disk isn't quite on-par with what I need, either.
My current machine is a five year-old quad-core i7 that's running just fine. My only beef with it is that between 2012 and 2017, a bunch of things happened on Linux and now I'd really, really rather use OS X (hell, I'd rather use Windows if it didn't shove ads down my throat...).
An up-to-date Mac Mini would be exactly what I need -- small, runs OS X, doesn't come with a bunch of hardware that I don't need, can run Emacs, compile C programs, run Perl/Python/whatever scripts, plays music and ssh-es into other boxes (my current machine does all that, too, except its OS keeps breaking)