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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

The mini has special challenges. It is a low volume product compared to the the iPhones, iPads, and iMacs. There are probably 100 iPhones sold for each mini. Simultaneously, it is a cost sensitive product, sitting at the bottom of the Apple computer price list. It is probably difficult to recover the engineering, qc, and manufacturing costs to change a model.

Couple this with a baffling inability of Intel's market segmentation machinations to cough out a pair of chips which make sense for a low end and a high end mini and there really isn't a compelling reason to make a new model. Intel's newer offerings just don't offer enough bang to pay the mini product development buck.

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> It is probably difficult to recover the engineering, qc, and manufacturing costs to change a model.

How much R&D can there be for Mac Minis when almost everything but the case is a commodity part?

Aside from considerations of cost, it should be embarrassing to Apple to sell such outdated tech at these high prices.

Sure, they are outdated. But if you sat a user down in front of a current Mac Mini and one using one of Intel's equivalent wattage and price point parts which shipped in volume in the past six months, would a user notice the difference? Short of benchmarking I doubt they would. The new parts just aren't compelling.

If they wanted to use the Mac mini for a "home theater" they might notice that the mini can't handle 4K/UHD resolutions above 30Hz.

Even outside home theater use, they may notice watching H.265 videos on a computer without hardware decoding (not really a problem now, very much will be a problem within the lifespan of a mini purchased today).

They'll notice if they have another, actually new Mac in their lives and find the mini has no USB-C ports, either for Thunderbolt 3 or even USB 3.1 (of course this is also true of the Mac Pro but at least they've 'fessed up about that).

First off this is partly a self fullfilling prophecy: I'm increasingly less likely to buy one the longer it takes them to update it.

Also, they've effectively pushed me to other vendors for small form factor PC's now. I needed a small form factor HTPC and was ready to just casually buy a Mini, until I saw they hadnt updated it in years. I switched to a smaller and cheaper chromebox which I put Linux on, and I won't be going back to Mac minis now because I found a better cheaper solution.

On the on hand, thanks apple, on the other theyre doing it to themselves from my perspective.

Strategically, I think they would be better off going with AMD on the Mini. It's total units are tiny and they can leverage this into even better deals from Intel.

The problem is that Intel's CPUs are significantly more power efficient than AMDs.

That's not true anymore with Ryzen. See here (french, but you should be able to read the graphs): http://www.hardware.fr/articles/959-4/consommation-efficacit...

Ryzen is a desktop CPU, and mini PCs (like NUC) tend to use laptop parts, e.g. Intel 15W U-series, or 45W H-series. Ryzen is not even in the correct market segment.

Raven Ridge is scheduled to be released Q3.

I'm not sure if AMD could offer Thunderbolt, which might be a deal breaker for Apple.

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