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Comment by roqi | Hacker News Reader

> The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well.

As a long time Linux and macOS user, I don't agree. Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup. Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD. Moreover, a Mac mini tops up at 24GB of RAM, and for that you need to pay an additional 460€ for your weak 256GB HD box.

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I think to compare prices you need something with adequate GPU performance (which the M2 has).

The M2 GPU is roughly the performance of the notebook edition of the RTX3060.

To get a MiniPC with one of those it is over $1200! https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771159431.html

> I think to compare prices you need something with adequate GPU performance (which the M2 has).

I feel your comment reads too much like fanboy excuses. CPU is not the only or even main requirement. I personally want to max out on RAM and HD. I can buy a mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB nvie for 400€. With a Mac, I need to spend almost twice that to only get 25% of te RAM and 50% of that HD space.

This was the norm since Apple shipped Intel core i5 Mac minis.

There is no way around this. Apple price gouges their kit. It's irrelevant how you feel they fare n artificial benchmarks.

>Apple price gouges their kit

How do you define price gouging?

Why is it wrong for a company to sell their product for the highest price people are willing to pay?

It's a bit of a different design point.

The M2 Mac mini's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, which has some advantages (good memory bandwidth, no copying between CPU and GPU RAM) and disadvantages (expensive, non-upgradable DRAM tiers.) Internal flash storage is basically non-upgradable as well (though you can easily plug in external thunderbolt m.2 storage.)

It also doesn't currently run Windows natively, nor does it support eGPUs.

I'm not sure any Mac mini model was ever much of a competitor to cheaper PCs, but mini PCs have gotten a lot better over time, probably inspired somewhat by the Mac mini, while the mini has followed in the footsteps of other Mac models by adopting Apple Silicon and unified memory.

The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac, and compares favorably with the older intel Mac minis in terms of performance, but I'd spring for 16GB of RAM (at least) for my use cases.

Flash is upgradeable, but the only source of proprietary NAND chips with special firmware is Apple itself :/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR7m4aUxHcM

> It's a bit of a different design point.

I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.

> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac

That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.

Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.

Where can you buy that miniPC?

After doing a quick search, a couple brands that have miniPCs that meet these specs include "Beelink" or "Minisforum"

> I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny!

Both of these companies are huge in the mini PC space. Most people have never heard of them because all they do is mini PCs.

Minisforum latest 7940HS lines are better than M2. More powerful, fairly close on power efficiency, better GPU, cheaper, and without all the nonsense that comes with buying Macs. Their fully juiced model is $800 (and doesn't lock you in to a model that milks casb from you like a sow).

The M2 GPU is a fair bit better performing than the 780M in that though isn't it?

I've been trying to work it out and the best comparison I've seen is this: https://i.imgur.com/MhM1fap.png

Although https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/138lari/comment/j... indicates it is a reasonable match.

There is also the fact that the AMD CPU is newer, has a 50% higher TDP, and is built on a smaller node, but is far from providing 50% better performance than the M2 [0]

On the other hand, I don't own a Mini, nor I'm on the market for a mini PC, but I don't feel like dropping $800 for a prebuilt PC unless they provide stellar support and warranty, and chinese OEMs aren't really known for that.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R9-7940HS-vs-M1_14521_14...

It isn't. As the Reddit link explains, the only benchmarks it wins in are synthetics.

You can play Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p at over 60fps. You can produce all the synthetic benchmarks in the world but this is as powerful as a console. This is the most powerful iGPU out there, it is about as powerful as 1060.

I'm not sure what Beelink is supposed to be mistaken for. I only know them for their micro-PCs and I'm not familiar with another brandname that it is supposed to remind me of.

I hadn't heard of Minisforum though. But the same goes there - not sure what is is supposed to be mistaken for.

I just priced the Ryzen Lenovo ultra small form factor, which is smaller than a Mac Mini and only slightly larger than a Playstation 2 slim, and it was £500 rather than £400 but other than that those numbers didn't seem far off the mark.

The Mini comes with an internal PSU, though. All these mini PCs come with external PSUs, some hilariously large at over half the size of the PC itself.

This is true about it being an external PSU, but it is nowhere near 1/2 the size of the computer.

I have one because I was able to get an i5 that was passively cooled, so great for a Plex server that's second hand for only £100. The PSU is more like 1/8th, maybe smaller.

I happen to own a Lenovo Thinkcentre. The PSU is perhaps 1/3 the volume of the computer itself, which I think is crazy for a computer with a mobile chip inside.

I know that some Intel NUCs have monstrous PSUs [0], which I think should constitute false advertising regarding the actual size of the computers.

[0] https://www.servethehome.com/intel-nuc-11-pro-review-tiger-c...

Fair enough, if I had got that Intel one I would probably have a similar opinion. The power brick I have is about the size of the small Lenovo travel power supplies, maybe about 25% of that Intel one, at a guess without seeing it in person.

It's definitely smaller than 1/3 the volume of the unit unless I have a incredibly small form factor rather than an ultra small form factor unit? But I don't think so. It is very small.

>Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup.

It's justified if people pay it.

>Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD.

So what's the problem?

If you like running Linux on your Ryzen5 miniPC with 32GB of RAM for 400€, you're more than free to do that. Apple's not stopping you.

The original point of this thread is that they'd like to be able to get an M2 PC like that. So that's the problem.

I, too, would like to pay Ford prices for a Rivian.

I'll gladly play Apple processor prices for an Apple processor, but I'm not going to pay Apple PC prices for an Apple PC when all I really want is the CPU.

It's an SoC; what do you think you're paying for besides the CPU? The whole rest of the computer (for a Mac Mini, at least) is worth maybe $50.

Except if you want 32gb ram and 2tb disk space, they charge well in excess of what anyone else (for the most part) is able to charge for similar upgrades.

I guess Apple doesn’t want to be Intel. It is like the old Kelloggs adverts “we don’t make cereal for anyone else”. Alluding to those brands that use the same cereal at a marked up price and resell it to a supermarket brand to sell at a lower price in a plain box.

> The original point of this thread is that they'd like to be able to get an M2 PC like that.

Not really. The point is that Apple's products are overpriced, and in particular the Apple Mini underperforms and simply isn't competitive when compared to today's alternatives. I repeat, a mini PC with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB HD on the market for over 700€ simply doesn't compete with miniPCs with Ryzen or Intel i7 or even i5 that ship with 500GB HDs and at least 16GB of RAM which can cost 200 or 300€ less.

Neither of them really have HDs, rather SSDs, but more importantly the memory numbers are not directly comparable because macOS has a memory compressor. Which matters a very large amount for many workloads.

The markup is because I can go to apple.com, pick the RAM and storage I want, and not really have to figure out anything about flavors or distros, knowing that it comes with the best chip on the market. This is leaving out that it just works with my phone and tablet.

The markup is because Apple can command it based on a long history of quality and building a tech luxury brand. It's solely about keeping margins high and the brand status high.

Even if they could make the same money by lowering prices (and increasing volume), it'd be a terrible idea based on how consumer behavior and status seeking actually works. If the quality were the same and the product were far cheaper, consumers wouldn't want it as much. The absolute worst place to be in any market tends to be the middle, you go to the middle to die. High margins provide a margin for error in business, it's invaluable.

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