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Comment by krger | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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