Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it’s really hard to justify one of these in light of m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?

Are the minis upgradeable? My nuc now has an nvme drive and a 2.5" ssd, and I've upped it to 32gb ram for some light vmware work.

On the other side of spectrum I have a few cheap nucs with celeron for media tv and streaming purposes.

If I read it correctly, Mac mini is 800cad for 8gb ram and 256 sdd.

I understand, but I feel like nucs always end up at this weird, “I’m going to drop 200 on ram, 200 on a ssd and have a 700-900 dollar thing that has no second hand value and really isn’t that powerful”. I remember throttling being an issue as well. Add a custom heat sink and some thermal paste? (50-100 more..)

It just feels like you’re paper cutting your way into a more expensive system. Not sure on small form factor pcs otherwise though. Hp z2 minis always seemed neat and typically have a promo code that works with a bare config you can bring your own ram/disk + Linux.

Have you seen the prices of RAM and SSDs lately? You can get name brand 32gb of DDR5 and a 1 TB NVME drive for a little over $100. Apple is literally charging 1000% markup on these upgrades.

"No second hand value"?

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=NUC11TNKi7&_s...

I can understand that perception. Depends on situation I suppose. I find that a) ram and ssd prices are way more affordable than that b) I always seem to have some around anyway - The circle of upgrades! And c) I wish second hand value was low, I'd be buying them like candy, but it isn't :-/

They can be nice as small servers. OSX is not as suited to server usage as a BSD or Linux and doesn’t have expandable storage - NUCs have additional m2 or sata drive ports. The NUCs also cost less.

Or if you want more than 256 gigs of storage built in. The Mini’s pricing makes no sense at all if it’s not Base or with the M2 Pro.

Much better as home-servers (450~ euros for a barebone 1340p is a pretty good deal). They have really good IO and linux support.

if you're using these in any sort of volume, then the $4-500 of savings is significant.

also, if you're not using MacOS then having hardware that's actually compatible with your OS is nice. all respect to the asahi linux folks, but i'm not going to give that to my customers.

How so?

Depends on the application, but for base line Apple silicon mac minis, ram is like lungs, even if the cpu/legs are super fast.

The max studio m1 max on the other hand is worth looking at.

Operating systems other than MacOS? (Well, Asahi is pretty impressive but it is only a couple years old).

Base price is $599 for 8GB and 256GB of storage. A NUC with more storage isn't that expensive.

There are advantages if the M2 is what you want, but CPU/GPU aren't always the thing to optimize for here.

My 8/256 NUC setup cost $230, the cheapest 8/256 Mini is $825 here. Easiest choice to justify ever.

What if you just don't want os x?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com