As long as it has enough RAM, that seems like a sound idea.
I actually got the M1 MacBook Air to replace an old Linux netbook that was dying (and also needed the walled garden for a project). I think that the M1 would still be enough for my daily tasks away from the desktop for quite a few years... except that I got the 8 GB version, which in hindsight was a pretty big mistake, assuming the rest of the hardware and software will have decent longevity.
Now I'm looking for remote development environments, something I could maybe run on my homelab and remote into, or maybe just running development containers on them.
If I picked up a new Mini or MacBook today, I'm reasonably confident it, too, would last me five years or more.
I'm not sure that quite follows. This benchmark is with the fastest (of 3) CPU options for the Mini. With 64GB of memory and 1 TB storage (to make a fair comparison with the Studio M2 Ultra), you're looking at a $2500 machine. We're not talking about the base $600 config here.
Granted, that's a lot less than the $4000 starting price of an M2 Ultra machine, but it's also 18 months later, and you don't get the GPU performance of an Ultra (see below).
> So the new Mini is faster than all existing Macs (at least on multicore Geekbench)
That's another thing: This only measures CPU performance.
The difference between "Max" chips and "Pro" chips lies in the GPU, not the CPU. The CPU core counts for Pro and Max are the same, but the Max has 2x as many GPU cores. ("Ultra" chips are basically two "Max" dies on one chip)
As you might expect, M2 Max and Pro have near-identical multi-core geekbench scores, but the Geekbench Metal score for the M2 Max is 80% higher than the M2 Pro (and M2 Ultra is about 2.7x the M2 Pro).
A 10-core M4 (w/ 10 GPU cores) scores about 58,000 on Metal (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/compute/3039631), so the Mac Mini with 14-core M4 Pro (w/ 20 GPU cores) should be expected to score around 116,000 on Metal.
That's almost exactly the same GPU performance as a Studio M2 Max (which would have cost you $2600 last year with 64GB memory and 1TB storage)... If you paid $4000 for the M2 Ultra last year, you would still have comfortably 2x the performance of today's $2500 Mac Mini, and nearly the same multi-core CPU performance.
> Of course, it will soon be surpassed by the M4 Max chip with a 16-core CPU, but no results are available for that chip as of writing.
Also how on earth does a newer machine being fast "throw a wrench" in the performance profile of an existing machine?
This sounds like retroactive rationalization of not being able to get a top of the line machine.