That $499 Mac mini comes from somewhere…
Yes. Very much so. But what's the actual sacrifice?
There's a point of paradox about so much technical magic being delivered at such insanely low prices by historical standards, such that picking apart the supply chain is just an academic exercise in reality; it's not even bean-counting.
I see a mind-bending panoply of giddy youtubers shouting don't-make-a-huge-mistake advice on M2 configs with no disciplined regard for what matters. The argument is you're getting gypped if you buy at the low end, because the higher end offers a subsystem with a bigger metric, with no thought as to why that metric matters.
Which is akin to the debacle of the 2019 Mac Pro: it's target market is maybe 1–5% of mac sales, for customers with very different expectations than the other 9X%. If you do structural engineering you actually need ECC no matter if it's expensive because you can't risk design failure due to bit errors. You'll never hear a gamer say a word about a missing bit. Gamers brag about making their kit crash!
But in every scenario, single metric thinking gets weird. Like imagine if you viewed SSD speed as the rate at which you could wear the drive out: "the Pro mini wears out its non-replaceable hard drive twice as fast as the entry model OMG" or imagine increasing the rate which you could load data to exhaust RAM, I've overloaded this baby quicker than ever!
Then there's weirdness of scale, for example, a Mac Pro with 1.5T of RAM and a PCIe3 x4 SSD will take 10 minutes just to load all that RAM! Ok so make it a PCIe5 SSD it only takes 3 minutes. Feel better?
Imagine a review that cries over the dearth of cubic feet of a iPhone. It must be a terrible deal, you can't even fit a book of matches inside it!
While reviews are rarely this patently absurd, they are typically so incognizant of meaningful tradeoffs as to be mostly noise.
By historic standards, say 10 years ago, the base mini is 3x more CPU, and 2x RAM for less $—not even inflation adjusted—less power consumption, and better reliability.
Plus it includes 10x GPU, 20x HD perf, 4x expansion bandwidth, 5x display res, 10x video codec and a 1TFLOPS machine learning unit which didn't exist at all 10 years ago. And the HW is more stable and quiet.
(Too bad about the SW... but I'll skip that rant)
If you consider your entire workflow, you learn to push around the constraints to work within the limits of your tools. That's craft.
Making it beautiful too: that's art.
All these youtube M2 stats reports are cookie-cutter attention-seeking diatribes that show neither art nor craft.
If anyone is limited by their Mac these days, no amount of further tech improvement is going to help. The solutions have been delivered.
I think griping about latest Mac configs can take a backseat to astonishment at the overall gains for the decade. Apple is a force beyond wild dreams of John Scully.
Which makes it just about time for something big to change...
