Apple Mac mini M1

> I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3 years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3 beyond that. If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still working as well as it did on the day you bought it. You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being attached to the current used price - and there are less expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it was when I got it is still providing value and selling it used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar price as what I'd sell it for. > sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc. I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a worse device as it doesn't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk. Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was its form factor and quiet running.

I've had a mac mini m1 on my desk with nearly 100% uptime since launch. It only gets powered off only when there's a power outage or when I do an update.

I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.

Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.

My Mac mini m1 is a fantastic home server. Years ago I realized running a 100W PC all the time was REALLY expensive, so I switched to an old linux laptop at 30W (about $4/month). That helped, but I moved to the m1 mac specifically for the power efficiency. It does all the things my linux server did, and it does them at 6W (75¢/month). I've found no competitor with similar performance that can run in such a low power footprint. M4 mini's are way better at power/performance, and I imagine their price is about to come way down since the M6 mini just got announced. Software-wise, it's different, but mostly equivalent. Homebrew or macports has a similar software inventory to debian. And Apple's container framework is a welcome improvement over colima for running most container workloads.

I see that my old M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB memory and 1 TB drive has held value over time, selling for $600 to $700. A new Mac Mini with that much ram and storage costs about double now.

There's absolutely no way I'm using a gas guzzling 2018 intel clunker with unsupported software issues. Maybe if i need the box to double as a space heater. Basline mac mini is $800 and gets you into the M4 tier chips. Overkill for web dev and iOS apps. Enough power to carry you for 10+ years of dev work before your next upgrade. I'm still on the M1 mini and plan upgrade at the 10 year mark (2031) or if I need more power sooner (unlikey). I feel the mini's are price competitive. They say "apple tax" but go on to some linux machine provider, select similar stats, and see the price tag rocket past the mini.

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense. I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier. My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

8GB RAM and no active cooling would be miserable. Mac Mini is the best bang for buck at the moment. I have an M1 Air as well, but if I'm away from my desk and doing anything that would push the SOC hard, I remote into my Mini.

Mac Mini M1 running Asahi Linux is half of that: 65-70 kWh/year

I have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs? I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).

I am using a M1 Mac Mini 8GB as a home server/desktop, and it works just fine. It can run games and a Minecraft server in the background while serving video and home automation, and I've never had anything force quit because of it. I agree with the people who are saying 8GB should be kept as a target spec for the low end. It's really only bloated software that has made it necessary to get so much RAM, and now that prices have gone up, if Apple forces developers to do more with less for a segment of their market, I'm all for it.

I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!

I got an M1 Mac Mini somewhat recently as well, to replace my ~2012 Mac Mini that I use as a media center PC. And frankly, it's overkill. Used ones can be had for $200-$300 USD, lower side with cosmetic damage. An absolute steal, IMO.

Was never really into Apple hardware (mainly the price), however I recently got an M1 Mac Mini and an iPhone for app development, and the inference speed for as you say, a 5 year old chip is actually crazy. If they made the M series fully open for Linux (I know Asahi is working away) I probably would never buy another non-M series processor again.

I repurposed old M1/M4 Mac Mini's at my workplace into GitHub action runners. Works like a charm, and made our workflows simpler and faster. Persisting the working directory between runs was a big performance boost.

The Toshiba (!?) laptops that got sold to one of my clients at nearly $1100/ea are pathetic. Basically the same kit you can get for $600-700 at Best Buy. The equivalent MacBook would have been miles better, in terms of build quality and specs. Although, I’m using a ThinkPad E16v2 right now that I am quite pleased with that was $899 with 32GB/1TB. There are reports Apple is getting ready to launch a less expensive MacBook soon. I think the <$1000 options for laptops is about to get rather interesting. I’m still disappointed to see the days of easy RAM/storage upgrades have largely gone. I was initially suspicious of the reasons offered for why soldering memory directly to the motherboard is necessary, but with a few years of academic engineering experience (I don’t use much of my EE education in my day job), it’s not illogical—as frequency increases, the circuit’s sensitivity to parasitic inductance and capacitance also increases, and connectors/interfaces are a big source of parasitic effects and general nonlinearity. That said, my desktop has traditional DIMM slots, and it’s technically running faster DDR5 than any of my other devices with soldered DDR4 modules. I charitably assume the difference is laptop’s need for greater efficiencies, but either way it would be nice if the manufacturers hadn’t instantly taken advantage of this new “necessity” to jack up prices on memory and storage quite so aggressively. It’s probably also worth noting that Apple was first to really do t…