[krylon]

In late 2013, I decided I really wanted a new computer. And after looking at my bank account, I decided that a good way to treat myself without going totally overboard financially would be be the 2012 Mac Mini with the quad-core i7. I liked the machine very much, I eventually upgraded the RAM, but by late 2016, I was no longer happy with the machine's performance.

At that point, I took a look at Apple's lineup and found their machines underpowered, overpriced (at least compared to my budget), and some part of me no longer liked OS X as much as I had initially.

I waited for Ryzen to become available and for the first time in more than a decade, I built my own PC and am now back to using GNU/Linux. About 20 months later, I am very happy with my decision. But I might very well have chosen another Apple machine if they had one with reasonably current hardware, at a reasonable price, which I could have upgraded later on. It is sad, because they sure know how to build a sweet computer.

Note: AFAIK, Apple computers are significantly more expensive in Europe, so the price-performance ratio might be more favorable in the US.

[vldx]

Given the new Mac Mini, would you still build your own PC now? I was seriously considering going the Hackintosh route, but the new Mini seems to provide fair value for its price.

[krylon]

I spent about € 1100-1200 on my current desktop, it has a Ryzen 1700, 32 GB RAM and 750 GB SSD storage, plus a GeForce GTX960.

Let me just make a quick check: With a six-core CPU (my Ryzen has 8, although per-core performance is lower), 32 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD, the new Mac Mini would cost me € 2209 in Apple's online shop. If I take 8GB RAM and upgrade myself, the machine itself is € 1489, plus about € 250 for RAM, so about 1739 bucks. I have no idea how much that would cost me in the US.

Nah, I think I still would have built my own machine. Plus, it was surprisingly fun. More laborious than I remembered, but fun. I have to admit, though, the Mini looks gorgeous in Space Grey, and I like that they have upped the performance significantly.

I briefly considered building a Hackintosh, but from what I heard, it is too much trouble for me. I am pretty happy with openSuse Tumbleweed running the MATE desktop. Setting up additional repositories for proper video playback was a little annoying, but it was a one-time thing, and things Just Work(tm) now. ;-)