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by musicale 1106 days ago
It's a bit of a different design point.

The M2 Mac mini's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, which has some advantages (good memory bandwidth, no copying between CPU and GPU RAM) and disadvantages (expensive, non-upgradable DRAM tiers.) Internal flash storage is basically non-upgradable as well (though you can easily plug in external thunderbolt m.2 storage.)

It also doesn't currently run Windows natively, nor does it support eGPUs.

I'm not sure any Mac mini model was ever much of a competitor to cheaper PCs, but mini PCs have gotten a lot better over time, probably inspired somewhat by the Mac mini, while the mini has followed in the footsteps of other Mac models by adopting Apple Silicon and unified memory.

The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac, and compares favorably with the older intel Mac minis in terms of performance, but I'd spring for 16GB of RAM (at least) for my use cases.

2 comments

> It's a bit of a different design point.

I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.

> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac

That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.

Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.

Flash is upgradeable, but the only source of proprietary NAND chips with special firmware is Apple itself :/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR7m4aUxHcM