[diffeomorphism]

> Maybe I'm just too rich to appreciate it these days but a, say, 1-year old used mac mini m2 looks like it can be snatched for around $499 on ebay.

Unfortunately, no. The dell has ram slots and two ssd slots. So a config with 16 or even 32 GB of ram and 2TB of storage is about $600. A mac mini has exactly none of these and costs $1600 with these specs.

And Apple knows this. They charge $200 for the ram upgrade precisely because they know the "base" config is so limited and just for marketing. The actual base config is $1000 with okay ram and non-crippled ssd.