[LeoPanthera]

There's a huge difference there. Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top.

Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies.

Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.

[sangnoir]

> Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top

I anticipated this concern, the $509 I gave earlier is the Amazon price that includes the mark-up. The Beelink SER7 costs only $320 on AliExpress.

Modern solid-state electronics are very reliable, most reliability issues for electronics are related to screens or batteries; which desktop computers lack. I guess there was a bad-capacitor problem over a decade ago, but nothing since then. If your risk-aversion for a desktop computer is high, you pay the Apple premium (possibly buying Applecare), or self-insure by buying 2 SER7s for nearly the same price ($640) as one regular M4 Mac Mini and keep the other one as a spare.

[ericmay]

IF you're ordering them in the context of a larger buying program like a university or other office you'd at least get some sort of account rep and Apple support as well. I'm not sure if you could get that from Beelink, could you? I see some benefit in that use case.

But that's aside from the main topic which was the personal and home use case. On that topic you get a decent set of products as well such as Pages/Numbers/etc. and others along with software support for the Mac Mini. I'm guessing the Beelink runs on Linux? That may be hard for some to work with (which is unfortunate since it's really not), or maybe they have to separately buy a Windows license? Something to consider in the comparison.