Apple didn’t discontinue it. You can still buy a $499 Mac Mini with - 4 GB RAM. God help your soul if you buy it though.

Mac Mini's have utility. I have an office full of Mac Mini's, a dozen of them or so, and keep buying more.

I still love them for my team. I have it down to a routine now, I buy one of the cheaper ones from the Apple refurbished site for about $400-500 or so, and buy an SSD from Crucial on the same day.

When it shows up I swap out the unusably slow internal 5400rpm drive for the SSD. That's a little tricky but once you've done it twice you can do it again in 10-15 minutes no problem.

Then I get it all fired up. I have a bunch of Dell IPS 4k screens in various sizes and get a another used one or two from B&H if I need more.

I'm very happy with this workflow, but it's still a hack. It sure would be better if Apple just made more reasonable desktop machines.

I’ve had two Mac Minis. The higher spec G4 Mac Mini and the first Intel Mac Mini - a Core duo 1.66Ghz. Apple abandoned it relatively quickly but I put Windows 7 on it and my mom still uses it to this day as a secondary computer when she tutors.

I also recommended Mac Minis as single purpose computers. A non profit I volunteer for uses one for live-streaming with WireCast and s Black Magic box, one to control lights, and a third for Propesenter.

But when I spec out a Mac Mini with a decent processor and RAM, I’m paying as much as I would for s low end 21” iMac with much better specs.

We've replaced out Mac minis with Intel NUCs. It really go to the point we just wouldn't spend the money on something that so outdated and crippled.

Sorry, outdated knowledge. I know somewhere around 2010 they revamped the line to start at $799, I was under the impression they never dipped back down.

> Apple's line is "the Mac is a truck, but most automobiles aren't trucks."

OTOH, the top three best-selling vehicles in the US are trucks: the Ford F Series, the Chevy Silverado, and the Dodge Ram.

Isn't that largely because of the Section 179 tax credit?

Partially, but a lot of folks really need trucks for professional use.

But modern pickup trucks are also very popular for personal use. You can get them with really nice interiors these days (compared to when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s). They're damned luxurious in comparison to the old days.

> It's vital to the platform that "anyone can afford a Mac."

Now it's "anyone can afford an Apple product." Get an iPhone for $125 a month or whatever it costs to lease and get a voice/data plan.

Last year I bought an iPhone SE from Walmart to replace my obsolete iPod touch. $140, tax included. Checking their site, it seems they still have it for a bit more, locked to their own prepaid brands.