If you need/require Thunderbolt 5, you'll have to step up from $599 to $1399+ for the M4 Pro-based mac mini's.
Basically, the only thing half-working are slow paced story games and slow strategy games (mostly turn based), which ironically require little ressource most of the time (so why pay for cloud service ?!).
Like most things "cloud" conceptually it is seductive but in practice extremely compromised.
• Risk of accidental unplugging.
• Contacts may become wonky over time → see above.
• The need to sacrifice a port (or the portion of one in the case of a dongle).
• Enclosures tend to have annoying IO lights.
• Takes a bit of space.
All of these can be solved, especially when dealing with a desktop that stays in place. Paradoxically, there was never a better time to be modest with internal storage.
Although I will say:
> photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer
Over my dead body :) If there’s one thing I’ll always happily carve out SSD space for, it’s local copies of my photo library!
1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface)
2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer
So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game console.
[0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/