I got the Mac mini m1 as my first Apple computer recently (used). It’s really cool. It never heats up ever

My Mac mini M1 is still such a great computer and I really don't need to upgrade, but with the spec bump up to 16GB of RAM, $230 trade in value that Apple is telling me they'll give me, and the $499 education pricing (I'm currently doing a Masters degree) it's too tempting to pass up.

My first thought was similar, though followed quickly by "...but it's Apple, so what's the catch?" The relevant extra things to know are that the SSD is soldered, there are no slots for extra SSDs, and choosing a sensible (1TB) drive is >4X the price of buying similar storage at retail. Still a no from me, then.

(The only thing I do often that's CPU-limited is compiling, being faster at that saves me maybe a few minutes in a full working day; I don't care. I am frequently limited by RAM and I really hate shuffling things around to make space on drives.)

remember a good monitor. scaling is kinda annoying on mac's, with lower resolution (under 4K)

If you wanted a MacBook Air, that was also upgraded to 16GB of RAM for the base model for the same price.