>With education discount, it's around €650,

It is €579 including VAT. The Educational discount in US is only $499. €650 sounds wrong. Where in EU is that.

Data point: base model Mac mini is 719€ in Spain, 599€ with the educational discount.

> With education discount

I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses.

That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable

Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.

It's not like they're taking a loss from educational purchases. It's just price discrimination. You might as well say "if we all started using newspaper coupons we can say goodbye to those discounts."

But that IS actually true, that if everyone used a coupon, the coupon would eventually go away or become weaker.

The expected percentage of people using a coupon is often part of the calculation (however vague) when deciding the coupon.

Likewise, the expected percentage of people using the education discount is part of Apple's calculation. Even if they lose money on the device (which I personally think is unlikely), they'll make it back from subscriptions and their cut of app store purchases.

It is also an investment.

Teachers promote/showcase the device for students.

Students who buy the device earlier, might influence the choices in their future jobs.

Pretty sure people already are abusing it.

I think this is a lot like the situation with oldschool Photoshop: for a long time, people pirated Photoshop, and Adobe really didn't care — didn't bother to do anything to make piracy the least bit challenging.

This was seemingly because they considered the amount of money they could make off of sales to individuals, to be relatively trivial next to the amount of money they could make off of corporate volume licensing; and they knew that corporations wouldn't be pirating Photoshop even if it was trivial (because corporations always have the thought of an acquisition-time assets audit on their minds.)

Apple likely thinks the same way about this education discount: all their material income comes from volume purchases or alternate distribution channels (e.g. cellular carriers for phones), or in-store sales; with online retail sales being a relatively-trivial fraction. So it doesn't really matter if they're "losing" part of their margin on these online retail sales.

(Or, if you think about it another way: this is essentially customer-driven price discrimination. Like coupons are for grocery stores. The discounted price is Apple's true price — the price that builds in a profit margin they're happy with. The higher price is pure gravy if they can convince people to part with it. They put the higher price front-and-center, and make the lower-priced offer a bit obscure. People "spending someone else's money" don't care about hunting for deals; they just want to get the thing and get out. So you can milk the gravy from them. People who hold their bank balance more dearly, hunt for the deal, and find it. Still fine; still made a profit from them!)

> Apple likely thinks the same way about this education discount: all their material income comes from volume purchases or alternate distribution channels (e.g. cellular carriers for phones), or in-store sales; with online retail sales being a relatively-trivial fraction. So it doesn't really matter if they're "losing" part of their margin on these online retail sales.

Exactly. At that point when the amount of abusers gets too high (because this will become mainstream knowledge and people think it is generally acceptable to dishonor the intention), then this will end. Or if they are able to improve the verification process with negligible costs.

So, the more people talk about "educational price", and more think that is acceptable to "cheat", more likely the count of abusers reach that threshold and good things end.

> (Or, if you think about it another way: this is essentially customer-driven price discrimination. Like coupons are for grocery stores. The discounted price is Apple's true price — the price that builds in a profit margin they're happy with. The higher price is pure gravy if they can convince people to part with it. They put the higher price front-and-center, and make the lower-priced offer a bit obscure. People "spending someone else's money" don't care about hunting for deals; they just want to get the thing and get out. So you can milk the gravy from them. People who hold their bank balance more dearly, hunt for the deal, and find it. Still fine; still made a profit from them!)

You are finding again an excuse to cheat. It is perfectly okay to take an advantage of discount if you are eligible for that. But this was not the case.

> So, the more people talk

It’s been decades at this point, I suspect we’re at an equilibrium by now.

They almost certainly won’t get rid of it because people are abusing it. If they do it’s because they don’t want to offer it.

If they want to end the abuse they will simply toughen the verification procedure.

> They almost certainly won’t get rid of it because people are abusing it.

It always depends on the ratio (valid cases vs abusers), if the amount of the abusers gets too high, then the discount is not correctly fulfilling its purpose.

> If they want to end the abuse they will simply toughen the verification procedure.

It also depends on how expensive or difficult it is to maintain such verification procedure. At some point it is not justified anymore.

I just personally don't like the current attitude which seems to be going on. If you can "cheat" on getting the discount, people just keep finding reasons why they are justified to cheat. "They should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible".

It happens everywhere. People get praised on finding such cheats. Even in Universities, people are encouraged to cheat on getting better grades with less work. Oh, clever boy! He used different LLMs with with good context that made the output look like his own writing.

Not much different than saying "get a better lawyer", if you are getting punished for breaking the law. Opposite applies and that is why lawyers can be really expensive.

Or, not much different than big tech doing morally questionable things because the law is lagging behind. "Nobody is not enforcing the law, so it is perfectly okay. Worst case is that we need to pay some fines.".

It's not cheating if they intend for you to do it (but just can't explicitly say it's allowed because then everyone would do it and that would collapse their self-assortative price-discrimination strategy.)

> If you can "cheat" on getting the discount, people just keep finding reasons why they are justified to cheat. "They should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible".

You seem to misunderstand the argument. It's not "they should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible." The argument is that they would toughen the verification procedure if cheating were possible and they cared; which proves, at the very least, that they don't care (and potentially proves that they in fact want you to do it, at least sometimes.)

To be clear, this argument doesn't apply to bureaucracies — governmental, academic, or Enterprise — where there's so much red tape in the way of making changes that it's almost impossible to fix issues like this even if several people care quite a lot.

But this argument very much does apply to a relatively-agile, not-so-Enterprise-y-for-its-size corporation like Apple. In fact, it applies especially to Apple, who has an almost Disney-like obsession with micromanaging all customer interactions as an extended customer-lifecycle marketing opportunity. (For example: you'll never find a rotting out-of-date page on an Apple-owned website.)

Apple know exactly who they're giving this discount out to. They've almost assuredly sat down at least once and done a hand-analysis of one or more months' purchases, to determine the proportion of education-store purchases that are from genuine education customers. (Heck, they probably have gone far beyond this; far lazier corporations than Apple set up heuristics for this kind of "promotion fraud"; run continuous analyses on them; and spit out a weekly reports to mull over in marketing-KPIs progress meetings!)

If Apple's education store gives discounts to group XYZ, then you can assume that that's the intended outcome. At least under the Apple marketing department's current paradigm of thought.

> It's not cheating if they intend for you to do it

It feels like you are proving my point of people finding excuses to buy the Mac with educational discount, when they don't meet the requirements :)

The intend it clearly for educational setting. For students and teachers. You dishonor the intend if you still try to claim the discount. Whether you are punished or not.

I think you might be suffering from a categorical blindness to a certain type of thing humans do.

Let's say I own a private beach. I want to allow my beach to be enjoyed freely and responsibly by a reasonable number of people, whether friends or strangers. I don't want to constantly be cleaning up garbage on my beach. And I don't want the beach to be overcrowded when I myself use it.

So what do I do? Well, I'm sure not going to hire a bouncer to guard my beach. (How would I even tell them who's allowed in, anyway? Can you recognize "irresponsible people" on sight?)

No, instead, I will probably post a sign outside my beach, saying "NO TRESPASSING".

But I won't enforce it! And if anyone (e.g. my few direct friends who I invite to hang with me at my beach) asks, I'll tell them I won't enforce it! They can bring people to my beach if they like!

Access to the beach is now an open secret. It's something that people can freely tell those they trust about. The number of people visiting the beach will rise slowly over time. Maybe it'll eventually increase to be too much, or maybe churn in the population near the beach will keep a lid on it (mostly depends on how hard the beach is to access.)

If some tour company tries to drop off a whole busload of tourists at my beach, though, I will most certainly kick them out, pointing at the "NO TRESPASSING" sign. (Since I don't have a bouncer, probably what I would actually do is call the cops on them.)

The cops would ask me about the people already on the beach, of course. To which I would say:

> Those people on the beach right now? They're my "friends." No, I don't exactly know them... but I know people who know them! They're "on the guest list." But these people standing by the bus over here — these are not my friends. These are people brought here by a guy trying to profit off of providing others access to my beach, which I have not granted. They are not allowed in. Nobody brought here by this bus company will ever be allowed in.

This is every underground party ever. This is every travel destination for the rich. Open secrets, with guardians who actively lie by overstating the restrictions or conditions in place, to keep a lid on the spread of the secret.

And this is a thing companies do constantly.

• Every store discount code given out to some YouTuber to give to people who watch their thing? Open secret. (Consider: is it "legitimate" for a discount app like Honey to find and publish those audience-targeted codes? No, probably not; Honey would be acting like the tour-bus operator above. But would the online store mind if you personally found the code and used it, despite not being a member of that Youtuber's audience? No, they'd be happy to have your business. Would they even mind if you told three friends, and you all immediately bought something? No. In fact, they'd be overjoyed!)

• The unmentioned (and implied to the contrary!) never-ending-ness of the free trial period for WinRAR? Open secret. (If WinRAR never implied you had to buy it at some point, nobody would have ever bought it; they'd just consider it freeware. But you don't "have" to buy it. It goes on working forever. Some people feel guilty or pressured, and do buy it. Others eventually discover the bomb is a dud. This is WinRAR's intended business model.)

• The CPU binning lottery? Open secret. (Did you know you can keep RMAing retail-purchased CPUs until you get a really highly overclockable one? You do now! And people have been doing this for decades! CPU vendors don't care—in fact, they want these few super-enthusiasts to get their hands on their best CPUs, since they'll probably publish some really nice benchmarks with them. Free advertising! They certainly don't want a company doing this in bulk though. That'd be way more trouble than it's worth; and then what would they do with a huge pile of RMAed known-below-average-binned CPUs?)

• How easy Photoshop was to pirate in the pre-Creative-Cloud era? Open secret. (See my sibling post.)

You can exploit any/all of these if you know (and you're not in a situation legally preventing you from doing so — e.g. corporations can't pirate things.)

And some people know; but most people don't.

This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets. They don't want these secrets known by everyone. (If enough people do it, then it's no longer a marketing expense, but a hole in their business model.) But they don't want these secrets known by nobody, either.

The creators of any open secret, want some deserving people to take advantage of the open secret; otherwise they wouldn't have made it an open secret. (In almost all cases, you have to actually do extra work to make something an open secret. It's extra work to carefully design and manage the "virality coefficient" of an open secret so that it'll hit equilibrium, rather than spreading to fixation or dying out. The outbound word-of-mouth advertising required to get an underground party to happen, for example, is way more work than just putting up posters! It's almost always been easier to just have no secret at all!)

I hope you will agree with me that this dynamic exists in general.

If you do: what then leads believe that what Apple has here is a dumb unenforced mistake, rather than an open secret?

Great write-up!

> This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets.

Not necessarily. You know that biological evolution is blind, but thriving in a market environment doesn't require companies to know why what they are doing is successful.

So eg Photoshop (and Windows) used to be really easy to 'pirate' by individuals. And you can argue that this was good for Adobe (and Microsoft), because it's like an informal education discount: youngsters get used to the software at home and train themselves, so that later on it becomes the obvious choice for the office.

But for the mechanism to work, Adobe doesn't have to understand the mechanism. They could just not know at all about the pirating, or conclude that it's too much hassle to chase the pirates (but be completely unaware of the positive effects). Or on the contrary, they could over-estimate the positive effects of piracy etc.

Microsoft products are trivial to pirate thanks to Microsoft Activation Scripts [1] which is on GitHub. It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate.

[1]https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

I agree: I am sure that people at Microsoft are aware these days.

The first commit in the Microsoft Activation Scripts repository is from 2020. For Microsoft the dynamic I describe goes back all the way to the 1980s (and perhaps even earlier.)

Back in the 1970s and 1980s people at Microsoft might or might not have been aware. (I don't know for sure either way.) But it already worked in their favour.

My point is that the dynamic works whether or not anyone is aware of it.

> It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate.

Or it is one of the reasons why Microsoft is pushing hard to require cloud account for everything, including local Windows.

Having a cloud account is entirely disconnected from the activation state of Windows, and always will be. The activation state of Windows is a property of a Windows installation, because Windows installations — all the ones Microsoft cares about, at least — are managed (including license management!) by the IT departments of organizations; while Windows logins are managed by individual users.

Microsoft would be breaking their own business model in half if they forced each user to have a "Windows subscription" bound to their personal cloud account, instead of being able to just sign a $10MM/yr contract with Oracle or EY or whomever for a 100K-seat volume license.

Remember also that many large-scale deployments of Windows machines aren't of personal computers at all, but of:

1. workstations with non-cloud Active Directory-managed user accounts, with the accounts and data on the machine being backed up to corporate servers and thus the machine itself able to be drop-in replaced overnight without the user even noticing the change;

2. workstations with roaming user profiles configured, where many different people log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (think: computer labs, internet cafes, etc)

3. shared workstations where many employees log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (may overlap with 1) — think of the computers behind the desks at the customer-service wickets at a bank

4. machines with no logged-in users, only an AD administrator remote-managing them through domain privileges — think e.g. digital signage

If licensing status attaches to the logged-in user, then none of these use-cases work! And together, these use-cases form 80+% of how Microsoft makes money from Windows!

That is a great write up. But I think this proves even more my point that people do anything to make an excuse for cheating :)

I agree that there might be some open secrets. This particular case is not comparable. Simply, because it does not make sense. Apple is making a harware business. They are already are giving the discount for the correct use base where the discount is an actual investment

* Students that then might pick the same hardware in the future at work, company they found, etc.

* Teachers, who promote the same hardware for students

For others, why this would be open secret? The correct user base already gets the discount. There are no benefits to give discount for others as well, even in secret. It is just loss. These same people likely would by the hardware anyway. I bet that this price difference does not make them to not buy the product.

The story you are telling is not comparable in this case. The comparable comparison would include that you allow some random people into that beach well, that you don't trust. But because the count is so small, it does not matter.

However, people start posting about your beach in social media, or even in Hacker News. Friends of friends of friends tell about their friends too. Now the beach is crowded and all randoms are the all the time! What would you do? Get a bouncer or put "a real" Trespassing sign? And even your friends can't enjoy the beach anymore.

It is all about statistics and in what direction we let these things go.

> That is a great write up. But I think this proves even more my point that people do anything to make an excuse for cheating :)

You would have an argument (not a good argument) if I ever actually took advantage of the education discount. But I don't!

(I get all my Apple computers as business-lease equipment from my employer, within which I have arbitrary IT equipment purchasing authority. And then, once they've fully depreciated, I buy those computers from my employer for a trivial sum to become my personal computer(s), and also order new current-gen work computer(s). Is this "cheating?" No, Apple loves this — my employer is paying full price, and never gets any sort of discount. And my employer also loves this — they just want me to be productive, and paying a few thousand dollars to buy whatever arbitrary equipment I requisition every two years, is extremely cheap for how much my added productivity will make them over that period. Given the different things each party in this relationship values, this is a win-win-win.)

> For others, why this would be open secret? The correct user base already gets the discount. There are no benefits to give discount for others as well, even in secret.

As roughly seven other people have replied to you: price discrimination. The user base Apple would like to help out are "individual buyers who just barely cannot afford Apple products, with a $100 discount being enough of a difference to prevent them from falling out of the funnel."

Students tend to be central members of this group; but Apple, in practice, seems to actually want to help this group as a whole.

(And why wouldn't they? It's not like they're making a loss on education-discounted sales. They're making money and getting people into the Apple ecosystem, where they'll hopefully dive deeper once they have more money!)

But there's no way to openly offer "anyone who needs a $100 discount to be convinced to buy an Apple product" that $100 discount, without either:

• sounding like you're literally calling people poor (open "means-adjusted pricing"? It's been tried; people hate it! Only ever gets aired out as a TAM-expansion tactic in markets for extremely-inelastic-demand goods with zero competition, e.g. on-patent medications.)

• or leaving a loophole for rich people to find that results in Apple not being able to milk them.

And the one thing that goes against every strand of a luxury consumer product company's DNA, is the thought of letting a rich buyer with high willingness-to-pay get away with a low-margin purchase. In Apple's business, milking one rich customer can give you the net profit of dozens of low-margin customers. (Think: convincing some Mr. Moneybags who walks into an Apple Store thinking they want a Mac Mini, that what they really need is a fully-upgraded Mac Studio.)

> However, people start posting about your beach in social media, or even in Hacker News. Friends of friends of friends tell about their friends too. Now the beach is crowded and all randoms are the all the time! What would you do? Get a bouncer or put "a real" Trespassing sign? And even your friends can't enjoy the beach anymore.

How is this comparable? As other sibling replies state, the open secret of the Apple education discount has been widely dispersed for at least a decade now. It is at equilibrium — it clearly isn't spreading to the point that "the beach is overcrowded." Ask a random person off the street — heck, ask the average person on HN five minutes before this thread started — and they would not know that Apple offers an education discount but doesn't verify academic status.

You want to know what an open secret reaching fixation looks like? Picture it being discussed in "money-saving tips" listicle videos put out by popular [i.e. tens-of-millions-of-subs] vloggers. Not even tech vloggers, either — I'm talking gaming vloggers, art vloggers, beauty vloggers, etc.

Some open secrets do run away like this — and yes, this does cause their creators to pull the plug! The Apple Store education-discount open secret is not like this.

SheerID already exists and can differentiate between alumni and current students. Apple just needs to decide it's worth it (thus far, they haven't).

I've seen this FUD repeated for a long time. Hasn't happened yet. Probably the worst that will happen is they'll start requiring some type of verification again.

20 years ago I worked Apple retail and this was well known then.

Tbh, it's not that much compared to Apple sales.

In Switzerland (Europe?) we can easily get cheaper price, from official resellers, than the edu price. Apple store won't match.

You don't even need a .edu email address. I logged in with my regular Apple account and made a purchase on the education store expecting them to ask for that or some other verification, and they never did.

They claim the right to audit purchases through the edu store and charge you the difference if you don't qualify, but I've never read anyone online reporting they've been audited/charged.

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/browse/open/salespolicies/....

I can't confirm, but I had a Apple store employee tell me the same. And then I forgot to use it when I ordered my Mac Mini.

Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site.

Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price.

I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)

Since the first ARM systems (may be before) you can’t upgrade things on your own, i had an Air which can be SSD upgraded but not memory upgraded. Memory can only be upgraded from factory.

Unless you are dosdude on Youtube

"MacBook Air 16GB RAM Upgrade"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxbVxaScZQ4

You could just solder on a new ram set

The amount of people for whom this is a "just" kind of task is very very low. I don't think "just" should be in that sentence ;)

"just" at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRRNR4HyYaw

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631130

They have variations of the program in some European countries. It's been a long time for me, but in the UK they used to just whitelist university domains (we didn't use .edu TLDs either).

We use .ac.uk though (and much of the non-USA world uses .ac.ccTLD similarly) so no need to whitelist individual university domains. I don't know about Apple, but that's a common approach. (And does irritate some where they don't use either and get missed, Canada for example.)

Some countries place no restrictions on registering domains under their .ac second level domain though.

AFAIK, in most of the EU they validate you are a student or an academic through UNiDAYS.

> € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price.

"Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent [...] because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture."

- Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing (who apparently never heard of zram)

windows also uses memory compression

Yeah, that doesn't explain why the Intel Mac Pro cheesegrater wanted $3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM that OWC would sell from the same manufacturer, same speeds, for $1,000 for 192GB.

Sorry Bob, architecture may be different now, but Apple has always been egregious.

But what's the point in Borcher's comment? Because there's efficient software use of memory, it's legitimate to put a tenfold price marker on the hardware?

One thing that will potentially future-proof the new Mac Mini is that the SSD is on a removable board. It's a custom Apple design but someone's already hand made their own upgrade. Wouldn't be surprised if there will be 3rd party upgrades commercially available within a year.

€23 for 8 MB of RAM sounds a bit too expensive, to be honest.

I’m going to have to check this out, I no longer have access directly to my old college email, but it still forwards to my gmail over a decade later!

>which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable

Pay someone with an edu account to complete the purchase for you. Also, they are commonly available for community college students, including those taking free classes.

They use it because they have an inherent bias and want to put the Mac in a position to compare favorably.

Even Apple Store employees will freely give you the discount. Apple doesn't discount because they aren't a discount brand, but they will give you this discount if you ask.

A lot of people have a relative or something still in education, just buy it through them. It's not like this is government subsidy, just a promotion to increase sales and maybe hope to have long term customer by hooking them at younger age. Probably much less immoral than blocking ads on YouTube.

I think you are missing the point. The person who mentioned educational pricing was asking if there are any machines with comparable performance and silence for that little a price, and said that the educational price is €650.

Suppose I know of a non-Mac that has similar performance and silence for €1000 non-educational. To decide if that meets the requirement I'd need to either look up the non-educational price of the Mac to compare to €1000 or I'd need to look up the educational price of the €1000 machine (if it has one) to compare with €650.

They are more likely to get useful answers if they post the non-educational price so that people don't have to do extra work to figure out if they should respond.

Failing to block ads is immoral.

Failing to block ads is also bad security practice.

It seems viable that doing so increases the price for those of us who don't.

The typical .edu discount from Apple on largish purchases is about $100, regardless of whether that's a $600 final tag or a $2000 final tag. So, somewhere between 14% and 5%.

If Apple sells 50% of Macs to the .edu discount market, that's a difference to you of somewhere between 2.5% and 7%.

Or, you can accept that Apple's prices are not set by the market so much as by their marketing department.

I believe build-to-order upgrades are also discounted, so it may not be a fixed discount.

So is paying the full price and signalling to Apple "we can afford it just fine, don't sweat about cutting margins or lowering extra disk/RAM pricing", but I don't see you complaining about that :)

Why would that be?

Companies tend to focus on the overall % profit margin for a product. If a higher percentage of sales are for a discounted (edu) SKU with lower margins, they will tend to raise the price of the product to hit their desired profit margin.

e.g. If a company was selling a product at $1000, and wanted to offer a 20% discount for EDU that would be bought by 50% of the market, they would need to raise the price by about 10% to keep the same margin. If only 20% of the market bought the discounted SKU, they could keep the same margins with only a 5% (?) increase in price to the rest of the SKUs.

You are free to purchase as many Apple products as you want to offset any perceived revenue losses from promotional discounts. I'm not so sure why you would want to do this but I keep hearing that behavioral economics is a thing, maybe paying more is your definition of rationality.

It’s basic market economics. More discounted purchases tends to lead to an increase in the non discounted price. Of course, that’s baked in at outset. Apple knows x% of sales come with a edu discount so the non-edu price is offset to account for the edu discount. I don’t have any problem with a vendor doing that. It’s how they forecast a profit margin. Apple, apparently, has allowed “people who know someone in education to also claim an edu discount” to be part of their pricing model that ultimately leads to increased prices for those those do not know someone with an edu email.

It’s trivially easy to obtain the discount. Anyone working in education, or a student at any level, k-12, higher ed, graduates with access to uni email can get it. Apple doesn’t ask any questions or for verification.

They also go on sale at a similar price to the general public relatively frequently.

Take a pottery course at community college. Pay $65 in tuition, get your education discount, and um, relive the scene from Ghost? :)

We're all students of Internet University.

Shush ;)

But also a ton of people are absolutely in college, at any age, new people are coming to HN every day; I'd think HN is an easier place to discuss and explore vaguely tech/startup related topics than in school

Corporate perks brokers and Amazon also give 15% off.

But anyways, 15% is pretty much in the error fuzz range of "which platform do I like better" and "dominated by RAM upgrade price.

very few on HN pay full price for Mac products ;)

> Surely very few of us on HN are still in college?

What makes you think that? I'm back in school getting a MEng degree in my 30s.

I mean... surely that's not very common among HNers.

But a ton of us have a friend/kid/relative in HS or college ...

Educational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student.

So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.

Don't you usually need to verify somehow, like an .edu address?

I am actually currently a college student, but I can confirm that Apple did nothing to verify that this was the case when I bought mine.

That may be so in America, but in Germany I had to log in through my university‘s system in order to verify my student status.

Wow, really? Thanks for the tip.

Canada also does not verify, don't ask me how I know. However, where I live now (Spain) they do have some 3rd party service verifying edu status.

The cheating/fraudulence encouragement in this thread is disgusting. You guys are not stilling a pencil but several hundreds dollars. Paying a part of it or apple being fatty rich doesn’t make it more honest.

I don’t think I ever encounter here such collective encouragement to bypass a law (ok probably for jailbreak which is not a fraud). Not sure if the demography changes, societal culture change or just luck.

Edit: Oh and yeas I never completed college, don’t own a .edu and am maybe just subconsciously jealous.

>I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference.

Or when they only use it to make the Apple pricing seem more favorable and ignore it when it comes to PC pricing. Most PC manufacturers also have educational pricing, whether directly or through some portal provided by your institution. I know my son's college had a deal and also had a list of the tax free days in the state so that you could pre-order and then pay and pick up on the day the tax didn't apply.

> tax free days in the state

i'm sorry, tax free days?!? am i too european to understand this? does this apply to everything, like groceries, tech, flowers, wood etc., or just corporate transactions?

I can't say for all states but here in Massachusetts we have an annual tax free weekend where sales tax (6.25%) is not applied for "most retail items of up to $2,500, purchased in Massachusetts for personal use" (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-sales-tax-ho...).

Also groceries never have a sales tax in Massachusetts but, again, that varies by state.

> tax free weekend where sales tax (6.25%) is not applied

that's such a strange concept for me. i wonder what the historic reasoning there is for it, as it seems like one of those legacy things which were started to increase sales during difficult market times :D

> Also groceries never have a sales tax in Massachusetts

also interesting :) what i knew was that some or most states display the prices without tax, so you'll only know the total of your grocery trip at the checkout. never seen this here over the pond, prices always include taxes.

what's common is that different things are taxed differently. food and beverages have lower tax than non-essential things, except of course if the beverages contain alcohol, etc. yada yada blabla.

We don't have tax free weekends in Australia but fresh produce is also exempt from GST (our version of VAT). Anything that has had any "processing" done on it incurs GST though, so oranges are tax free but orange juice is not.

Education and Health are also exempt from GST.

>also interesting :) what i knew was that some or most states display the prices without tax, so you'll only know the total of your grocery trip at the checkout.

It comes up on /r/askamericans all the time, but it's not realistic to include tax on the prices because there are so many different taxing zones. A large city may have multiple. Most places you can figure it's going to be ~10% and might be pleasantly surprised when it's less. Everyone knows to figure roughly 10% extra, so it's not a chore or anything, even children figure it out.

And are they representation-free too?

Some places it's anything with sales tax, or maybe just goods in general if they already have low or no tax on food. Other places have it on specific goods that would be considered 'school supplies'. I think where my son is, it's a week or weekend where it's all sales tax is waived. Definitely not a corporate thing, it's to give parents and residents a break and to help stimulate the economy with spending.

It may be a local thing in Bay area, but usually there’s some way to get some discount when making a purchase with Apple - be it via education, or via a corporate discount (just show your badge from another company), or via a friend who works at Apple, or some big retailers start selling at good discount (eg Amazon easily gets 5-10% lower price over time).

Anecdotally, last week I visited a local Apple Store with my son who is in middle school. Without any prompting from us, the Apple rep asked my son if he is planning to go to college some day, and applied the college discount to our purchase without my son saying much…

If you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre:

> it's around €650, including VAT.

Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product.

A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about Apple prices here.

Similarly, VAT costs are between you and whatever jurisdiction you live in that’s levying them. Apple isn’t the one to thank or complain to about them.

Outside of North America, it would be bizarre to not include VAT. Anytime you see the € or £ symbol, you can assume it's VAT included.

I am outside of North America and have been for about 3/4 of my adult life.

The issue with adding VAT to prices on a forum with people living in a lot of different places is that VAT rates vary greatly from place to place.

To get an idea what an Apple product costs, it's more helpful to look at the price charged prior to taxes, tax deductions, educational discounts and other factors that will depend entirely on the specific cases of each reader.

Except for burgerland, EU prices include taxes and are pretty much same in all jurisdictions, especially for electronics.

It might be worth noting that outside North America, we all see and think about prices post-tax.

The fact tax was mentioned at all was likely for your benefit, with the knowledge there are a lot of North Americans here…

This is most likely because OP used Euros. In Europe, prices are listed including VAT. So in day to day life, you only see prices with VAT for your country included.

I would never compare prices without VAT.

What is the point of not including VAT? You still have to pay it. It is not like you move across the continent just to pay a few percents less.

You're saying this to someone who twice took a 24-hour train from Beijing to Hong Kong to buy an Apple computer for 27% less due to HK not having an additional electronics tax.

A lot of my friends in Taiwan used to buy macs in HK for the same reason.

Because when one configures it with reasonable 32GB RAM/2TB SSD and EU prices, it suddenly becomes £1800 and it's harder to convince anyone of its price superiority.

> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly.

That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too.

For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient.

The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but the cost of those upgrades are very hard to justify.

I'd also prefer to use the system for at least 5 years, and likely up to 10 years, if not longer. Even if 64 GB is tolerable now, I can easily see it becoming insufficient for my needs before then.

The lack of reasonably-priced internal storage, while easier to work around than the lack of sufficient and reasonably-priced RAM, doesn't help matters, too.

Even if future Studio models, for example, might allow for a more ideal amount of RAM, I have to expect that unjustifiable upgrade costs will likely still be an issue, and then there's the wait on top of that.

I can easily see myself and the others I've talked to settling for PCs, rather than making unjustifiably-expensive Mac purchases.

In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade.

I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine with louder components, but the upgrade will likely be half the cost of anything close from Apple since I can take my existing GPU, PSU and storage at the very least along with me.

And "upgrade costs" is highly misleading for most of the components. You are buying a different machine config that you can't change, up or down, later on. I get that most people don't want to bother opening up a PC to swap out components, but the easier they made it, the more people will do it, and Apple is running the other way.

Does your existing motherboard allow for more than 64GB ram? The 5950x itself supports up to 128GB: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x

Mine doesn't but yes I could move to a mATX or bigger board to unlock that extending its life. I tend to go for the 'smaller' ITX cases and boards, so currently have a x570-i setup maxing out at 64GB.

Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.

Compared to Linux that's flat not true. Someone has been blowing marketing up your ...

As a person who uses both, daily, its kinda true.

MacOS does seem to “use all the ram” but never falls over itself.

I think the kernel is likely genuinely better in low memory conditions (its hard to be worse than Linux here to be honest) - and thats combined with being aggressive about using as much of the ram as there is available opportunistically. (not fully unloading applications when closing them for example).

“WindowServer” uses 2-3G of ram, and electron apps use lots too; but truthfully my macbook is able to sustain significantly more open programs than my linux laptop, despite my linux laptop actually having more memory. (32G vs 24G for the Mac).

I cant explain it and I am genuinely curious how this is the case, but at least anecdotally, parent is more correct than not.

You can also compress memory on Linux with zswap or zram.

For storage at least, you can pop your existing nvme drive into a thunderbolt enclosure and use it on a mac mini. Over TB4, it should run at the drive's full speed (so long as you get a decent enclosure).

It won't help the RAM situation, but storage at least is upgradable like that.

Be careful to check the support for larger ram on the motherboard as well as cpu - I’ve got an am5 setup with 128gb of ram but the it had to be down locked to even post.

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

With what kind of workload? If you need 32GB of RAM then the computer that actually has that much RAM should be almost guaranteed to be quicker.

Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.

So probably nothing that actually needs more than 16GB of RAM then. And realistically comparing M1 to an i7 several years older than it.

Having more RAM doesn't increase memory bandwidth and having more memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean better performance. You aren't even able to make use of all of the bandwidth your M1 is capable of in the real world [1].

Apple Silicon has good perf/watt but the gap probably isn't as big as you're thinking.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

When did I say having more RAM increased memory bandwidth? Are you having a separate conversation with yourself right now? I feel like you might have misinterpreted what I originally said and just ran with it.

There is a lot of misleading information about Apple's unified memory out there so I mentioned it just to be clear.

I have a M2 pro with 32G and I hit memory limits just from web browsing.

I just struggle to believe this. What OS is the Thinkpad running and did you put everything there (i.e., no corporate crud?).

I run Ubuntu on my Thinkpad - I generally notice the biggest difference with video editing, but really multitasking anything is night and day because of the memory bandwidth. I use the same software on both machines for video editing, Davinci Resolve.

Not sure what you mean by 'efficient', they are faster for sure (amazing memory bandwidth thanks to on chip memory), but to my knowledge they would be the same for amount of data stored. So that same think pad will likely be faster at tasks that need 24GB for example, highly depend on the use case as always.

Memory requirements for general-purpose desktop usage usually don't come down to a single task with a large working set that needs to fit in RAM in its entirety. It's more often a matter of the aggregate memory usage of many tasks, which means that in practice there's a wide gray area where the OS can make a difference, depending on the effectiveness of its memory compression, swap, signalling memory pressure to applications, suspending background tasks or simply having fewer of them in the first place.

Good points well made, macOS likely is more 'memory efficient' in that regards.

Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here.

much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7?

Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you were measuring, the methodology you were using, and what the exact result is. Otherwise your words have no meaning.

Repeating what I just commented elsewhere, but Mac uses several advanced memory management features: apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks, it will compress memory instead of paging out, better memory allocation, less fragmentation.

Bandwidth for copying things into memory is also vastly faster than what you get on Intel/AMD, for example on the Max chips you get 800GB/s which is the rough equivalent of 16 channels of DDR5-6400, something simply not available in consumer hardware. You can get 8 channels with AMD Epyc, but the motherboard for that alone will cost more than a Mac mini.

Sharing read-only/executable memory and compressed memory are also done on Windows 10+ and modern Linux distributions. No idea what "better memory allocation" and "less fragmentation" are.

800GB/s is a theoretical maximum but you wouldn't be able to use all of it from the CPU or even the GPU.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

>apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks

How is that different from plain shared libraries?

System design and stability. On MacOS a lot is shared between applications compared to the average Linux app. Dynamic linking has fallen out of favor in Linux recently [1], and the fragmentation in the ecosystem means apps have to deal with different GUI libraries, system lib versions etc, whereas on Mac you can safely target a minimum OS version when using system frameworks. Apps will also rarely use third party replacements as the provides libraries cover everything [2], from audio to image manipulation and ML.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whs8QZf3YnifdLv57+FhBi5_W...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...

People who need 64GB+ RAM are not running 1000 instances of native Apple apps. They run docker, VMs, they run AI models, compile huge projects, they run demanding graphics applications or IntelliJ on huge projects. Rich system libraries are irrelevant in these cases.

This thread started as question on how MacOS is more efficient, not the usefulness of more RAM. In any case, you might still benefit from the substantial increase in bandwidth and lower system / built-in apps memory usage, plus memory compression, making 16GB on Mac more useful than it seems.

I can run apps with 4 distinct toolkits on Linux and memory usage will barely go past the memory usage of opening one Facebook or Instagram tab in a browser. Compared to compiling a single semi-large source file with -fsanitize=addresses which can cause one single instance of GCC or Clang to easily go past 5G of memory usage no matter the operating system...

I'm talking about memory bandwidth - maybe your workloads don't take advantage of that but most do and that's why apple designed their new chips to take advantage of it.

Bandwidth doesn't replace size, these are orthogonal parameters.

I never said it did.

So why are you commenting in a thread about size?

Nix works well on mac, very similar to Nix/Linux for the most part. There are some missing packages, but the common ones tend to be fine. Its worth using the Determinate Systems installer to avoid reinstalling Nix on every macOS update though.

Nix-darwin is good, and I use it, but it is nowhere close to NixOS. I think there are some options I've set through it that macOS keeps overriding, so the declarative configuration drifts from the real one eventually

I think the only real issue with Nix on macOS is that Nix can eat through storage quite quickly, and storage upgrades are pretty expensive on Macs. This might push the balance back to an fanless ryzen build

> I think the only real issue with Nix on macOS is that Nix can eat through storage quite quickly, and storage upgrades are pretty expensive on Macs. This might push the balance back to an fanless ryzen build

Only if you want to be able to roll back multiple versions. Otherwise, I think it is fine.

Indeed I've been liberally using nix-collect-garbage -d after every darwin-rebuild switch without issues for years.

> Its worth using the Determinate Systems installer to avoid reinstalling Nix on every macOS update though.

I've had Nix installed from the traditional installer since the very first M1 and never had to reinstall nixpkgs across OS updates.

I guess some people have been addressing the clobbering of /etc/bashrc with full reinstalls?

A comparable option in my opinion would be Minisforum 790S7. They also have a separate mini-ITX motherboard from that one if you want to DIY.

The CPU in it is faster in raw multi-thread performance, single-threaded it's a bit slower, but still quite impressive.

The only problem I had with Minisforum is that they couldn't supply the exact hardware I ordered and their suggested solution was either to wait for 1+ month or get a sligtly different configuration. Two times out of two.

Quality-wise they're pretty good though, no complaints there.

I can't find a Minisforum 790S7 for anywhere near the price of the base model mac mini. I am seeing $459.00 USD and that is "BAREBONE (NO OS/RAM/SSD)" [1]. I am comparing this to the M4 Mac Mini base model, that does indeed come with an OS, RAM, and an SSD[2] at $499 USD.

[1] https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-mini-itx-pc...

[2] https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-...

Welp. You're definitely correct. But that's the only machine in my opinion that comes close (and offers some advantage like a whole PCIe 5.0 x16 slot). There are other mini PCs that are cheaper, some other commenter suggested Beelinks which are also quite popular among enthusiasts, SER8 for example: Ryzen 8745HS, 24 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD for 467 Euro. Seems competitive enough.

Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [1] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmware but there's always the possibility of it crippling the device which would be a big time-loss more than anything.

Other flavors of malware are easily removed with a quick Windows reinstall before use but potential firmware infections are a good reason to pay more for mainstream PCs.

[1] https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um760-slim

That's a valid concern but I personally avoid going into this rabbit hole just for the sake of my (already fragile) sanity.

Speaking of issues, the other one with these low cost mini PCs is low-quality SSDs. The one that my UN100D was supplied with was pure garboleum in terms of speed so it had to be replaced.

I've recently bought two minisforum PCs on Amazon. I fully expected the SSD to be garbage and to throw them out. To my surprise, they were decent-ish Kingston TLC PCIE 4.0 SSDs. Definitely not the cheapest SSD on the market.

The Minisforum needs an external power brick which probably almosts doubles the size.

The Mac Mini does not need any external power adapter which is quite amazing.

Beelink EQR6 has an internal PSU and is also quite small, a bit smaller in footprint actually. It even comes with two full-size m.2 slots and expandable RAM.

Mini is great, exceptionally so, I actually just got a rather souped-up one (that's the reason I'm in this thread) but x86 vendors are catching up and there's a certain possibility that more established brands will pick up.

An external power adapter means a DC power input, which can be upgraded with a LiIon battery. It’s more expensive to do for AC.

That’s a very nice upgrade in many places, and for many scenarios. A power brick, meanwhile, is easy to hide out of sight.

For the base model, but any upgrade on the Mac will kill that advantage instantly. For those keen enough to solder better parts on it the Mac Mini base model is the worst kind of barebone, filled with components that shouldn't even be produced anymore.

> components that shouldn't even be produced anymore

That's kinda harsh. For what it's worth, the base model isn't that bad and the storage can be (theoretically) upgraded down the road, even though it might cost a fair bit more than a standard m.2 SSD.

Sure, in raw compute it's slower than competition, but objectively it's still plenty fast and more trustworthy in terms of reliability.

That's a good suggestion. How are the cooling systems supplied with Minisforum in terms of noise and efficiency?

I can only speak of experience with their UN100D mini PC which I use as a home server in a fairly constrained closet. Not a hot machine by any means, far from that, but the cooling seems pretty decent even for this low power CPU.

BD790i that I just received (didn't even install anywhere) has a rather substantial heatsink over the CPU similar to high wattage GPUs. The chip itself is rated at 55W TDP so it shouldn't be that much of a problem cooling it. The motherboard doesn't come with a fan and I'm definitely not going to spend extra on high-end ones at least just yet.

I don't know anything about the thermals of 790S7's case though. It looks like they gave it at least some thought judging by the duct over the CPU, but how it actually performs I have no idea.

The configuration being tested by OP is a $1499 model.

In Germany you can get the cheapest (base version, 16GB RAM/256GB SSD) M4 Mini for 579€ via Unidays edu discount (also including VAT).

I picked mine up from the post office yesterday, it's 50% faster in Geekbench single/multi-core CPU benchmarks than my M1 Pro Macbook Pro and about as fast in GPU performance. Impressive.

After experiencing NixOS it's hard to settle for anything less. Nix is only good for running home-manager; nix-darwin is mostly a joke (I don't mean disrespect, I appreciate the work devs are doing, but limitations of the platform cripple the entire experience).

FWIW, Mitchell Hashimoto runs NixOS VM on his Mac for development. And that's the option I'm gonna implement once I get my MBP from repairs.

I use nix-darwin on an M2 as a daily driver. It works great! A few quirks you need to go with Brew (mostly graphical applications), but my setup is almost identical between my NixOS and my nix-darwin setups other than that (and some OS toggles).

Nix support on Darwin is really good in my experience. Though it does happen that some packages are not supported.

Next to that I run a NixOS VM on https://getutm.app/ using Virtualization Framework. Performance is great.

You're one setting away `virtualisation.rosetta.enable = true;` to also use that VM for x86_64 packages and builds.

I have a WIP PR for Rosetta AOT caching on NixOS as well: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/330829

How is the graphics/desktop performance in VMs, do you get accelerated graphics with NixOS?

Beelink has dropped the price for a roughly comparable unit with an Intel Core Ultra from 800 US Dollars to $700.

https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-sei14-ultra5-125h

This is the best answer.

The Beelink (and other mini-PC brands) offer comparable performance.

The fact they offer lots of different configurations lets you choose your own trade-offs.

Assuming you don't have an operating system preference, the base model Mac Mini is tough to beat outright, but as you upgrade it there are other options that get interesting.

> The Beelink (and other mini-PC brands) offer comparable performance.

[0] has the new (base!) M4 at 3859 (single) and 14837 (multi) whilst [1] has the Ultra 5 125H 4500 at ~2200 (single) and ~11500 (multi). "comparable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/11/review-the-fastest-of-...

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=Ultra+5+125H

> new (base!) M4 at 3859 (single) and 14837 (multi)

I think that's the M4 in the base iMac (8 core), which is different (and less powerful!) than the M4 in the base Mac Mini (10 core).

The Beelink is 32Gb RAM + 1TB storage though.

Like I said: the base Mac Mini is tough to beat!

A performance test between a Beelink flagship mini PC that was around $1000 and the Mac Mini was recently posted:

> M4 Mac Mini vs Intel and AMD Flagships – It's Not Even Close

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uuu046EE28

There are even cheaper mini PCs you can buy that offer great bang for the buck for home users who just want to do web browsing and run Office, but the performance isn't at the same level, even if you spend a lot more.

Beelink are awesome little machines!

Daily nix user across Mac and Linux, though I use Mac for actual development. No problems here moving between the two with my dev env defined on GitHub [0]

[0]: https://github.com/edude03/dotfiles

How do you handle the different keyboard layouts (cmd and ctrl on Mac, ctrl and superkey on Linux)?

I'm using a Mac at work and Linux at home with a programmable keyboard but I didn't find a solution to "merge" cmd and ctrl on Mac, so I still need to use both on Mac (not a big drama, but slightly annoying).

My half solution is to use a keyboard that physically feels quite different to help my brain use a different mode. The Linux keyboard is a big heavy mechanical keyboard while on the macbook I just use the built-in keyboard.

It's not a perfect solution and I still make mistakes, but it helps.

While I suspect it is silent for most tasks, the M4 mini isn’t fanless.

For my music studio I’ve enjoyed the M1 mini since it is totally silent and am eager to read some noise tests on the new M4 mini.

Maybe for a little server or something, but with the hard to upgrade 256GB storage.. I don't get the appeal. Also 16GB of memory is extremely limited these days. Again, perfect for a little server, but not for a daily driver.

It's a desktop computer. What's keeping you from using an external SSD?

For large media, sure, but I really don't to pay a premium to then need to manage where my everyday apps are installed cause I only have 256GB of storage I can't upgrade.

For someone who wants to develop and build apple ecosystem apps or cross-platform an existing game this is a steal.

The storage is easily upgradable on the new Mac mini as it’s using a standard M2 SSD (a short version)

https://youtu.be/cJPXLE9uPr8

The video is desoldering chips, getting new compatible ones and soldering them back (exactly like Mac Studio).

I wouldnt call that easy. Most people would call that the exact opposite.

Except you have to use proprietary SSDs otherwise soldering is involved. 1/10

There was a comparison mentioned on last week’s episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, I don’t remember if it was pointed out to them or they noticed it themselves.

Base Mac mini: $599, 16/256 GB

Double storage and ram: $600 upgrade.

Price of 32/512 config: $1199

Two 16/256 machines: $1198.

The ram is (Apple) reasonable at $200, but $400 for the storage doubling is insane.

While I am sure there are performance differences, I picked up 128GB of DDR4 a few months ago for ~$200. That is some wild margin.

The differences actually are quite huge. As far as I know, the M series chips all use LPDDR5 RAM, which is indeed more expensive than the DIMM/SO-DIMM modules you would add to your diy build.

Still, you can easily get a good kit of DDR5 DIMMs for 110€/32GB from a retailer. So while LPDDR5 RAM is more expensive, it is most certainly not expensive enough to justify a 230€/8GB price as being driven by BOM costs

Also, the 256 uses 2x128 drives while the 512 uses a single drive, so you even get slightly slower storage with the upgrade. The base model is a great deal.

Do you have a source on that? It's not what I've read elsewhere, but I'm having trouble finding anything specific.

I had to look it up, and I had gotten that slightly wrong. The 256 did switch to 2x128 NAND while the previous model used 1x256, but the 512 is also multiple. https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/08/m4-mac-mini-modular-sto...

This is true for the Mac Studio but not for the M4 Mac Mini -- they all have a single storage slot and the only difference between the 256 and 512 models is the model of the NAND chips.

You're right thanks. The change was to 2x128 NAND for the 256 drive from the previous generation, not 2xSSD.

I think you have it the wrong way round? Ram is 400 (200/8GB) storage is 200

Oh do I? Well somehow that seems more insane to me.

NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT, with no RAM or storage. For the other 250 EUR, surely you can get more RAM than 16 GB and more storage than 256 GB.

I use a NUC as a daily driver. The problem with NUCs is that cooling is suboptimal, the fan is small and thus noisy. It can be fixed with a third-party case, but that's at least €60-100 more for a much slower machine. Plus, you may void the guarantee by transplanting the motherboard.

I have i7 NUC13 mounted on a back of monitor and I can barely hear it. It's not that bad, previously (NUC7-era) it was much worse.

They're usually the same 30 - 50 watt processors used in x86 laptops, once we got past the "dual-core" ceiling they became extremely capable.

It’s a shame that ASUS cancelled the NUC Extreme line. I know it’s quite a bit bigger than other NUCs. But the 13 Extreme had expandability, good cooling, and fast CPU options.

RAM is completely fair.

Apple is certainly out of their mind on storage. But on a desktop it’s trivial to plug-in an external disc that you can buy at an absolutely reasonable price instead of the insane Apple one.

$200 bucks for 8GB RAM extra is not fair ($200 to go to 24GB, another $200 for 32GB). 64GB DDR5 kits can be had for less than $200.

And while you can plug in storage, I think it does kind of ruin the appeal of having such a small device by having a bunch of spaghetti cables. And if the boot drive goes it's not easily replaceable and makes the machine a brick until it is.

> NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT

4 cores instead of 10 cores, 69W TDP instead of 22W, UHD Graphics 730 versus Apple's 10 core GPU (0.5 TFLOPs vs about 4.3), 23% worse single core performance, 45% worse multicore, and much louder cooling.

It's not a fair comparison.

So get a stronger one. There will be always something that is better on one or another side.

I have 13th gen i7, with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB ssd (and 2.5 GbE). It was 800 EUR + VAT, last year. How much would similar Mac Mini cost?

Not a fair comparison either.

Edit: 69W for the NUC is not TDP. It is 69W power brick that ships with the machine.

what do you get in https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0 ? - m4 mini is 45 it seems.

16.6 in Firefox, 19.8 in Chrome (Ubuntu 24.04, both browsers in flatpak).

A few more datapoints, of course completely unscientific, because why not:

                         | Firefox | Chrome | Safari |  Edge
    =====================|=========|========|========|=======
    Intel 1360P (Ubuntu) |  16.6   |  19.8  |  n/a   |  n/a
    Apple M1 (MacOS)     |  24.6.  |  26.3  |  28.5  |  28
    AMD 2920X (Fedora)   |  12.3   |  11.9  |  n/a   |  n/a
    AMD 2920X (Windows)  |  12.2   |  n/a   |  n/a   |  14.9

How noisy is it?

I made a fanless NUC 7 (!) years ago with a special case, and it's perhaps due for replacement.

Still can be heard, but it is not so annoying as it was. The fan noise is, how to describe it, softer?

Comparing nuc7i7dnke to nuc13anki7.

It's almost half the price.

Just put Asahi on there, or any linux you like. I'm sure the support will be there soon if it's not already.

Asahi Linux doesn’t currently support M4 but it’s planned for next year.

> or any Linux you like

That's not a thing. Apple silicon doesn't use EFI so you need a completely custom ROM to satisfy the boot process, hence Asahi. And Asahi doesn't support M4 and likely won't for a while.

ARM64 support for GUI apps (via flatpak in the Fedora Asahi Remix) is also pretty poor, though your standard fair of CLI apps are present.

It is a thing. Sure, it's not easy. You can't just download the Debian build for M1, but it can be built.

M4 support will come.

At this point maybe the main benefit of an x86 machine is it has a spot to plug in an Nvidia GPU :-)

That and Linux support is better, if you need it.

And you can pick up a used one for less than 1/10 the cost of a Mac Mini and it will be perfectly adequate for most people.

I appreciate the technical achievement of the M4 Mac Mini for what it is, but an old x86 machine is more than adequate for my home or even work needs.

I can at least attest to linux nix on arm working pretty well as I use NixOS asahi linux. Unfortunately M4 support is not there yet.

Asahi M4 support and 3rd-party SSD upgrades[1] will result in me buying an M4 Mini. Glad to hear that Nix works well on Asahi!

[1] https://wccftech.com/m4-mac-mini-ssd-already-modded-to-2tb-s...

> Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver?

Not positive ones, even on x86 Darwin. Homebrew feels a lot more stable, which is a decidedly concerning thing for the average Nix enjoyer.

What kind of issues are you having?

Well, missing packages for one. Nix prides itself on having one of the most compete package catalogs of any Linux package manager, and on Mac it leaves quite a bit to be desired. A lot of functionality has to be hooked in via home-manager scripts that are a lot less stable than NixOS modules, and since your system isn't built/upgraded by Nix you can't write overlays for a lot of Mac software. If you only need the versioned Flake management then it might be an okay option, but I found myself pretty frustrated by it in places that aren't an issue on Linux. I can't comfortably use it as a Homebrew replacement.

Also, my Mac is 256gb which feels far too cramped for Nix. I'd really only recommend it if you're working with 512gb or more.

Yeah, I eventually realized that nix-darwin is only good for managing the list of homebrew casks.

home-manager works better than I'd expect. At least I don't have to spend time configuring vim, git and shell prompt.

But overall, Nix on MacOS feels like a hack, behaves like a hack... because it's essentially a hack...

I'm waiting for the first reports of Lenovo's t14s gen 6 with Snapdragon X Elite.

> Yeah, I eventually realized that nix-darwin is only good for managing the list of homebrew casks.

If that's really all you use it for, and you already use Home Manager, the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin works fine in Home Manager with some small tweaks. I use that with a custom, per-user Homebrew prefix to keep Homebrew out of the way except for the task of installing casks.

well asahi is going to bring M4 support eventually and there is https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon

also you could just Containerize All The Things on macos idk

Ya like i get the love for linux, but seriously give MacOSX a try for a while, its pretty damn good lol

macOS simply doesn't work if I want to run this as a home server, which is my primary use case for an Apple silicon Mac. Most server applications are first class citizens on Linux, like Docker and Kubernetes and caddy/nginx (I know ports exist but there's more documentation and experience on Linux). Furthermore, systemd is a lot more documented than launchd and generally speaking it's easier to do things like upgrading headless, setting up NFS, and the like. I wish Apple offered these machines with official Linux support, but that's antithetical to their philosophy.

For most developer things it's slightly worse, so to have to pay extra for it is a bit silly.

There's no container support on macOS unfortunately, except for the frontends for linux virtual machines.

(Well they do have a thing called containers, but it's a desktop app security/sandboxing feature that does something conceptually different)

There's an extremely experimental/feature limited 3rd party implementation of macOS native containers. It requires disabling all sorts of security features, though.

I've been using Nix on macOS for almost a year. The good (and bad) thing about Nix is that it supports many different use cases, so you have to spend some time understanding the options before you can even figure out which flavor to install.

A good way to get started is to start using Nix to replace/supplement Homebrew. You can install Nix in addition to Homebrew and have some packages installed by one and some by the other. You can uninstall a Homebrew package and then reinstall it with Nix. You can even remove it with Nix and go back to Homebrew if you like.

I would generally recommend the following:

1. Use the Determinate Systems Nix installer, see https://zero-to-nix.com/start/install

2. Use "Flakes" (unfortunately the core documentation isn't updated for flakes)

3. Use "Home Manger" -- I would recommend the Flakes-based "Standalone setup": https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec...

I would wait on nix-darwin until you are sure you need/want it. (I have recently started using it for its support of the `linux-builder` feature, but not everyone needs that.)

As a software developer who uses macOS to develop for Linux, it is a great tool and I cautiously recommend it to those who are willing to deal with some learning curve and frustration.

I haven't yet used nix-darwin enough to make a recommendation one way or another. (But the `linux-builder` feature is compelling if you need it: https://nixcademy.com/posts/macos-linux-builder/)

There is a linux for apple silicon called ashani linux.

Pretty sure only M1/M2 supported, so none Apple's new offerings will fly...yet.

Shame, I'd love to use Linux on Apple's latest and greatest MacBooks, but will stay with tried and true Dell Precision series until the year of the Linux Apple laptop becomes a reality.

650$-€ for 16GB and 256GB? No. Hell no.

> One can potentially use Nix on a Mac Mini to keep similar development environments to those used in Linux, but AFAIK some packages are not supported on ARM. Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver?

Been using that ever since M1 became a thing; nothing worth mentioning, "not supported" is vanishingly rare in practice.

Seconding this.

Made the switch back to MacOS with the M series after being on x86 and NixOS prior.

The experience was refreshingly tepid.

>One can potentially use Nix on a Mac Mini to keep similar development environments to those used in Linux, but AFAIK some packages are not supported on ARM. Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver?

Would this run anything Docker/ARM?

My entire home server setup is Linux/Dockerized and the Mac Mini hardware looks so good, but the more I read about MacOS as a server OS the worse it seems to get.