I could not care less what the case is made out of. I guess some people are incredibly image conscious. USB 3.1g2 is basically free these days, and I have no need at all for thunderbolt, which you're paying almost $100 for*. And I don't need a windows license, so there's another $100. If you need a cute case, thunderbolt, and the warm fuzzy feeling that you paid for an OS so someone has to answer the phone and listen to you complain (but not actually fix anything) then this is the system for you. If you don't need those things, why would you be looking at the mac mini in the first place? Bottom line: drop the thunderbolt, windows, and the cute case, and you're down to about $530 if you buy now, less if you wait for sales.
The real point is that if you're stuck buying a mac you get what apple feels like selling you. If you don't care if you have a mac, you can decide what you want to spend money on and what you want to drop. This is nothing new.
* USB 3.1, no thunderbolt, $99:
ASRock H370M-ITX/ac LGA 1151 (300 Series) Intel H370 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com
Once again, this is not about "image" or being a part of the hipster millenial cortado pourover sipping crowd.
As the original starter post would've said it, if you need it for a living (you dev MacOS or support MacOS devs, use Ableton Live but hate hauling an iMac to music gigs, or need it as a cheap(er) machine for Adobe CC on MacOS versus the 21" iMac), or if you got it at a discount (corporate buy, buy with a hardware trade, using up some corporate credit card reward points), you will buy it new. If you didn't, chances are, you might see it on eBay in 2-3 years at a discount. Is it worth it then?
So let's see how the value prop measures out in the past few MacMini models -
The 2014 Haswell machine is a terrible value - dualcore Haswell, soldered RAM, and overpriced. For the same money buy a MacBook Pro 13” instead.
The 2012 MacMini / MacMini server are a decent enough value - Ivy Bridge dual/quadcore, a 16GB RAM ceiling, still a little overpriced, but you might see data center seconds coming up on eBay soon. It's supported by Mojave/Catalina.
The 2011 (Sandy i5/i7) is an okay enough value (even if you cannot get Mojave to work on it officially, and it’s a bit long on the tooth), it's something cheap and hackable, will run ESXi 6.x and/or do Linux just fine.
The 2010 and older are just really not good for much. The old PowerPC G4 MacMinis are decent Retro gaming/AmigaOS machines.
As for the 2018 Mac Mini? The verdict looks like this:
- In all cases, the PCIe SSDs are soldered in place, so either go 128 GB and use the USB-C/TB3 ports to drive external storage later, or get at least 512GB, but that'll be very expensive compared to NVMe M.2.
- The RAM is replaceable, but swapping RAM is about as painful as swapping HDDs on the 2010+ machines (open it up, pull the internal radio stuff out, take out the fan, insert a tool and pull the main board out of the unibody chassis/cavity, and then remove the shield around the DDR4 notebook RAM, not hard but not for the faint hearted either) - DDR4 is also expensive until at least 2020.
- On the Core i3 (cheapest) version, it's thermally constrained (it doesn't bench well against the 21" iMac unless you replace Apple's poorly formulated thermal heatsink compound, in which case you'll see much less throttling). The i5/i7 also sees some throttling issues, just not as severe.
- On the i3 model the Apple tax is around 12% compared to an equivalent NUC, and on the i5/i7 with more SSD capacity, it can reach 50% or more. AppleCare+ is also a joke compared to the Cadillac plans provided by "corporate NUC" makers.
- It doesn't offer much internal expandability (no PCIe, no M.2 slot), so anything you attach to it to improve it (USB-C or TB3 enclosure) will have its own steep price-tag, but then, NUCs only do M.2 and RAM in most cases. Dear PC master race, can someone please put out more NUC-like, volume produced (read: not custom) chassis with at least 1 or 2 PCIe x16 slots?
Right now, I wouldn't recommend buying one on your own tab, but in a few years when pricing goes down, it "could" be intriguing. Of course, that is assuming that someone didn't push out embedded Ryzen/Ryzen2 boxes that can compete against the NUCs by then...
