Comment by haiku2077

6 months ago

Also, there are some really amazing deals on used/refurb M2 Macs out there. ~$700 for a Macbook Air is a pretty great value, if you can live with 16GB of RAM and a okay but not amazing screen.

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haiku2077

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paxys  6 months ago

$450 for a M4 Mac mini (at Microcenter, but Best Buy will price match) is possibly the best computer hardware deal out there. It is an incredible machine.

  • xp84  6 months ago

    Having run a Mac Mini with a 256GB internal drive for 2-3 years I will dispute that anyone should buy base models for that reason. MacOS makes it as painful as possible for you to use external drives. For instance, no software for "cloud" drives (google drive, onedrive, icloud drive) is allowed to locate its local copy on an "External" drive, so you can't keep your files locally and in the cloud, have to pick one. Photos can have its library moved at least.

    I like the hardware, hate the absurd greedy storage and RAM prices.

    • samtheprogram  6 months ago

      > For instance, no software for "cloud" drives (google drive, onedrive, icloud drive) is allowed to locate its local copy on an "External" drive

      Source? Is this self-imposed, or what does “allowed” mean?

      Even if true, technical people can work around this by either spoofing a non-external drive or using `ln`, no?

      3 replies →

    • paxys  6 months ago

      AI FOMO at least made them bump the base RAM to 16GB. 256GB is pitiful but manageable if you don't need to handle large files. And jumping up to $800 just for another 256GB is absolutely not worth it.

      1 reply →

xp84  6 months ago

Indeed. I just grabbed a mint M3 MBA on ebay for about $950 with a 1TB ssd (which tbh was my main need to upgrade this family member in the first place, as they weren't CPU-bound on the old M1). Wild deals to be had!