Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.
Where do you buy your Mac Minis?
Before the personal LLM craze you could easily get $400 Mac Minis from Apple's certified refurbished store. I bought two M2 Pros for that price and turned them into Asahi Linux CI machines.
In Europe, but I didn't realize the 499 one is also history. Even worse :/
At a store, some stores do have stock. Otherwise apple.com
Cheapest mac mini I could spec out on the apple store right now is about $750, which if you consider how much more capable its M4 processor is than the pi, is a pretty good deal tbh.
because Apple goes in and buys out entire production cycles based on anticipated demand. Most infamously they got a year worth of TSMCs last new node - no one else could have it.
Usually, that gamble pays off, sometimes it does not (cough Apple Vision), and in some cases they get so many QC rejects that they can make an entire new product line on (financially) worthless scrap, that's how the MacBook Neo came to be - a bunch of iPhone SoC's that failed binning, I think in GPU cores.