Comment by AdmiralAsshat
17 hours ago
Mac Mini's were really nice HTPC candidates, too, before the AI boom. Like all things genuinely useful and affordable, they were snatched from the hands of normal consumers by a bunch of schmucks chasing the latest gold rush.
Isn’t a Mac mini annoying to use as an HTPC? You have to deal with a remote, software, and a full OS, compared with an Apple TV, which has a good remote and is optimized for TV use.
Isn’t a Mac mini annoying to use as an HTPC? You have to deal with a remote, software, and a full OS, compared with an Apple TV, which has a good remote and is optimized for TV use.
I've been using one for about a decade as a media server.
It just sits in the cabinet happily running the macOS TV program with the video files on an external hard drive. Playback on the TV is handled by the AppleTV's built-in Computer app. Works beautifully.
I have more movies and TV shows on that box than I could watch in my lifetime — a combination of ripped DVDs (Netflix, public library, and purchased) and OTA recordings.
When the cable goes out in my neighborhood (frequently), or a big storm screws up satellite reception (seasonally), I just don't care because I'm all localhost. As long as the lights stay on, everything is fine.
No ads. No privacy violation. No fees. No bandwidth congestion. No buffering. No subscription rate increases. All I pay for is electricity.
Our Blessed Homeland / Their Barbarous Wastes
I need a new little Mac for my music studio, currently an M2 MacBook Pro. I thought I'd be fun to experiment with some local models as well. Well, let's price up an M5 Pro. $3,019 with 64GB RAM and a 1TB HD. Three thousand American dollars for a Mac Mini. Beefy spec for sure but not comically so.
Frankly even the entry price is a bit high - I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.
Kinda sad that in 2026 1TB and 62GB of RAM is considered "beefy". We had 1TB iPhones for 5 years.
The only reason for this huge speedbump is that chip makers have been dragging their feet for the last 10 years with "just enough" memory.
How long have we had 15-core iPhones with 64 GB RAM and active cooling though?
I bought a 5090 a year an a half ago for $2000. The same card, now a year and a half older, is $4000. Then there is the RAM - I bought 96GB, wishing it was 128, and now the price on my old RAM has doubled.
Stuff is crazy expensive.
> Then there is the RAM - I bought 96GB, wishing it was 128, and now the price on my old RAM has doubled.
I also bought 96GB some while ago but after the initial increases, thinking I'll wait it out. Now 128GB is far more expensive than it was when I first looked. Luck has it I want DDR5 RDIMM as well, which seems the hardest hit when it comes to RAM prices, fun stuff.
The first Mac, which had 128k of ram and an 8mhz CPU and cost more than $6500 in today's dollars. Humans are spoiled.
Isn't OP complaining that the price went up because people want them for AI use? I guess it also went up because of cloud AI use increasing component costs, but those local models you want to run probably were trained in the cloud..
> I remember buying one for my son a few years ago (M1 mini) and it was a few hundred; now we're up to $900 for the base model.
The base price of a mini has only gone up $200 from $699 in 2020 to $899 today, and for $699 you only got 8GB of RAM instead of 16. Yeah the price has gone up but not nearly as much as you seem to be remembering...
[0] https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Mac_mini_(M1,_2020)
This is just so incredibly disrespectful to so many people.
Yes, sociopathic tech bros making everything insanely expensive for regular people is indeed incredibly disrespectful!
You're not entitled to this stuff any more than they are.
What planet do you live on?