FYI, I had an extremely bad time with my 2010 Mac mini. It was inexplicably, agonizingly slow, far below what I expected from its on-paper specsheet, and one of the worst computers Apple ever made. It would make me wait 10-15 seconds to focus a different (already open) application after I clicked the dock sometimes. I’m not sure if the 2012 generation was a quantum leap better but I certainly wasn’t going to risk another Mac Mini to test the theory.
At a minimum you’re gonna want to swap out the HDD with an SSD to get halfway acceptable performance, otherwise there’s a risk the performance will drag you down and demotivate you from whatever dev work you’re planning (that’s what the Mac Mini did to me at least).
apple was shipping hard drives in some models way after they stopped bothering to design their OS for them, but otoh they early adopted NVMe storage for the $999 2013 Macbook Air that my wife is still using
their low end lineup is either a joke or fantastic, it has ever been thus
The factionalism and brand power around Apple weirdly makes it difficult to understand their computers for what they actually are, a wide range from very bad to very good. Everything winds up flattened into the singular “Apple” brand in the discourse.
At the time, I read plenty of lukewarm, “balanced” reviews before buying that 2010 Mac Mini, then felt blindsided that it was a piece of garbage. The reviewers, I suppose, couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing and graded on a curve, and at the same time maybe didn’t want to become a target for the Apple stans by expressing strong negativity about any Apple product.
On the flip side, today, the consensus still hasn’t fully reflected the reality that the M1 are so good they make every competing laptop look like a bad joke. Making a claim as positive as that would make you look like an Apple stan, but again most people want to appear “balanced”
yeah, you still see a lot of laptop reviews on consumer and tech sites that are like 'this new laptop by X is super powerful and great!" and it’s like…can’t you just be like, look, if you need or want windows, this thing is worth considering, if you don’t this m1 air over here is nearly twice as powerful with double the battery life and no fan, I don’t know what else you’re looking at. now that apple no longer has a keyboard that breaks, they’re better at all the ancillary stuff that actually matters too – they’ve always had way better trackpads and speakers that are not an embarassment, the displays don’t have any weird QC issues, the build qualiy is solid, etc. hopefully one day intel manages to make a chip that both works and doesn’t light everything on fire, because if they don’t manage soon apple is just going to raise their prices over and over
they also have expandable storage again which is nice – the best part of macbooks with SD card slots is you can get an adapter that takes an microSD card in like a horizontal profile so it goes in there flush and you have an extra 1TB of hard drive-speed storage
Speaking of prices, this has been a slow evolution but I think something has flipped in Apple’s attitude to pricing. More and more they’re hitting midrange price points. Some of it is actually midrange, others are luxuxy-quality products like the M1 that are miraculously priced like they were midrange anyway. It’s happening across their entire product line: I was surprised to see their repeated price drops of the Airpods for instance, even though those remain the best buds on the market and don’t actually need to compete on price.
It sure looks like Apple has switched their corporate strategy to try to gobble market share and scale up as fast as possible
It looks like they’ve dropped the prices on pros too in a subtle manner where every reseller has a lower price than Apple’s website itself (~$200 vs $250)
Also they’re only terrible compared to the pros, as far as I know they’re still better in details like bluetooth pairing and battery life than every other non-noise-cancelling earbuds with the same form factor
kind of annoyed the new MBPs are only wifi 6 and not 6e because even if access points are currently wildly overpriced, the difference in shipping the client chipset is like, a buck (though ironically only Intel seems to have it across the board right now)