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Comment by robertsd247 | Hacker News Reader

There is zero justification for the pricing. It needs to be starting around $399. Apple is still working the privileged pricing model. Considering it has year old processor and 8GB RAM. For $800 an i5 and 16GB should be standard. I can forgive that 128GB SSD but not the CPU or RAM.

Side note, why is a computer only for games, streaming, and mining bitcoin? It that what the end user experience is limited to?

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>> There is zero justification for the pricing.

There is a justification for the pricing, but you probably won't like it: More than enough people will buy the product at a high margin price to make up for the price-sensitive people who won't buy it.

Apple uses value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing.

Fair enough, but it "values" the Mac Mini at $799 with a year-old i3 and 8GB of RAM? It valued the last one at $499 and it was 5 years old. I guess what the market will bear is really true...for Apple.

It's not about how much Apple values their products. Value-based pricing is based on how much value the customer gets out of the product.

The customer will not get $799 of value out of a Mac Mini. It will be made obsolete by Apple before that happens. Especially if Apple takes another 4 years to release the next one.

Keep in mind that the old Mini, priced at $499, only had a Laptop Dual Core i5 CPU. The new ones all have Desktop grade Quadcore CPUs in them. This isn't a totally justifiable reason for the price increase, but it is seemingly a large performance increase.

>> I can forgive that 128GB SSD but not the CPU or RAM.

I had the curse of having to use a 2017 MacBook Pro 13” with a 128GB SSD...it’s not forgivable, it’s not usable.

By the time I put xCode in there as well as Office, et cetera, and project files, I was left with 20-30GB left, and anytime I dipped below...20? it bombarded me, literally, continually, with a message ‘you are low on disk space.’

You know what is never forgivable? Soldering a hard drive to the motherboard on a $1500 device.

I agree that Apple has gone completely crazy with the markup, but who is saying those are the only applications for computers???

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