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Comment by khannn | Hacker News Reader

I seriously want a Mac, but I hate Apple's pricing and stinginess with RAM/Storage sizes.

Just buy an old one. Unless you are doing some sort of cutting edge work, an old one works fine. It's crazy how cheap they are. I assume because Apple users always like to churn to the newest thing.

I see the current base Mac Mini going for $499 new, but that's 16gb of unified ram and a 256 ssd. I'm currently using 17.5gb of memory on win11, but most of that is Brave with a ton of extensions loaded with many tabs. I'd be using the Mac for typical office stuff with some occasional programming probably with JetBrains IDEs. I'd like to do some AI stuff too, my current laptops are way too slow.

it does feel like, when you click the, "pay 400$ more for a 30$ hardware upgrade" button, that tim apple himself is laughing at me knowing their siren song has already worked and I am at their mercy, wallet open...

Running 40gb of RAM like a madman on my 2yr old Ryzen laptop for which the upgrade cost me $44.

Running 32GB RAM and 1TB SATA SSD with Windows 10, like a mad scientist, on my thus upgraded 15-years-old Sony Viao laptop.. SATA and SDRAM are backwards compatibible so a couple of years ago, I put in a new 1 TB SATA SSD drive in the old SATA1 slot, and two cheap DDR4 3200+ Mhz SDRAM chips in the RAM slots; I can upgrade again a few years later). This Sony Viao notebook (for it is a cute little laptop) now purrs like a Jaguar waiting to be unleashed. Dual booting Windows 10 and Mint Linux - OS boots in few seconds - and everything feels so snappy to work there.

Meanwhile, my Apple Mac Mini 2012 (Intel CPU) - which needed extraordinary efforts by me to make it triple boot MacOs, Windows 10 and Linux (trust Apple to make it hard to install other OSes on an Intel CPU PC) - is slow and fussy because of its meagre RAM and old HDD (not SSD). But the Apple service center refused to upgrade this Mac Mini to new RAM and new SSD, citing Apple policies to not allow such upgrades. Apple has made it quite hard to custom upgrade such iDevices, so this little PC is lying unused in my cupboard, waiting for the rainy day when I'll get the courage to tinker it by myself to upgrade it. And even if I did upgrade the hardware, this Mac Mini can only be upgraded to MacOS Catalina, and it won't get security upgrades, because Apple has stopped supporting it.

P.S.: I hate Apple.

I don't even want to fall down the rabbit hole of installing MacOS on a normal laptop again and my old 2014 Thinkpad with 8gb of ram plus 256gb ssd isn't going to light the world on fire performance wise.

I wish PCs had a unified GPU with 400..1000 GB/s bandwidth to the main memory. Up to 256 GB (or even 512 GB in Mac Studio). It's nice for AI. Thus staying on Macs, at least for now.

> And even if I did upgrade the hardware, this Mac Mini can only be upgraded to MacOS Catalina, and it won't get security upgrades, because Apple has stopped supporting it.

Your comment mostly makes sense but this is a weird mention when Windows is even worse on this now, Win11 not supporting much more recent machines.

You’re not missing out on a lot. Coming from someone who has used their products for many years now. Their products have more compromises and trade-offs now than they did during Apple’s Intel era.

What you will tangibly miss is low noise, low power draw hardware and very, very specific workloads being faster than the cutting edge AMD/Nvidia stack people are using today.

Genuine question: what compromises are you referring to here?

I would also like to hear about those compromises. I have been wanting this hardware and would like to know what I don’t know.

I have a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro, and at home my daily drivers are a Ryzen 9 3900 PC (still on Windows 10) and a Framework 13 laptop with a Ryzen 5 7640U running Windows 11. The hardware on my MacBook Pro is fantastic; I get amazing battery life that lasts far longer than my Framework 13, and the performance is excellent. I also love my MacBook Pro's build quality.

However, the reason my personal laptop is a Framework 13 and not a MacBook Pro is because I value upgradability and user-servicability. My Framework has 32GB of RAM, and I could upgrade it to 64GB at a later date. Its SSD, currently 1TB, is also upgradable. I miss the days of my 2006 Core Duo MacBook, which had user-serviceable RAM and storage. My Ryzen 9 3900 replaced a 2013 Mac Pro.

Additionally, macOS doesn't spark the same type of joy that it used to; I used to use Macs as my personal daily drivers from 2006 to 2022. While macOS is less annoying than Windows to me, and while I love some of the bundled apps like Preview.app and Dictionary.app, the annoyances have grown over the years, such as needing to click a security prompt each time I run lldb on a freshly-compiled program. I also do not like the UI directions that macOS has been taking during the Tim Cook era; I didn't like the changes made during Yosemite (though I was able to live with them) and I don't plan to upgrade from Sequoia to Tahoe until I have to for security reasons.

Apple's ARM hardware is appealing enough to me that I'd love to purchase a M4 Mac Mini to have a powerful, inexpensive, low-power ARM device to play with. It would be a great Linux or FreeBSD system, except due to the hardware being undocumented, the only OS that can run on the M4 Mac Mini for now is macOS. It's a shame; Apple could probably sell more Macs if they at least documented enough to make it easier for developers of alternative operating systems to write drivers for them.

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