I don’t think the entry models have particularly good margins, although knowing Apple also not bad. The really high margins are on the upsell models, which are what you should be buying if you are a heavy user.That's great! Enjoy!
(still doesn't mean they weren't optimized for mega margins- multiple things can be true here)
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple is Now Selling a Refurbished Mac Mini for Just $319 (!)
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I haven’t used a windows machine in 15 years so I can’t compare. But my 8GB MBA sure suffers when I use it. The external display puts too much pressure on the machine perhaps
Well, personally having owned both a 2018 Macbook Air i5 with 8GB RAM and and 2020 Macbook Air M1 with 8GB RAM, the 8GB was much, much more useable on the M1 version than on the i5 version, so it was not complete nonsense. Would I prefer 16GB RAM, sure, but 8GB on the M1 Macbook is still very useable to this day, whereas I find it barely useable on the Intel Macbook.
Since I own both those models, I'm just curious what you consider destroyed by OS updates about them. I don't really like many (or possibly any) of the changes in the last few versions of iOS, and I absolutely hate that iPadOS turned off the ability to turn off multi-window (which I consider unusable on the iPad mini and curse Apple every time I accidentally click those 3 dots at the middle top of the display, which is multiple times a day or hour), but "destroyed" still seems a little bit too much... even though as I typed that last bit, I did start to think that perhaps I do agree with you!
This articles seems rather late and strange that you apparently didn't find this out until Saturday from a post on X, as I had commented on the new price on the forum for the original article late Thursday night. Considering another post 6 hours before mine had mentioned they had just dropped the price, it seems like this all happened within a few hours of MacRumors original story, so it seems weird you had to find it out from a post on X a couple of days later.
A few days ago, we reported that Apple's refurbished Mac mini pricing had a problem, and it appears that Apple has taken note.
Apple was offering a refurbished Mac mini with the M2 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage for $559, which was $50 more than a refurbished Mac mini with the M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. All other key specifications were equal.
That's no longer the case.
As noted by Tech God on X, Apple has since revised its refurbished Mac mini pricing, and the latest prices are quite impressive. In the U.S., you can now get a refurbished Mac mini with the M2 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage for just $319. And the model that previously cost $559 is now priced at $459.
Problem solved.
Article Link: Apple is Now Selling a Refurbished Mac Mini for Just $319 (!)
It seems weird that you think Macrumors read every single post on the forum within hours. If you knew something you wanted them to pick up on, you should have sent them an email via the “tips/contact us” link.
The difference is, 90s Apple was arrogant and that led to bankruptcy.
2010s Apple was arrogant and got away with it.
Thanks for the tip, as I actually didn't see that link. I can't say I would have bothered sending that one in, as it already seemed late by the time I read the first article, which is why I found it so strange to find out they didn't even seem to know for another day and a half. It is good to know, though, and I won't assume in the future that they actually have a better source of information. Thanks.
I would have said that was almost the norm for computers in 1994... my co-worker used to joke he hadn't bought a home computer because he was waiting for the technology to stabilize. I bought a 486 that year, just before the Pentium came out. Almost any purchase felt obsoleted by the next model. People complain about minimal upgrades between models these days, but I do not miss the days when every new model seemed to obsolete your recent purchase.
They were weeks away from bankruptcy when Steve came back... Should've said "almost"
Exactly. I repeatedly find it amusing that people comment on "RAM" without knowing anything about it. Most people can't even get their head around some of the basic notions of key memory terms, such as physical, wired, virtual, shared, and compressed. Then they look at a simple, single-dimension memory chart and magically divine some mighty bold conclusions.
This is the perfect Mac to buy for our retired parents who basically use a computer for Facebook and to pay bills 🥳
My base model M1 mini still does Handbrake encodes way faster (and much more quietly) than my i7 mini did, with multiple tabs open in Chrome at the same time, even with 8 GB RAM. My M4 mini with 16GB may be faster, but even the base 8GB M1 is still capable of far more than just surfing the net, even while simultaneously surfing the net.
Well, I think Next was bought in Dec 1996 and Steve came back in Feb 1997 and the MacWorld Expo with the Microsoft announcement wasn't until August, so those were quite a few weeks, but I would have said that period was probably one of the least arrogant in Apple's history. The AIM alliance was actually pretty impressive, initially anyway, and the PowerMac 7500 I had was probably the easiest computer to upgrade that I ever owned. Apple had even allowed clones and was working with IBM to develop their new OS, but that seemed to have all the focus that "design by committee" is usually known for, and I recall getting SDKs that had so many different directions that it was hard to pick where they were heading.
Anyway, they had issues and everyone knew it, but Apple bought Next which brought back prodigal son Jobs (which, for his effort, got Amelio ousted in a Jobs' coup later that year IIRC), and I would say that Apple had swallowed a lot of that pride to bring back Jobs. As much as they screwed stuff up during that period, very little of it seemed to be due to arrogance to me, especially the purchase of Next that ended up being the needed huge boost for Apple and Jobs (Next was not doing great commercially, but the Apple/Jobs combo somehow seemed to be magic.)
