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Apple's M4 Mac Mini Hits $499 Low Price on Amazon
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The in-store only purchase at MicroCenter is the kicker. If MC had a lower price on something they'll ship to you, BestBuy will match it. With that price from MC being good only if you pick it up in person, I can understand why BestBuy won't match unless there's a MC store nearby for an in-person, in-store purchase.
In my case, both stores are about the same distance away so it was easy to get BestBuy to price match my MBP M4 last year when I bought it, returned it, then bought an M4 Pro. Again, with price matching MC.
The main reason I'll use BestBuy is that I'm a Plus member which allows for returns up to 60 days.
Yeah my M4 Pro has taken the place of my 12 core cMP as my 24/7 operating server for various things. Mainly because it runs the latest operating systems without patches, but also due to the horsepower it has for my applications and SUPER low power consumption when doing basic server items.
Mac Pro = 255 Watts at Idle (no monitor on)
Mac Mini = 25 Watts at idle (no minitor on)
I get the impression that MacRumors only cares if an Apple product goes on sale if they can shill an affiliate link.
Costco routinely discounts these.
Costco routinely discounts these.
It's more efficient than that even. Reported numbers have the M4 Pro Mini pulling only 7 watts at idle.
Did you actually open it up and put in a drive? If so do you have a link to how you did it?
I thought you couldn’t do that with the minis
I am so close to buying one of these just to learn how to set up a home plex server or to figure out how to host things locally.
How difficult are these to use without an attached monitor?
How difficult are these to use without an attached monitor?
lol yes, but I’m guessing Microcenter won’t provide this site with an affiliates fee, so it’s not in their interest to tell you about the deal that could REALLY save you money. If MacRumors cared more about the readers who provide the site traffic here, you’d see THAT offer on the front page. Or at least they would update the post.
It’s really a shame, because to a lot of folks that’s extra savings is going to matter and it would be nice if MacRumors was looking out for you a bit when they posted these “deals.”
Thank you for being a good citizen and drawing attention to the greater discount, and to the member who mentioned BestBuy will price match. Grateful, and I’m not in the market for one!
You will need a monitor to set up, but if you have another Mac you can use screens 5 to remote in and manage the machine remotely.
That may be true, but mine isn't, I have server services running on it 24/7 with some of it being video re-encoding to make non-compatible cameras work with Homekit as well as some other services & external drives.
Depending on your setup, no sense using a paid 3rd party solution when MacOS already has a remote desktop, and has for years.
Just use the native screen sharing, and remote in that way via terminal and built-in VNC. If you need to access outside of your network, setup your firewall with appropriate VPN tunneling and encryption. Best to lock it down to a specific / limited user, and from there manually authenticate with an admin account if you need to install / service anything with admin / root privileges.
I need the remote access and the simplicity of setting it up is a no brainer for 25.00 bucks a year.
Let’s stop with the BS, It’s been as low as $399.99 recently. So just stop it.
It's a special SSD that some companies are making and they are very expensive (relative to SSD's for Windows PC's). Many are of questionable quality and reliability. The SSD in the M4 Mini is socketed but is not a normal SSD. It's a lot of work and not for the faint of heart tech person.
As with anything, YMMV.
I simply offered up the option that the OP may not have been aware of.
That tracks. My M4 Air when doing low-demand stuff like writing will go as low as 3-4 watts with the display backlight around 6 notches (out of 16). My last Intel i5 Air would never drop below 10 watts and would often sit at like 15.
$499 is the original price from when the Mac mini first went on sale 21 years ago, in January 2005. Since inflation makes things higher priced over time, and since computer parts get lower priced over time, it makes sense for the same tier of computers to stay at a similar price or get lower priced.
Tim Cook is a greedy corporate scumbag though, which is why he has priced the Mac mini, as well as many other Apple products, at a higher price than when Steve Jobs was CEO.
Tim Cook is a greedy corporate scumbag though, which is why he has priced the Mac mini, as well as many other Apple products, at a higher price than when Steve Jobs was CEO.