The product line is half-baked. For the sake of argument, let's disregard the age of the hardware still selling for the same price as when first introduced. Well, depending on which country you're in, it might be more expensive to buy now, as Apple have upped the pricing due to exchange rates.
There used to be a time where you could happily recommend 'just buy a Mac'. Now you have to recommend 'Oh, don't buy that one'. Spinning drives give a terrible user experience and frankly destroys the brand quality and loyalty. Absolutely no Mac in 2016 should have anything less than a Fusion drive.
The entry-level Mac Mini, once a capable and generously-priced machine to introduce people to the Apple ecosystem, is now a painfully sluggish, soldered, non-upgradable doorstop. You buy an iMac with a Retina display, and get a 5400RPM drive. As if to add insult to injury, you can't even use the new ones in Target Display Mode -- god forbid, as some people may buy the entry-level one so they can have a cheap 4K/5K monitor, rather than having to pay extra for something that performs vaguely acceptably for the price.
I would love for Tim Cook to work some poor Apple advisor's job for a week, and has to explain to somebody why their 2K machine from a self-congratulating, commited-to-quality company, is so darn sluggish. "Well, you paid a lot -- but you didn't pay enough."
It just makes me mad. How much money do you need before it's enough, and you start giving people a little value for their purchase?
