Price of
RAM and SSD upgrades. The base £600 Mini is decent value-for-money
if the RAM and SSD meet your needs. The £1000 model
that only differs by an extra 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD is not.
No. Fixed RAM came about (originally in Intel MBPs) because Apple switched to low power LPDDR RAM which
couldn't be supplied in plug-in modules and had to be surface-mount soldered to the logic board. With Apple Silicon they're maybe getting a small extra power/speed gain by soldering them to the chip package rather than a logic board (and probably a significant
cost saving by reducing the size of the logic board).
The "unified memory" thing is an advantage of Apple Silicon architecture present in all Mac models. You paid for that with your base M4. The actual RAM and SSD chips
that are the only difference between the £600 and £1000 models are the same tech used in other low power/SFF/high performance PCs.
Meanwhile, the SSD modules have never needed to be fixed - and
aren't fixed in the Mini/Studio. The Mini/Studio SSD modules are actually
simpler than regular NVMe sticks (which each contain an SSD controller chip) because the controller is already built into the M4 - so much so that a few Mom & Pop makers have been able to produce and sell much cheaper equivalents in tiny quantities without the advantage of Apple's huge economy-of-scale savings. It's only Apple's artificial barrier of needing a second Mac and configurator program to upgrade the SSDs that blocks serious third-party competition here. (Other systems have a BIOS/UEFI configuration screen to handle that sort of thing).
Inflation of what?
If I want to fill my car on July 4 2025 I go looking for the filling station with the best price
for petrol/gas in 2025. I don't pick one filling station and compare its price to a committee-defined standard basket of groceries, clothing housing costs and other sundries. Petrol/gas prices have often gone up at a substantially higher rate than "standard" inflation. If you're shopping for a computer in 2025 then you compare with other computers in 2025, not the price of a Mars bar in 2014. Turns out that
most consumer electronics products are offering exponentially more bang for the same buck as they did 10 years ago. Apple is nothing special in that regard - and in terms of RAM/SSD price-per-GB they're way behind the curve.
Only if you ignore RAM/SSD.
True, the price-points of Macs have stayed roughly the same in $/£ for decades while most measures of computing power went up exponentially -
but that's no different from any other computer or most consumer electronics. My 4k OLED TV in 2023 cost about the same number of banknotes as my smaller, 1080p LCD TV did in 2010 (and if I needed to compare the price to a loaf of bread I wouldn't be buying new 4k OLED TVs!)
...but Apple's price-per-GB for RAM and SSD stuck somewhere in the early 2010s (not long after Macs switched from ~1TB hard drives to then-hugely-expensive 128/256GB SSDs) while RAM/SSD prices in the rest of the industry went on growing as usual.
Bizarre really - the number of processor and GPU cores, processor performance, graphics resolution, interface speed etc. of macs has grown exponentially - all of which have the potential to process more data per second, handle higher-resolution/less-compressed files
which use more RAM and SSD. Yet these forums are fill of people falling over themselves to defend Apple's failure to keep up in RAM/SSD capacity.
Again, I don't know why people are so keen to defend expensive computers as being "OK" - or enthuse about how small and neat their Mac Mini or MBP is and then defend having to spoil that by hanging off external boxes. If you
do need external drives then it shouldn't be to hold your system files, temporary files and apps.
If I want "OK" I can get a PC or alternative for a fraction of the price of a Mac that will be perfectly good for basic computing needs. The base Mac Mini is good value
for a premium, small-form-factor PC. 16GB RAM
is OK (although a year ago some people were staunchly defending 8GB) - £200 extra if you need 24GB isn't OK. 256GB of SSD
isn't OK (with a big chunk being eaten by the system, and pro Apps consuming 10s of GB - and given that, if your system SSD ever gets close to full, performance will take a hammering). Even 512GB base would be a vast improvement.
First off - list price 24/1TB Mini is £1199 and Mac Studio starts at £2099. If you want to go down the discont/used/refurb/old-new-stock route, you can play that with "comparable" PCs as well. If you want to try and defend simply adding 8GB RAM and 0.75GB of SSD
doubling the price of the base Mini then, honestly...
Here you go:
Minisforum AI X1 Pro CPU AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370 Processor and GPU AMD Radeon™ 890M, 12 Croes 24 Threads & Max 5.1GHz. High Frequency Memory DDR5 Chanel Up to 96GB,speed max 5600Mhz.
www.minisforum.uk
32GB/1TB for £840 ...but, of course, you can argue until the cows come home as to whether this is "comparable" to a Mac Mini. You're probably not going to find a direct equivalent between M4 and any Intel or AMD processor. The relevant thing is the cost of RAM and storage, and (a) you're not going to find much in the ~£1000 price range that doesn't come with 32GB/1TB as standard plus (b) the relative cost of any RAM/SSD upgrade will usually be a fraction of Apple's. In this case, the 96GB/2TB option adds about £220 to the price...
Adding 64GB and an extra 1TB of SSD to a Mac costs £1400
on top of £2600 for the first Studio model that can take that much RAM.
(Of course, there's a huge range of PCs, so you can always go negative bargain-hunting and choose a MS Surface with Apple-compatible pricing or a HP server product with $1000 hard disc drives... but that's not generally how you "shop around")
To re-iterate: Apple can name their price for the various M4 processor models, which are unique Apple products with no direct PC equivalent to compare with... but there is nothing unique about the LPDDR RAM and flash SSD chips which comprise their upgrades.
