The M4 Mac Mini was released earlier this year. I'm very sad. The base model starts at $599. To double the RAM and storage costs $600. Can you believe it? Doubling the storage and RAM costs $1 more than doubling the whole computer. What absolute BS.
The power button is on the bottom. That's just dumb. And inexcusable. I do use the power button on mine sometimes. And I have stuff on top of he Mini, so getting to the power button means maybe knocking things over.
I was sad when the Mac Studio came out — all that space, but no room for (nice, big, cheap, and still totally usable) 2.5" drives inside? Ugh. If I could have put two 2.5" drives into it, I'd've bought one on Day 1. Instead, I bought an external enclosure instead.
So naturally, I wasn't surprosed when the new tiny Mini came out with no internal expansion. Even though the port count is comparable, the new one has only USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, and I still have 2 USB-A devices that I use all the time, and I prefer having the correct ports built in, instead of using an adapter. So, after a couple months of deciding what to do, I decided to get an M2, refurbished. (I've had many refurbished Macs in the past, and never had a single problem with any of them.) I coulndn't get the exact spec I wanted (options are limited when you're getting a refurb) but I did OK. Base CPU and GPU, 16 GB RAM, and 1 TB storage. It was $739. They kept having weird configs, like 2 TB storage but only 8 GB RAM, or 24 GB RAM but only a 512 GB SSD, or something with 10GB ethernet, which I definitely don't need to spend extra money money on, so this was the best I could do. My M1 mini is also 16 GB/1 TB, so this isn't an upgrade, but it's also not a downgrade. I could have lived with an M2 Pro if all the other specs were good, but they were the same deal — M2 Pro but lame RAM and/or storage, and they get really expensive, really fast.
I ordered an M1 Mini on the day it was announced in late 2020. It's still working just fine, but I do a bit of video stuff and the M2 is way faster at encoding thanks to new hardware acceleration added to the M2, so I knew I'd enjoy an upgrade. And I wanted to future-proof myself a bit. My M1 is already coming up on 5 years old. Apple will eventually drop support for the M1, but hopefully the M2 will be supported a bit longer. And I knew that the M4 sucked and there's no reason to think future Minis or Studios will be any better, so I figured I'd better order one before they're all gone. So here we are: an M2 Mini, 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB storage, for $739.