I’m one of those Macs since the beginning folks. The first computer I truly used on my own was the family Mac Classic. I’ve watched Apple almost die and come back from the brink of destruction. I’ve used Macs daily in school, the school lab where I undoubtedly fell in love with digital media was full of Powermac G4s.
Before my 2018 Mini I had a very upgraded Mac Pro. Absolutely loved how I could squeeze in all the drives and cards for more ports into it. My chief complaint of course was heat. I live in a somewhat warm part of California already and having a heat lamp keeping my pet turtle alive AND a Mac Pro pumping out the heat in the same room was just a no go. Doesn’t help my older monitors were putting out heat too.
Essentially during the winter, I never ran a heater.
Fast forward to today. I like my 2018 Mini. Its about the same multicore as my Mac Pro and substantially better at single core. It runs cooler, the fans aren’t as loud and the new Ultrasharps put out way less heat. Hypothetically a win win.
Hypothetically.
I used to have a single power strip running everything, now I have 3. Hubs, docks and enclosures all take power and not everything plays nice when plugged into one another. After much experimentation and many forced hard shutdowns I have finally found a good balance but not everything is rosy. For one my Mini can’t sleep with its RX 580 eGPU and probably 1/10 startups result in a random crash. The internal HDMI port causes crashes and one of the two monitors has to have video coming from the Mini semi-directly to work. The workaround is using a Dell WD15 USB C dock -> MiniDP -> Secondary Monitor.
This brings me to my future with Apple hardware.
One of the my biggest complaints about Apple is the depreciation and eventual dropping of things they don’t like anymore. Right now I’m still on Mojave because I reference 32-Bit software. I’ve read people grumbling about losing Firewire support on newer MacOS for random devices. I keep a Sony DSR-45 DV Deck around for conversion projects, I’d hate to lose that.
The iOS bloat isn’t the great either nor is the fact that I just can’t plug in my Samsung S22 Ultra that I have to use for work and transfer files to and from it. My Windows laptop, no problem there.
Another point of contention is the lack of ports on all the current available Macs. The Studio has exactly as many ports as my current Mini and the M1 Mini lost ports. For reference this is my current Thunderbolt and USB trees.
Thats alot of hubs and docks just to connect stuff I use. On my Mac Pro I had 2x USB 3 cards to attach everything, worked without a hitch.
As a hobbyist, power user, artist there doesn’t really seem to be a future for me and Apple. I can’t stay on an obsolete OS forever and all the bugs associated with my current Mini have really turned me off from any future hardware. Heck, I can’t even use Thunderbolt 1 and 2 devices on a 4 enabled computer.
Windows isn’t as elegant as a Mac but at least it seems like I can actually do what I want to do with it.
Source: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-2018-mini-and-why-it-will-be-my-last-mac.2353982/