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They're definitely more popular right now, but they've been a winner since M1.

Great performance, quiet, efficient.

It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance, especially if you consider the cost of electricity.

Great parent/grandparent machines, home servers.


> It would be tough to get a windows machine at that price that gets anywhere close on performance

Not that tough. I paid $299 for a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket.

Would have considered the Mac Mini, but the AMD box has much better Linux support.


> a Ryzen 5800h mini PC last year, which roughly lands in the same performance bracket [as a Mac mini].

Not really. And this is before the M5 Mac mini which ships later this year.

Putting it together in desktop‑mini form factors:

- Raw CPU: M4 is much faster single‑core, generally faster multi‑core at lower power.

- GPU: M4’s iGPU is roughly 2×+ Vega 8 and more modern.

- Memory subsystem: M4 has far higher bandwidth and unified memory, ideal for integrated GPU and many modern workloads.

- Efficiency/noise: M4 wins by a large margin; much higher perf per watt.

- Compatibility: 5800H wins if you need bare‑metal x86 OSes like FreeBSD or specific x86‑only software stacks.

- 5800H: 35–54 W configurable TDP in laptops; mini‑PC implementations often run it fairly hot to maintain clocks.

- M4 in Mac mini: ~24 W base TDP, ~40 W boost, but getting clearly higher performance per watt.


Let's assume the 5800H consumed 50W and the mini consumed 0W and both ran 100% utilization all year at $0.20/kWh.

The mini would save $87/year. That's a 3.5y breakeven assuming no reinvestment.


The M4 is from 2024, the 5800h is from 2021. You should be comparing against the M1 or M2, which was Apple's actual competitor at that performance bracket and time period.


You bought the 5800h last year, and provided last year's price paid for it. That makes the 2024 Mac mini more relevant than the models that weren't being made or sold last year. Unless you'd like to dig up what that 5800h system cost back in 2021, to put that into context against a Mac mini from back then?


The Beelink mini PC I bought MSRPs at $600, but it comes with a 500GB NVMe drive. In Apple's pricing scheme, that puts it equivalent to a $800 Mac Mini configuration.

To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance. Maybe not your ideal configuration, but I had $300 and a limited patience for Asahi development.


> To reiterate, this is absolutely a comparable machine to the Mac Mini in terms of performance.

Reiterating is not the appropriate response after someone has already detailed many ways in which the performance a 5800h is not in the same league, none of which you have even attempted to refute.

The more truthful claim you could have made is that you don't need the extra performance (far more plausible, given that you bought a new machine with a four year old chip), or that you needed storage capacity more than you needed performance.


Even if the mini is more power efficient at $600 base, saving $300 upfront pushes out the breakeven point.


Something something selling shovels in a gold rush.


There's very good steam integration, a controller first UI, it's very performant, sleep works better, fantastic performance monitoring and settings.

I love it, but there's probably not a whole bunch of reason to run it on things in other form factors.


Pretty sure Bazzite offers all those things as well.


It does. It provides everything SteamOS does. So if SteamOS doesn't support the Xbox Ally X, why install SteamOS?


Agree with everything here.

Anecdote:

I purchased an EV this year, my highest priority was range per dollar, and the vehicle I selected happened to be new because of current market conditions. (Equinox EV for under 25k otd after incentives)


I agree, claude is an impressive agent but it seems like it's impatient and trying to make its own thing, tries to make its own tests when I already have them, etc. Maybe better for a new project.

GPT 5 (at least with cline) reads whatever you give it, then laser targets the required changes.

With High, as long as I actually provided enough relevant context it usually one shots the solution and sometimes even finds things I left out.

The only downside for me is it's extremely slow, but I still use it on anything nuanced.


> agree, claude is an impressive agent but it seems like it's impatient and trying to make its own thing, tries to make its own tests when I already have them, etc. Maybe better for a new project.

Nope, Claude will deviate from it's own project as well.

Claude is brilliant but needs hard rules. You have to treat it and make it feel like the robot it really. Feed it a bit too much human prose in your instructions and it will start to behave like a teen.


Roller coaster tycoon is good.

The business software I have to work with from the 80s is a straight up nightmare. And I'd say most old software is in this camp.


Well, most new software is a nightmare too. And recently a lot of it started to try to do the wrong thing by design, what's an extra step into nightmare scenario beyond anything from 80s.


I just switched to the iPhone with the new cycle, explicitly because of this news.

Sideloading was the killer feature for me as well.


> I just switched to the iPhone with the new cycle, explicitly because of this news.

And guess what, sideloading has never been allowed on iPhones.

So you just went from bad to worse. The only rational option for tech-minded people nowadays is to buy a device that supports Lineage or Graphene (ironically Pixels are good for this) and to replace the stock OS.


Well no, the iPhone has niceties that Android lacks (as evidenced by its total market dominance for markets who can afford Apple devices). Lots of engineers use Android phones, but the C-suite invariably uses iPhones.

So if the reason you're choosing Android over iOS is freedom and flexibility, once that's gone, why not choose slickness, speed, battery-life, photo quality, and an integrated experience?


> the C-suite invariably uses iPhones.

Hard to see that as a plus.

I have owned iPhones in the past (and still have a couple of old models collecting dust in a drawer), and I don't think they are in any way more refined than my Pixel 9 running Graphene. Most importantly, it is immune to arbitrary restrictions like sideloading bans or government-mandated spyware (aka Chat Control in Europe).


> (as evidenced by its total market dominance for markets who can afford Apple devices)

This is only true in English speaking markets, the rich countries of Western Europe are much more Android heavy.


> battery life

Eh? I have a 6000mah Android. Everyone with an iPhone that I know struggles to get half the battery life I get.


I agree, it's like they looked at GPT 3.5 one time and said "this isn't for me"

The big 3 - Opus 4.1 GPT5 High, Gemini 2.5 Pro

Are astonishing in their capabilities, it's just a matter of providing the right context and instructions.

Basically, "you're holding it wrong"


I don't know, it's nice to have icons and buttons that actually look like what they're going to do instead of amorphous blobs.


I read the article linked above with all of the testing they did to identify the cause, I'd definitely have no trouble buying from them in the future.

Reminiscent of the tylenol case study, handled a tough situation correctly and it's still on the shelf.


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