I understand, but I feel like nucs always end up at this weird, “I’m going to drop 200 on ram, 200 on a ssd and have a 700-900 dollar thing that has no second hand value and really isn’t that powerful”. I remember throttling being an issue as well. Add a custom heat sink and some thermal paste? (50-100 more..)
It just feels like you’re paper cutting your way into a more expensive system. Not sure on small form factor pcs otherwise though. Hp z2 minis always seemed neat and typically have a promo code that works with a bare config you can bring your own ram/disk + Linux.
Have you seen the prices of RAM and SSDs lately? You can get name brand 32gb of DDR5 and a 1 TB NVME drive for a little over $100. Apple is literally charging 1000% markup on these upgrades.
I can understand that perception. Depends on situation I suppose. I find that a) ram and ssd prices are way more affordable than that b) I always seem to have some around anyway - The circle of upgrades! And c) I wish second hand value was low, I'd be buying them like candy, but it isn't :-/
They can be nice as small servers. OSX is not as suited to server usage as a BSD or Linux and doesn’t have expandable storage - NUCs have additional m2 or sata drive ports. The NUCs also cost less.
if you're using these in any sort of volume, then the $4-500 of savings is significant.
also, if you're not using MacOS then having hardware that's actually compatible with your OS is nice. all respect to the asahi linux folks, but i'm not going to give that to my customers.
