I bought a mac mini ten years ago (for about E400?). It still lives on today as my parent's desktop. I passed to them many years ago and not one problem. Fantastic machine.
However I cannot justify the prices they're asking for these ones. I'm looking for a new machine for myself now, but no way will these be considered.
Let me get this straight: You would not consider paying a premium for a machine even though your experience tells you, that it has a useful life of 10+ years?
All of my experiences with Mac have been like this.
Got a MBP for college, 2009. Still running as my mom's laptop in 2018. Meanwhile my dad's 2 year old dell has endless problems, it's incredibly cheap, despite having better internal hardware. It's slower, needed tons of configuration out of the box, and Windows 10 is just awful. My dad's laptop constantly has issues. My mom? Never once. It just works.
I will gladly pay for a product that is like that. I don't care what an SSD costs on Amazon. I don't want to spend time looking up components and motherboards and bargain hunting. I don't care about gaming and therefore the GPU. People on here look at numbers and costs but they never consider the customer experience.
It's far more damning of Apple to have the bad keyboard on the new MBPs than have some overpriced hardware. Ask 99% of people on the street if they even know what an i7 is.
I've bought a number of Macs since I switched in 2007 and I've had a number of tragic stories.
My wife's previous Macbook Air died during its second year. It was working fine and one day it didn't turn on. Apple Mexico asked for close to $1000 at the time to replace the logic which was simply ridiculous.
My top of the line 2011 MBP died when it was 2.5 years old because of a known GPU defect. Apple fixed it over a year later but it was too late. I already had a new machine and the second hand value of the 2011 plummeted. I ended up giving it away to a junior dev in my team a couple of years later.
My current laptop is a 2014 13'' rMBP. I wanted to change the battery and Apple Mexico asked for close to $400 since it argued the complete top panel had to be replaced. I ended up doing it myself for less than $100.
I still prefer Macs for working because of macOS, but I don't know what I will do when my current laptop dies.
I'm sure lots of people have stories like ours, one way or another. Things break. Not everything is perfect, but sometimes it is. How often are macs really failing? We hear stories because Apple is hated and you-tubers love getting scenarios where they can make an attack apple video. But without actual numbers we have no idea if this is a trend or not. Consumer Reports regularly ranks Apple as having the best failure rates.
For a long time smart car buyers never bought redesigned vehicles. Why? Their reliability is unknown. As device gains in hardware continue to diminish, perhaps it'd be wise for us to take this stance with electronics - and wait a few years.
> I still prefer Macs for working because of macOS, but I don't know what I will do when my current laptop dies.
Sadly it's not much better on the other side. Premium window machines still can't get basic things like the touchpad right. Windows 10 is pretty bad. I'd gladly get another machine - but nothing offers what I like about my Macs. The linux people aren't worth bothering with. Most people don't want to deal with the limits - and there aren't a lot of manufacturers.
My biggest gripe is not that things fail (that's completely expected) but how Apple reacts to that.
For example my 2007 MBP suffered from Nvidiagate. The GPU died during its third year, many months after the warranty had ended. Apple fixed it, no questions asked.
The 2011 Radeongate affair was ridiculous. There were thousands and thousands of users complaining online. It took Apple 2 years from the first machines failing to start a repair program AFTER a couple of class action lawsuits. It was a massive fuckup.
I haven't bought any of the redesigned MBPs with the butterfly keyboard, but again it took a couple of years to get a repair program after a couple of class action lawsuits. Also, in the US Apple is all fine and dandy, but in Mexico I've personally witnessed cases of Apple refusing to repair the keyboard because apparently they couldn't reproduce the issue.
> But without actual numbers we have no idea if this is a trend or not
Yeah, Apple is as opaque as things can be. Even more now than they will not even share the number of units sold in future reports.
I mean, if we're giving anecdotes, I bought a Dell laptop in 2006, refurbished for something like $600. I was able to upgrade it over the years all the way to Windows 10 (I think I paid $40 for the Windows 7 upgrade at one point). The only thing that failed for me on that machine was the built-in wifi. I only ended up getting rid of it two years ago because I really had no use for it, and had long since replaced both my laptop and my desktop machines by then.
Topically - it was at one point driving my television off this old E1505 and got a 2010 Mac Mini as a Christmas present, and hooked that up instead. Netflix and Hulu chugged on the Mac Mini, which also locked up for no reason from time to time. I literally installed nothing but Flash, for playing back videos.
Hulu and Netflix ran without hiccups or lag on the 2006 Dell laptop, so we put the laptop back.
Around 2010, Flash on anything other than Windows was notoriously craptastic -- to the point that Apple refused to support Flash in their mobile browser.
Nowadays, that same 2010 Mini could probably stream Netflix reliably, since it'll be decoding HTML5+DRM instead of Flash.
Yup, I have a 2009 core 2 duo mac mini and it does netflix just fine thanks to html5 video. It still does everything I need reliably (web browsing, non-vm web dev, ms office), but I will upgrade to the new mini and hand this one off to the kids.
meh. I had a 2007 mini that crapped out one month after the guarantee expired. Took it in for support and they told me to buy a new one, not interested in taking it on. To be fair this was a specialist apple dealer. At the time there was no local Apple store.
My general experience with Apple products has been 50:50 some good, some bad, Apple is nothing special when it comes to quality. Better than some is about all I can say.
1 - it wouldn't be suitable for me now (nor for the past few years).
2 - I remember there being a big differential in equivalently priced machines back then. One of my current work Dell workstations is a much cheaper option than this Mac, much better specced and I've had no issues with it for over two years.
3 - It's £800 for the thing, seems way out of line with inflation compared to what I bought then.
> seems way out of line with inflation compared to what I bought then
Can't speak for European pricing, but the base model Mac Mini 10 years ago cost $599, and adjusted for inflation it would cost $750 today ($50 less than the current base model).
However I cannot justify the prices they're asking for these ones. I'm looking for a new machine for myself now, but no way will these be considered.