Worse than that, they hold their value, so buying a used M1 mini is still a few hundred bucks, and saving $200-300 by purchasing a 5 generation older mini seems like a bad deal in comparison.

Someone came to be excited they got a "deal" on the newest Intel Mac Mini for hosting OpenClaw. 8GB model for $300. I kind of regret bursting their bubble by telling them you can walk over to Costco (nearest one at time of discussion was walking distance) and pay $550 for one with an M4 and 16GB of RAM.

Up until a week ago, the base m4 mini (16gb ram/256gb ssd) was $399 at microcenter, now $499. Pretty shocking how good of a value that is IMO.

Damn. Would be awesome to network a bunch over thunderbolt.

That’s just somebody not doing their research and overpaying unfortunately

Just like with GPUs and Bitcoin they'll be a flood of old hardware on the market eventually.

Depends on what you mean by “eventually”