Drive on...

 Earlier this year I realised it was time to move on to a new computer. At that time, I had been using a 2019 MacBook Pro i9 for a year-I had paid way too much for this when it came out thinking it could be my daily driver, but never really liked it that much. It was too expensive and too fragile-feeling to take to trade fairs, so it was my ultra-dependable secondhand 2015 MacBook Air that accompanied me to Germany 2019. Truth be told, I had stuck with my 2010 iMac i5, with a 2.5" SSD transplant and RAM maxed to 16GB, as long as I could, until a failing video card and lack of browser support for High Sierra finally made me reluctantly let it go last year,

What made me finally look for a better option was the fact that MacOS Sequoia seemed determined to force the MBP's Radeon graphics on all the time -which resulted in the computer becoming unusable several times during summer here as the GPU with its 77W power budget saturated the shared heatsinking system with the CPU, so the CPU would launch dummy processes that would knock out 80% of its bandwidth. The MBP getting the known hinge-flex issue which made the inbuilt screen's desktop look like a Cure music video from 1981, was the icing on the cake. Time to finally make the Apple Silicon transition.

I had looked at a runout M1 Max MacBook Pro laptop last year for $A3000 at the local Good Guys, but never quite convinced myself to pull the trigger on the purchase. Likewise I had seen runout M1 Studios for about the same price, and was wary of such a financial commitment for relatively old technology. Trying out a hand-me-down M1 Max MBP that a relative had as a loaner convinced me it was not that good a performer for general-purpose computing (Photoshop was excruciating), and best to wait for a better value, more modern proposition.

With the release of the M4 Mac Mini late last year, that moment had arrived. The value was excellent for the base model, but if I was finally going to replace my desktop, I would need lots more storage, and Apple's ludicrous prices for internal storage came into play. The M4 Pro was tempting, but it was more than double the cost for a slight spec bump, which would mean it would have to last me longer, which means it would probably be better to invest more in (non-upgradeable) and storage at the start, and...can you help me spell "sunk-cost fallacy", kids?

Therefore, the base MBP would have to be the go, especially if I could keep the cost down so I could afford to update it in a couple of years. I did feel that the $A300 ask for an extra 8GB RAM would be justified-being able to update RAM beyond base level has always added at least a year's utility to any Mac I've owned. While Apple had recently ended their ludicrous "8GB should be enough for anybody" mantra and made the base configuration 16GB, I knew that 16GB was the bare minimum I would want in an Intel Mac, due to running memory hogs like KiCad and Affinity suite. Add to this having shared memory for the GPU in the M4 and  having program code run in a larger footprint due to being RISC-native (I well remembered the Motorola/PowerPC transition in the 90s), it meant that 24GB RAM it would have to be.

But what of storage? One thing that had steered me towards the Mini had been the revelation that Apple was going against the grain of history and making the internal storage user-upgradeable again. Of course, being Apple, they did not actually acknowledge this was possible, or provide user support, and the modules were a proprietary controllerless type that had to be paired with the computer while blank, but hey, at least it wasn't the paranoid T2 Intel Macs where individual chips had to be paired with that unique motherboard before even being switched on, and much easier to do than with the Studios. Problem was, while the speed at which multiple vendors developed solutions was amazing, the fact remained that the limited choice of SSD ICs made the solutions very expensive compared to external storage, even on Aliexpress. Plus, the procedure to install them requires a complete reset inside the Mini, and once they're "initialised" they can't be used in another computer, so they can't follow you into another computer or even an external enclosure.