I remember in 2007, buying my first MacBook. It came with an enormous 2gb of RAM. I asked about upgrading it. The guy leaned in conspiratorially and told me that Apple’s RAM upgrades were a rip-off, and that I’d be better of buying it elsewhere. So I did, for half of what Apple were asking.
This is a grift that Apple have had for far too long, and there’s a part of me that’s convinced that their move to soldered RAM was to stop people upgrading after the fact more than it was about SOC efficiencies.
You can buy a Ryzen 9 32Gb 2 Tb mini pc that seems to have a similar form factor. It’s capable of running 3 4K diaplays, not too shabby. at Amazon in Europe for 446€. Or, if you’d prefer, a Ryzen 5 pro 16 Gb 512 SSD for 289 Link so half the money and you get 2x storage… Link sure, no thunderbolt, but considering the specs, I know what I’d buy.
What’s the power draw at idle for both systems? My money is that the M4 mac mini blows away the Ryzen into space
Probably not as far off as youd think. A lot of the efficiency comes from the smaller node that apple uses. If both amd and apple silicon processors are being compared and that are using the same node, then they are pretty equivalent. 6900hx is still tsmc 7 nm (later version) while the new m4 is on 3 nm. Both are still pretty efficient. It’s not like tiger lake levels of inefficient.
Linus has made a video about this recently trying to build an equivalent machine. There’s really nothing like the base Mac Mini for its price, but that stops being true as soon as you make any upgrades.