A Mac Mini can run more software than any of their competitors (you can’t install macOS on a VM on a Windows or Linux host but the reverse is possible).
Even on the hardware side you are free to connect third party drives, monitors, keyboards, etc…
This thread is talking about HTPC, and I'm wondering what the use case is where you need lots of RAM and the speed/latency of an internal NVMe drive.
My HTPC is about 12 years old, and I'm pretty sure that the internal SATA SSDs are slower than a modern external USB3.1 drive. Yet it does everything I ask of it with no noticeable delay.
No, the thread is not mentioning HTPCS but about NUCs, which can also be used to do productivity work/games, not just watching movies, so exqueeze me that I want/need a system with 16GB of RAM and some decent storage in mid-2023 to be productive and am not contempt with the bare minimums of 8GB/256 and being price gouged for any drop over that.
You are exqueezed. While the overall topic is about NUCs, this particular thread of conversation appeared, to me, to be about HTPCs. Nevertheless, the existence in the marketplace of computers with underwhelming specification does not in any way diminish your techno-self-worth or invalidate your needs and desires.
Yes, spend $600 on an base iMac Mini then spend $800 on an TB SSD with $200 worth of NVME inside it because ... logic ???
Meanwhile a 12th-Gen NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD costs ~$240 on Amazon, and you can replace the internal RAM and SSD with whatever size and models you want.
