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Apple is clearly pushing everything towards a more luxury high end. More than ever, they're pushing the market to see how far they can go.
They're pricing me out. I can afford their stuff, I just find it hard to justify it.
The pricing is not really justifiable especially given the most use cases of the Mac mini (Home Theater, NAS, Backup etc.) are better handled by other OSes. The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! If you needed the 6 cores sure but given most workloads other than encoding don't - it's questionable. Even then the 6C processor doesn't cost enough to make up for the difference.
What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow. I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than…
I use an Apple TV 4K. For non-netflix/hulu/primevideo stuff, it streams off a Synology NAS (using Plex or VLC for Apple TV)
edit: it's funny how your experience pretty much mirrors mine almost 10 years ago. A Mac guy outfitting a machine for a home media center. I was used to Mac media stuff always being behind on codec support and performance so I bought some HP PC. It never worked right, always had to mess around with audio outputs (HDMI audio output worked maybe once) and codec stuff kept breaking since either Windows or the Nvidia drivers hated trying to do hardware acceleration and you just got a green screen. We mostly ended up plugging in our MacBooks...
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Lack of GPU wasn't OP's gripe.
How else would you interpret the comment? The only thing they mention is the lack of GPU, so I'm curious why you would say that. In any case the price is due to the SSD and RAM upgrades. You can get the i7 with 8gb RAM and 256gb SSD for $1300, which is still pricey but what do you expect from Apple...
Base price on the Mac Pro has been $3000 even before the trashcan version. With the pattern in all of Apple's recent products, the next one might be more.
I really don't like when reviewers test the high end configuration only. This makes the review pretty useless for most of us who may be considering a lower spec.
But more than that, Marco Arment actually uses high end rigs in his daily work and describes pushing them to the limit. It is highly appropriate for Marco to review a Mac Mini with high end specs, and I find it informative
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I use optical audio in a mac mini as a home theater TV driver. No thanks.
These days optical audio is dying when it comes to home theater systems, primarily due to its lack of codec support. You can't passthrough DTS-HD over optical, you can over HDMI.
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The quote is a bit out of context. The sentence right above it: >It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age. So, no, it's not "yayy" because it "hasn't gotten worse", it's "yayy", because "[it makes] almost everything better".
Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these.
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What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow. I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than…
Why do you need a PC at all? A TV can play movies directly from a NAS.
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>The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! I'm actually very interested in these - could you point me at some? I've been interested in getting a NUC8 machine, but the cheapest I can find one for (granted, in the UK) is £750 before RAM & SSD... and I have been seriously considering the new Mac Mini as a result because the final price doesn't seem like it'll be much different. edit…
You might want to look at some Chinese mini/industrial PCs Same 8GB/128 GB, but probably lower CPU for £307: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077SLPZ63 There are many different configurations on Amazon/Ebay http://www.inctel.com.cn/product/MiniPC.html
Refurbised Mac Pro with dual GPUs and SSDs are much better value.