I still believe the mac mini is the perfect home server. You can now get them with 10 gig internet. They sip power so a UPS can run them for ages, almost no heat, can transcode media for plex, cheap, tiny, etc. You can also use them connected to a TV for watching media that isn't easily accessed from a smart TV or media player. The only con is either MacOS, or linux support. Besides that they are incredible. If you need more horsepower sure, not perfect.
Like the Apple TV, I view the Mac Mini as an under-appreciated product that sees very little love from Apple. They're both great products at a decent price.
I have a mid-2012 quad-core Mac Mini that worked as a network file server until I replaced it very recently. It still works fine though. I'm almost a little sad at the thought of selling it.
Mac Minis are horrible server hardware. We've had a couple running as servers. They fail randomly. Their hard drives fail. They don't rack mount easily. The only reason to have them is if you inherit some old ones, don't want to throw them away, and then don't mind replacing and throwing failed units away pretty often.
I think I have about about 20 Mac Mini's for various roles around my office. Probably the most used computers / servers in our entire environment. They're starting to show their age though. One by one they are being retired.
Until I wanted Plex to start transcoding video durring the pandemic, I happily used a Mac Mini from 2008 as my home server, which itself was an upgrade from the Intel Geode FitPC I had been using for years before that. Like most things, it depends on what you're doing with it.
Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac minis as build and render farms.
So much naysaying here. The Mac Minis are excellent for certain use cases (like a home server) and they last forever. Great that Apple is updating them regularly.
A couple of years ago I would have argued with you, but we recently added a WebOS TV to the household: 4K HDR+ Netflix and Amazon Prime, perfect playback of seemingly everything on the NAS box (which is just a hard drive hanging off the router), all effortlessly and with zero mental effort or maintenance.
To reiterate what I said elsewhere, this Mac Mini is meant to be a desktop, not a media device (or some sort of perverse NAS). It's being pushed into the home theater niche by people who probably have a big trashcan Mac Pro at their desk and try to justify this lesser device. But it's an extremely competent legitimate PC for most people.
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