Comment by dangus

This is a dumb tangent that's been beaten to death, but yes Apple base model systems to tend to be somewhat untouchable in value around when they're released. Buying something anywhere close to the form factor of a Mac mini with the same performance is nearly impossible.

We also shouldn't beat this horse to death because it's not hard to plug in a USB/Thunderbolt SSD and there's essentially no performance penalty.

Or if you have a MacBook Pro you can get one of these: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/20/macbook-pro-flush-sd-card-tra...

Not the fastest thing in the world but it gets the job done.