Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini
I think the way to think about all of these Apple products is through the lens of what I believe their long-term strategy to be.<p>Apple wants to onboard people into the <i>new</i> Apple ecosystem, which is iToys and backend services. They believe this will be better for you, not just for them. They control the iOS-based world in a way they could never control &quot;computers&quot;. They&#x27;re trying to get as many people as they can into their new Disneyland-ish ecosystem, where everything you do is approved and monitored and everything you buy is bought through them.<p>The low-end Mac seems to only matter now as a source of low-end users, who need carrot and stick to move them off Mac and onto iOS, so low-end Macs won&#x27;t get better but low-end iOS devices will. I suspect we&#x27;ll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon, and that will signal the end of low-end Macs.<p>The high-end Mac users have a better story, because Apple needs developers for their ecosystem, and those people need good tools. I can&#x27;t imagine Apple being interested in developing dev tools that run on non-Apple devices, and I think they&#x27;ll want an absolutely guaranteed source of computers with whatever features are needed to develop the best stuff for their ecosystem, so I think a high-end Mac product line will live on with each new version being a bit more iOS-like. If they want to keep the lockdown on iOS while retaining full power to develop for it, they will probably have to keep the less-locked-down macOS going for dev machines for a long time, but things like the Mac Mini have no place in this picture.