When Apple released the new Mac Minis, I was so tempted, i almost ordered one. I ended up not ordering, and I’m glad—fir different reasons though. What kept me from ordering were Apple’s outrageous upgrade prices for a bigger SSD and more Unified Memory (its not RAM, but its often called RAM.) However, what really bugged me was the incredible hostile UX of their configure-page.

Imagine this: you look at the marketing material for the new Mac Mini, you decide to buy, and then you’re presented with this:

This page, apart from showing four price points in a three column layout, that therefore needs two rows with the second row showing only one column, is confusing. It took me a while to figure out that the configurations shown here were designed towards price points, not towards useful technical differentiations. There is immense overlap between these Macs, you can even configure the lower ones to be one of the higher ones. The UX of selecting a Mac to buy is terrible. So you want a Mac? Here is a maze to solve, good luck!

When I encountered this UX, I wanted to buy a new Mac, but the four base-configurations to pick from and then adapt to my needs overlap and are confusing. This is what kept me from my impulse buy. I guess: Thanks Apple! I ended up not buying a new Mac that day, because I couldn’t be bothered to put this work in at that time. I left the page with the intention to buy one later, thinking: “Dammed if I know when I’ll find the time to navigate the latest maze!” This gave me time to learn more about the new Mac Mini and ultimately decide against buying one.

Apple’s Upgrade pricing and how you can defend yourself

As I wrote above, I decided not to buy in the end, because the base model only comes with 256GB SSD and an upgrade to 512 GB is USD 200. An SSD with 512 GB is about USD 30 on Amazon, Apple wants USD 200 for half that? No. Thats an Apple-premium of 6x, its disgusting.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look into how macs could be used with small internal SSDs. Turns out you can configure the App Store to install large apps on an external drive, and you can also move a user’s home folder to an external drive—essentially limiting the SSD to the OS and small apps. This also simplifies Apple’s maze: Get the cheapest Mac Mini with the chip you want (M4 or M4 Pro) and then use an external drive.

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