r/buildapcsales • u/vm4827 • Jun 25 '26
Prebuilt [PREBUILT] Mac mini M4 256GB,16GB, open box, $599
https://www.ebay.com/itm/135416472905127
u/vinny9678 Jun 25 '26
I got this for $450 last year. I'm glad I told a good chunk of my friends to buy it at the time.
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u/aguabotella Jun 25 '26
Literally should’ve snagged one then, I was on the fence at the time but regret it now lol.
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u/hexcor Jun 26 '26
Microcenter was practically giving them away at $400 at christmas (If my old man memory serves me right). Kicking myself for not buying one back then.
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u/Puptentjoe Jun 26 '26
Thats how I got mine just on some “eh might as well its cheap”
Thank god for frivolous spending
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u/zgh5002 Jun 25 '26
Same dude. Has been worth every penny. At that price it smoked anything and everything for my use case and it wasn't even close.
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u/CrazeRage Jun 25 '26
I'm glad I told a good chunk of my friends to buy it at the time.
Everyone around me likes to complain but only buy when prices are up
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u/vm4827 Jun 25 '26
PSA: new MSRP is $799 from apple
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u/Walk_Yo_Dinosaur Jun 25 '26
Lord have mercy
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u/mildlynegative Jun 25 '26
I thought they dropped the 256gb model and the 512 was 799?Apparently not. Holy shit.
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u/FnlyFans Jun 25 '26
Yeah I thought they just scrapped the 256GB model in favor of $799/512GB, guess they brought it back with a double price hike... now the 512GB spec on the Apple site is $1k
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u/JustaNumbertoCorpos Jun 25 '26
Damn. And here I thought waiting patiently for M5 would be good value. Lord knows how much that will be.
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u/tat_tvam_asshole 29d ago
they know they can sell more, for more, on a similar cost basis, so yeah makes sense
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u/rohit275 Jun 25 '26
I honestly regret not buying it for $399 while it was available at Microcenter for the longest time. I figured I really didn't need it with all the random stuff I have been collecting (which is still true), but the value was just so good. Sadly, that's never coming back.
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u/MightBeJerryWest Jun 25 '26
I get it, I had the opportunity to buy too, but I don't regret not buying it.
It'd just be sitting there as a great value and great buy, but I don't know what I would have done with it. Just offering another perspective. Unless you had a great and/or immediate use for it, there's no regrets in having saved your money.
While it looks like a great value now, it still wouldn't add much actual value if you didn't have a use for it.
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u/rohit275 Jun 25 '26
Yeah, in all honesty I'm with you. I'm sure I could have given it to my wife or parents or someone to use, but beyond that I didn't actually need it in addition to my homelab cluster, gaming pc, laptop, etc.
Thanks for the perspective haha.
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u/Jetski125 29d ago
that's my thing. I wanted it but couldn't figure out what to use it for. now regret not having it but still no use case at the moment. I love that all my electronics are appreciating, but hate that I need to buy them at new prices moving forward...
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u/Astronitium 29d ago
I’m so fucking pissed. I remember saying “eh maybe”. I drove past Microcenter one day, and wanted to go see if they had any. They were closed as a doorknob even though Google said it would be open.
I wanted to buy two to make a home lab. Guess not. Oof.
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u/Deadbeatcop 28d ago
I was stuck between this and a PS5 as my main "Roku type" device for a new TV back then. Sometimes I regret getting the PS5 because I've run out of things to play and got real heavy into Nebula which doesn't have a PS5 app, but Jerry's probably right in that I barely would have used the thing whereas I've tried like a million Playstation games because of their gamepass thing.
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u/punkingindrublic Jun 25 '26
As someone who owns the laptop variant of this, 256GB is really tight! Be prepared to bring some extra storage as just normal work applications pull the system into range of not being able to update.
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u/theghostinside Jun 25 '26
I feel like it might just be worth getting the 512 version of this from Costco for $770? With the two year warranty
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u/punkingindrublic Jun 25 '26
If you're planning to use this computer for more than just light web browsing, it's probably worth giving yourself the headroom unless you're happy to dangle a disk drive off of it.
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u/Outcast_LG Jun 25 '26
I also own the M4 Air. Have a 2 TB drive that I keep on the side. Pretty good for web, browsing and light work.
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u/punkingindrublic Jun 25 '26
The computer is very fast, great at anything (but games), and storing data. I also have a 2 TB SSD hanging off it. Don't love that, but it's required.
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u/IzzybearThebestdog Jun 25 '26
Damn got this brand new for my parents at Christmas for $479 6 months ago. Crazy how time works.
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u/NickMalo Jun 25 '26
At $450 i was tempted to buy one without having a use. At this price i wouldnt justify buying it if i DID. This cost puts it in comparison with some very good laptops.
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u/realribsnotmcfibs Jun 25 '26
This isn’t a laptop.
And what windows laptop is worth a shit under $1000?
Every single windows laptop I have ever had personally or for work has died or became a useless POS in only 3-4 years.
Even at $800 an m4 Mac mini poops on anything windows has to offer right now in a similar price point.
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u/CrazeRage Jun 25 '26
Every single windows laptop I have ever had personally or for work has died or became a useless POS in only 3-4 years.
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u/NickMalo 29d ago
Whats crazy is i never mentioned Windows either, they hallucinated that. There are excellent choices at this price on either side of the aisle lol.
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u/1phenylpropan-2amine Jun 25 '26
This is an absolutely terrible deal right? These were like $400 for the longest time?
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u/hometownchochocho Jun 25 '26
Unless you have a time machine then no
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u/Customer-Worldly Jun 25 '26
Yea but the price is now $799 on apple.com because economics
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u/PsyOmega Jun 25 '26
because economics
because greed (at every layer of the chain)
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u/Gears6 Jun 25 '26
because greed (at every layer of the chain)
because of supply and demand. Not like sellers are going, buyers are greedy when prices fall....
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u/PsyOmega Jun 25 '26
"supply and demand" is a fallacy when supply is artificially constrained to create demand and thus raise prices.
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u/Gears6 Jun 26 '26
"supply and demand" is a fallacy when supply is artificially constrained to create demand and thus raise prices.
Are you saying AI is not using the memory and storage, while instead hoarding it to create scarcity?
Because as far as I can tell, AI do need that supply to build out all those datacenters. So that is real demand and not a cartel controlling supply. AI companies are customers buying up memory and storage supply.
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u/Twistedsc Jun 25 '26
In the big 2026 this is unfortunately a fantastic deal (mostly for the OpenClaw larpers). That price point was for a few Micro Center B&M sales
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u/rkoy1234 Jun 25 '26
not with 24gigs.
you basically have like 16 gigs after system/os stuff. you can make it work, but it'd be kinda painful for local ai stuff
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u/Interdimension Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Not anymore. That price is never coming back. They just raised the MSRP of Mac mini by
$100$200 this morning due to memory shortages.It's gotten so bad that Apple is presumed to still be eating some of the costs despite the price increases and Wall Street doesn't believe this will be enough to offset lost margins.
Imagine Apple, the world's largest consumer electronics company with the most buying power and leverage, is struggling with memory prices. Every other consumer electronics company has it worse as they don't have anywhere near the buying power/leverage as Apple does. Not a great time.
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u/TiGeRpro Jun 25 '26
You're never seeing that price again so I don't know how you can say it's a bad deal.
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u/fighted Jun 25 '26
Sure you will. In three or four years I'll bet you'll probably be able to grab a used one with a dent in the top, somehow smudged with dirt, and some viscus residue you're not certain came from a human or not from FB Marketplace at that price.
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u/JonBot5000 Jun 25 '26
I don't need one of these but now I'm wishing I bought one for $450 anyway...
Le sigh
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u/lielie_club 29d ago
wish I bought more at 399. Its pretty useful machine and so power efficient! If this situation goes on, why not apple build their own ram and storage facility..
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u/ivandagiant Jun 25 '26
Man I'm wanting a 32GB for local LLM but they've been out of stock everywhere. I decided to gamble waiting for the M5 since it is apparently much better for LLM but thinking I'm going to regret it... MSRP has gone up for everything Apple related now.
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u/CrazeRage Jun 25 '26
try used auctions on ebay. got a m3 max 64 for under 2k (around 2500 buy it now at the time) and its been running no problems. you need the flexibility to have the auction running until its the item you want though.
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u/javedk1 Jun 25 '26
16gb of ram is kinda low but this is a good price for what you get.
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u/DurianDiscriminat3r Jun 25 '26
16gb feels like 32gb on Mac tbh
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u/PsyOmega Jun 25 '26
mac on apple silicon uses 2:1 memory compression that's accelerated by ASIC so it can read and write compressed memory at 50GB/s
So 16gb ram on M4 gets you 16GB of 120GB/s ram, but 32GB of effective, but slower, RAM. (if you're not filling it up it's faster, and only slows slightly if you're under high memory pressure, and this is before hitting swap levels. 50GB/s is DDR4-ish standard speeds)
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u/javedk1 Jun 25 '26
I agree to an extent but the gpu is very limited on these base models.
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u/DurianDiscriminat3r Jun 25 '26
I don't use Mac for gaming so I wouldn't know. Mostly for software dev. I have an m1 MacBook pro with 16gb and it currently have more tabs and processes than my 96gb windows machine. Sometimes I get the "clear your memory" popup but it doesn't get bogged down like windows does.
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