Trying to Justify Getting a Mac Mini M4

[MacBirdy]

So I want to buy a Mac Mini M4, but I'm not sure why and now I'm trying to justify it to myself. Perhaps I'm just being silly. It's been about 6 years since I last owned a Mac, and I sometimes wonder how much the user experience has changed since those days. When I look at screenshots of Mac OS 15, it just looks the same as old OS X Snow Leopard, so that worries me a bit -- but there must be more to it than looks, right?

Currently I'm thinking that I could potentially move my Adobe Creative Cloud and DXO PureRAW 4 installations (currently on a well-equipped Windows PC) over to the Mac without needing additional license outlay. But whether it would be a performance increase or reduction is a bit of an unknown to me at this point. There's also the small amount of desk space it uses up, which is nice. Do they make good media devices, say, as an AppleTV alternative (including Dolby Vision/Dolby Atmos, etc?).

Any other reasons for a Mac Mini? I'm not interested in Apple Intelligence... ran it for a week or so on my iPhone 16 Pro and didn't find it useful at all (in fact Siri got worse), and I don't need ChatGPT thinking/writing/drawing for me. I can do those things badly all by myself.

The user experience not changing much is actually something positive. Users want consistency.
You haven't really told what you do with your current pc.
What would be your main reason for switching?

 

[eltoslightfoot]

The user experience not changing much is actually something positive. Users want consistency.
You haven't really told what you do with your current pc.
What would be your main reason for switching?

This is a good point. As someone well versed in all the major operating systems, I would love to just be on windows and not pay the "upgrade tax" on RAM and SSD. But MS is almost anti-privacy at this point. People are complaining they can't shut off copilot in MS 365--which they pay for!

So, here I am with a gaming laptop I use only for gaming and to remote into work, and a mac. If Mac could do all of my gaming, I would happily kick the gaming laptop to the curb, but we are not there yet.

But you definitely need a reason to switch, because it isn't easy to switch if you don't live and breathe different OSes.