Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
soldered memory and lack of expansion for one.
Soldered memory - I agree with both you and Mike. Sure, I prefer having upgradable memory whenever possible, but since I haven't had any memory die on me in a LONG time I don't see soldered memory as a big reliability issue, or at least not any more than having a soldered CPU/GPU. Honestly I can't remember the last time I had any RAM issues - the most recent I can think of is a faulty 64mb PC100 stick in the Pentium II I just finished building, but that's a 27 year old part!

Soldered storage on the other hand, flash memory WILL eventually wear out the more data you write to it - but the key word being "eventually". SSD's are typically rated for a certain amount of "Terabytes written", or TBW, and larger SSD's will theoretically last longer as the writes can be spread out over more area. The 1tb SSD in my Windows machine is around 6 months old, rated at 600TBW, and in those 6 months of 8 hours a day usage I've apparently written 6297gb, or just over 1% of the rated lifespan of my SSD. Extrapolating from this, my SSD should last around 50 years. My M1 Mac gets used less often, and in ~4.5 years it's written 14.3tb or ~3.2tb per year. Given that the SSD in it is only 256gb the lifespan is probably rated at 150TBW (Apple doesn't provide a rating), meaning that I can expect this Mac to last 47 years give or take a few. This is all academic of course, but the reality is that in the 15 years or so that I've been using SSD's I've seen only two fail.

Thankfully though the storage in the M4 Mac Mini's is actually replaceable! Not with standard off-the-shelf parts - Apple uses custom modules of course - but that means you can upgrade or replace storage later at least. My only issue with the M4 is the price of RAM upgrades, being that going from 16gb to 32gb nearly doubles the price of the whole computer - 600 bucks, when another 16gb ram stick is $60! That right there is why, after 17 years of being a Mac user, my next computer will be a PC running Linux (but that's a discussion for another time and is completely outside the scope of BIAB).

Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
right now mini pc's arent sitting still either with huge memory expandability
(virtual instruments anyone ?) and things like ability to have multiple on board m.2 storage devices...
I do love my mini HP which can be expanded to 64gb of ram and has two M.2 slots plus a 2.5" SATA bay, and theoretically can be upgraded to an 8-core i7 or i9. 150 bucks!

Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
Despite your concerns, a bare bones 2018 Intel Mini with 16GB RAM can run 450 tracks of Logic Pro without choking. I've run 300 tracks on my wife's M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM with the same result.
Exactly, like I mentioned before my M1 with 16gb was easily able to handle 200 tracks in Logic. I will mention though that my old 2013 MBP with 8gb ram had issues though, in particular Pro Tools consistently complained about memory with ZERO tracks, literally doing nothing!

Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
The last Mac where audio performance mattered was the 2013 Mac Pro 6.1 (aka trashcan) that choked on 288 tracks of Logic Pro and around 150 tracks of old versions of ProTools. Even so, it is still in wide use in many world class studios and mastering houses with a ton of Grammys on the shelves and shiny metal disks in frames on the walls. I know a lot of these guys and none of them have any intention of upgrading—many are scoring for film but none are using them to create AV.
The 'ol Trashcans could be quite good machines, it's really only the base model 4-core that had issues. Apparently it came down to a cooling issue causing throttling which didn't happen on the 6-12 core models, but since people could only afford the 4-core thanks to a $1000USD premium for the 6-core...

Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
(ps...can we keep little digs like 'you never buy' out of what i always hope is a nice discussion ?...thanks and i'll leave it at that...
Yes, please.

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