Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [1] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmware but there's always the possibility of it crippling the device which would be a big time-loss more than anything.

Other flavors of malware are easily removed with a quick Windows reinstall before use but potential firmware infections are a good reason to pay more for mainstream PCs.

[1] https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um760-slim

That's a valid concern but I personally avoid going into this rabbit hole just for the sake of my (already fragile) sanity.

Speaking of issues, the other one with these low cost mini PCs is low-quality SSDs. The one that my UN100D was supplied with was pure garboleum in terms of speed so it had to be replaced.

I've recently bought two minisforum PCs on Amazon. I fully expected the SSD to be garbage and to throw them out. To my surprise, they were decent-ish Kingston TLC PCIE 4.0 SSDs. Definitely not the cheapest SSD on the market.

The Minisforum needs an external power brick which probably almosts doubles the size.

The Mac Mini does not need any external power adapter which is quite amazing.

Beelink EQR6 has an internal PSU and is also quite small, a bit smaller in footprint actually. It even comes with two full-size m.2 slots and expandable RAM.

Mini is great, exceptionally so, I actually just got a rather souped-up one (that's the reason I'm in this thread) but x86 vendors are catching up and there's a certain possibility that more established brands will pick up.

An external power adapter means a DC power input, which can be upgraded with a LiIon battery. It’s more expensive to do for AC.

That’s a very nice upgrade in many places, and for many scenarios. A power brick, meanwhile, is easy to hide out of sight.

I almost lost a job for using this at work. Still not sure how they detected it.

You’re setting up a relay using two well known domain names it seems. And you’re encrypting files that probably can’t be decrypted using MITM so you’re sending all kinds of “red flags” if they use any number of MITM detection software.

To be fair our offshore team was so bad with security (“doesn’t work? Turn it off!”) it is unfortunately necessary. If I had a slightly different app “magick wormhole” they’re likely to use it if it had a pretty GUI.

Like if we didn’t have strict security policies in place how do you manage 500+ “developers” who have no repercussions? Part of it is getting the cheapest labor possible, part of it is security is hard to do right and part of it is english as a second language issue.

It is much easier to put everyone in an incredibly locked down environment than it is to have them decide what’s secure or not. If I were to fork this and internally use our own DNS and put a GUI wrapper and there’s a flaw in the implementation of magic wormhole I’d be in much more trouble than using Crowdstrike which no one will get fired for using for example.

If it's an illegally biased opinion then presumably it will be overturned on appeal. Otherwise Irish law looks prohibitively business-unfriendly.

So business-unfriendly the tax loophole used to be called the Irish double sandwich.

“Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” is the name!

Ah right thanks, must be getting old.

It's not a coin toss at all. Judge Mehta's ruling is rock solid, as are all of his rulings historically. An appeal won't get very far.