TL;DR

I put my €1800 MacBook Pro M1 Pro head-to-head with a €300 mini PC and found the cheaper option surprisingly fast. While the mini PC couldn’t completely replace my Mac for work due to some software and hardware limitations, it made me question the need for expensive purchases. Do we really need the latest and greatest hardware to be productive? Or are we being pushed to constantly upgrade for features we might not even fully utilize?

Introduction

I often wonder how much computing power we need to strike a balance between “fast enough to use comfortably” and “overpowered and overpriced so you never use it to its full potential”?

Slow computer hardware frustrates me. If you can think faster than your computer or perform operations quickly, but it takes “time to think while showing you a beach ball,” you’re wasting your time. When a computer takes seconds to think “here” and another few seconds “there,” it adds up to hours of wasted time over the years. Additionally, waiting for the computer to finish operations fragments your attention significantly.

I know this from experience. Growing up with slow dial-up modems in the 90s, I had to wait several seconds, sometimes even dozens of seconds, for a web page with all its images to fully load. Since then, I’ve developed a habit of getting distracted by other tasks too often while working.

For me, having a fast computer is both a way to stay focused and save time.

But I often wonder: how much computing power is enough?

As a longtime Mac user, I decided to look for a cheap alternative by installing FreeBSD to see what I could achieve.

€1800 MacBook Pro vs. €300 Mini PC review

My MacBook Pro M1 Pro, which cost around €1800, has the following specs:

• 10 CPU cores (8 performance and 2 efficiency)
• 16 GB of RAM, LPDDR5
• SSD hard drive
• mac