Welp. You're definitely correct. But that's the only machine in my opinion that comes close (and offers some advantage like a whole PCIe 5.0 x16 slot). There are other mini PCs that are cheaper, some other commenter suggested Beelinks which are also quite popular among enthusiasts, SER8 for example: Ryzen 8745HS, 24 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD for 467 Euro. Seems competitive enough.
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.
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.
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.
