To be fair, it was a pretty vague anecdote with dubious relevancy. If someone joined the Hyundai community and said commented on the 2024 Elantra thread that they hate the Elantra because their 2002 Elantra broke down, they’d probably get downvoted too.

Apple has been making the Mac mini for 20 years, across 3 different processor architectures and 3 different body styles. With no details or timeframe, your anecdote is pretty pointless.

If you’re at all curious, the M4 Mini benches absurdly high for a computer of its size & power draw, and is one of the best performance per dollar products that Apple has ever put out according to pretty much all reviews. So you might give it another go if your entire opinion of the product line is based on an i3 Mac Mini you owned 10+ years ago.

I never said it couldn’t be interpreted as patronizing, but it’s also a fact. Apple absolutely thinks it knows better than their customers what they want, that’s the “courage” thing they were referring to in eliminating the headphone jack on the iPhone.

That’s what I mean by opinionated design. I’m not espousing it or defending it, I’m just explaining it. I would take issue with calling it “stupid” though, it’s actually very considered. Whether or not you agree with the reasoning or conclusion is your own business, but stupid implies a lack of consideration or an oversight. It’s definitely not that.

If after all that you still feel it’s stupid or patronizing, then this is not the product or company for you. Which is also totally OK. Not everything has to be for you.

It refers to the low power consumption of the chip, conventional wisdom is to shut down old, large or power hungry desktop computers because they generated a lot of heat and consumed a lot of power while idle.

Whereas if you think of the Mini more as a laptop in terms of the heat it generates and the power it uses, then it makes more sense why they think you don’t need to shut it off.

The enforcement is breaking bad habits that make your experience worse. There is no reason to wait for the computer to boot every time you need it, but people still do it because old habits die hard. But if they just stopped, they would enjoy and use the product more.

Because instant wake results in a better user experience. Contrary to popular belief, people frequently make decisions that make their experience worse out of habit or based on misinformation, especially when it comes to technology.

I don’t think your experience is invalid, it’s just that you’re in the apple_enthusiast community so maybe people just don’t want to hear it?

The rest of Lemmy will happily share in your Apple hatred and pile on with their own complaints, would it be alright if you left this little corner for us?

Which is exactly why they made this change. The Mac mini is essentially a screenless laptop in a tiny case. You don’t fully shut down your laptop between uses, so why would you shut this down? It probably costs $2/year in idle power costs. There is no common reason to regularly shut it off other than habits and personal preference.

Rather than Apple enforcing this through nag screens or other methods, they just make a simple design change to try and break this habit.

Yes but it repeatedly discharges and recharges that 5%, which generates heat and causes swelling. I’ve had to repair enough laptops left constantly plugged in to know this is an extremely common issue.

I never said I thought Apple was accounting for every use case here or that it was the best way to achieve this, so you’re arguing with the wrong person. I’m just explaining what they do and why they do it.

Because they don’t want you to. It’s not just for those reasons, those are just primary ones. They also don’t like the look of having it connected to a charge cable all the time, and users don’t “change the function” of anything on average so a solution that involves user choice doesn’t really work for them either.

If you’re looking for choice for the sake of choice when there is an obvious solution they can enforce through design instead, you’re looking at the wrong company.

You identified the issue right there, using the power button regularly is “normal” for similar devices. So how do they make it clear that it’s not “normal” for this device? Simple, make it hard to do.

I’m not saying you have to like it or even appreciate it, this is one of the most divisive things about Apple. I completely understand why people don’t like it and choose another solution as a result. It is the reality of how they design things though.

Because Apple design is opinionated. The charge port is on the bottom of the Magic Mouse because they want you to charge it and disconnect the cable rather than leaving it connected all the time and causing the battery to swell. The power button is on the bottom of the Mac mini because they want you to leave it on because it idles at essentially nothing.

People have decades of habits built up from time, and Apple’s designs have choices made to try and break those habits through negative reenforcement.