fourish

There are tons of listing for cheap Mac’s on marketplace now. Even Mac studios. The mini M4 is a very good deal. Super happy with mine.

Older intel macs could do an internet recovery on a bare drive. The internet recovery system was part of the ROMs/BIOS.

Don’t tell him about building an unRAID server on a PC. It’s a rabbit hole your dad will love.

Can scale it from cheap used hardware to top of the line server hardware.

I started mine with retired PC hardware and have upgraded it to used commercial server hardware and it’s rock solid with more storage than my office server at work. 😂. The ultimate tinkering platform.

Set mine up as well. Marvellous piece of kit. Quite affordable for what you get.

I’ve heard it doesn’t due to Apple restrictions on the new operating systems for Apple silicon but I’ve never tried it myself.

Ifixit accomplished it. Required another Mac to reinstall the OS.

Apple decided they want memory modules that only contain memory because the storage controller is on their own silicon and they have direct low level access to the storage chips if they do it themselves. Probably cheaper (for them) without redundant controller parts they don’t need too.

Surprised nobody has reverse engineered this yet to make compatible upgrade modules. Probably not enough money in it. Edit: there’s a kickstarter for some homebrew modules which seem to work but they’re still pretty expensive.

I just got mine with 1TB. I added a second external SSD for a bit more space. Good enough for me. The only issue is that I can’t point the Dropbox app at the external drive. The new one has to point to the user home folder (guess I could move all of that to the external drive).

They actually do. I work with them and I’ve seen it on multiple occasions here (not the US). Maybe you should try it.

But I’m not talking about the US. Did you miss that?

Yes totally agree about that. I don’t believe the police in Canada have qualified immunity however it is more difficult to get a conviction against them.

Already got my shipping notification. Thankfully work is footing the bill but it’s not unreasonably expensive for the value it provides me at work.