I own a Mac Studio and a small-form HP Elite Mini G6 desktop PC. They’re both tiny, they’re both powerful and silent. They’re both great machines.
I bought the Mac when it was released by Apple (it’s the M1 Pro Max or something like that, I can’t recall when that was). It was a good chunk of money but it was worth it, fully and easily replacing and outperforming the old Mac Pro I had been using for years. It worked really well for all I needed, including video editing, and it took no space at all. I bought the HP used maybe two years after the Mac. Why do I need two computers, you may ask?
I don’t.
I always have been an Apple guy, since the mid-80s, and when that Mac Studio was released I knew it was the machine I had been waiting for a long time. I was happy to get my hands on it to replace my much older Mac Pro. It was an incredibly powerful machine and it still is. Like, really.
So, why buy the HP, then?
I decided I wanted to switch to GNU/Linux but did not want to ‘play’ with that idea on my work computer in case somethign would go wrong you know. So, I purchased a cheap used HP that was even smaller than my Mac Studio. I compared spec and brands and decided I would go for that kind of small form business machine as it was powerful enough for all my use case (save maybe for video editing, even though it should be usable for that task I never intended to do video on that PC). So, I startedusing it, and GNU/Linux and something odd happened.
I realized I liked GNU/Linux much more than I expected. Even more than macOS—to me, macOS has been going to shit since Apple decided they wanted to make it look and behave like if it was iOS.
A few months in, I was barely using the Mac at all. I could have sold the Mac Studio but habits are hard to change, and old habits are even harder—and I’ve been an Apple guy since the mid-80s. So, I did not sell it. Not yet.
The funny thing is that the day I needed more storage for the PC (on the Mac, I solved that by plugging external SSDs, cumbersome but OK-ish) I realized that on that HP PC it was easy to swap drives. One could simply put a larger SSD in the machine (two SSDs, as a matter of fact). And so I did, following the instructions in the official PDF to disassemble the entire machine, every single part of it. Doing so, I realized I could also add RAM or upgrade its CPU with a better one, change the WiFi/BT card, replace any broken parts if I ever had to.
And I could do all of that by using a single standard screwdriver.
In comparison, the Mac Studio looked to me like a giant pile e-waste. I mean, the moment anything would go wrong with it, there would nothing I could to fix or upgrade it since almost everything is soldered to the motherboard. And the one piece that is not, the SSD, Apple made it sure that’s it’s not using standard components (one can buy anywhere) and then, if by any luck one could find a compatible drive, Apple also made sure that, even if it was the exact same model, it would not be recognized by the Mac—“Buy our new computer, moron, don’t try to fix it”.
I was very disappointed by Apple and its green-washing marketing bullshit, as well as by the fact that there is still no law making it illegal to sell non-fixable and non-upgradable hardware here in Europe. And I was very impressed by that small HP PC.
And that’s what I want to support. So when times come to buy a new machine I will go the PC road and ignore Apple… That is if the PC industry has not, once again, decided to copy Apple like they have been doing for the past twenty years. The cynical in me has little doubt they would not hesitate much getting rid of easy to repair/upgrade machines the moment they realize that could help them sell more… e-waste.
Long live the holy margin, and fuck the planet.
If that was to happen, if PC easy to repair PC were to vanish, I don’t know when as thx to GNU/Linux I know I will be able to use that tiny HP machine for quite many years, I’ll consider my options at that moment. I know this one company that’s selling easy to fix laptops, called frame.work.
Published: 2025/01/15