Mac Mini vs. Macbook value
The Mac Mini can be considerably cheaper than MacBooks, making the Mac Mini a good value for developers who work at a desk.
Running benchmarks that take about ten minutes, the Mac Mini fan did not come on and the case was still cool to the touch. If building large projects, consider the amount of RAM to avoid needing to limit build parallelism to avoid running out of RAM on build.
The Mac Mini has a modestly adequate internal speaker suitable for quiet offices. With macOS, the volume was not controllable in macOS itself with HDMI audio on the same monitor that volume control worked with Raspberry Pi–to be clear, this is an OS setting, not adjusting the monitor itself. It’s also disappointing that a microphone isn’t built in–this would have been useful for Siri at least. Perhaps Apple may have felt people would try to use an internal Mac Mini microphone for conferencing, and then get disappointed if they weren’t close enough to it for good sound.
As compared to a cloud physical Mac service, the Mac Mini pays for itself in a year, while adding value as a media center and convenience of having a local physical Mac.