I originally looked into using a Mac mini but couldn’t find one in a decent price range. They would work well for a node. However, make sure you buy one with enough ram, or a model that is upgradable. Late 2014 have soldered ram, so your stuck with initial configuration. Hard drives are swappable.
Discussion
Couldn’t do much about the ram… but for storage, couldn’t I just plug in an external HD?
I’m just thinking… for $150 I couldn’t do the Raspberry Pi build for that cheap… it would cost me 3x to do that build VS this. Though I do think the Raspberry Pi build would be more fun and cooler looking
Yes, you can use an external HD. I wanted to keep things tidy and so using the internal storage I thought was a plus.
Always depends on the price, here I couldn’t find one under 300$, so I decided to get a Pi4 and forget about the Mac mini.
Deep down I still want to buy a Pi4 and build out a cool little node in a nice case with fan lights and all that good stuff. lol