>Again, maybe I'm just too rich to care about the $50 here but I thought the Apple premium has shaken itself off at least the used market.
On the base configurations /only/.
If you need a lot of ram and storage (neither of which are upgradable on modern macs, and in my experience storage being the most common component failure the idea of throwing away a computer because its SSD failed really grinds my gears) Apple is overpriced to an obscene point.
Maybe less so in the used market, but high specced devices that aren't very old are less likely to be found there, someone who bought a 24GB mac mini with 2TB of storage isn't selling a year old model on the market unless they're doing something like switching to PCs and regretting their decision to buy a mac.
In fact it's highly likely that those only-a-year-old mac mini you can find on the market exist because someone thought they could make do with the base configuration and realized 8gb of ram is total garbage but using an Apple computer they're left with no choice but to buy a wholly new computer just to fix that mistake.
The base mini, brand new, is 699, which is a price I actually find reasonable for a computer with that level of performance and the nice form factor. But it only comes with 8gb of ram, which is abysmally unusable for anything other than "I browse facebook in one tab" kind of computer usage, and at the same time the rest of the computer is so good it makes no sense to sell this much hardware just to open facebook on a browser. So, you configure it for at least 16gb and now it's 929 euros. If you want 24gb of ram, it's now 1159 euros. Ouch. Stings. It's +460 euros just for an additional 16 gigs of ram, ridiculous, ram has never been cheaper than in the past few years, the same goes for SSDs, yet Apple prices their SSD like this :
512gb +230 euros
1TB +460 euros
2TB +920 euros
Wat?
You can get a Samsung 990 pro PCI-E 4 with 4 TB of storage for 300 euros.
This is called a total ripoff.