> A. You can easily recover 50% of the purchase price of a Mini on a 2-year resale, B. it takes two seconds to rotate the bottom cap off to get at the RAM slots - the putty knife thing was the OLD version, C. any significant storage should be Thunderbolt-attached, not internal.

A – for a render farm used properly, by 2 years, most of the units should be well worn out. Maybe some people would pay 50% for unit that have been burning 24/7 for two years, but not me.

B: That’s good to know – I have not seen the new cases.

C: That seems horribly inefficient and expensive – I would equip them with internal SSDs – Apple’s price is crazy high. Render jobs to and from network storage with SSD caching the local render write and then in-between renders sending to network. That’s always proved fastest and lowest cost here on my informal render farm of 6 machines.

Local Thunderbolt on bank of say 20 mac minis – that’s crazy money, even just in cables.