Apple offers unusually high $1,175 trade-in for M4 Pro Mac Mini, sparking DGX Spark vs M5 Ultra debate
noless15k · reddit · 2026-09-10
A user doing mechanistic interpretability found Apple offering $1,175 for his M4 Pro Mac Mini — 56% of the $2,099 he paid, far above Apple's typical 44% retention, and up from $1,050 in late August. The same config now costs $2,699 new, inflation lifting resale value.
- He's weighing a DGX Spark ($4,699) vs M5 Max/Ultra ($5,099–5,499) for work requiring access to model internals that subscriptions can't provide
- His math: Spark gives 2x+ INT4 (Autoround/AWQ) prefill over the Mini; a second Spark would be 4x the compute at a total cost near a 256GB M5 Ultra
- Gripes: the M5 Ultra should start at 128GB, not 96GB; Ultra launch price rose from $4k to $5.5k, DGX Spark from $4k to $4.7k; the M4 Pro is 10x+ slower at prefill, but everything feels overpriced right now
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