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
More from Infra
- Anthropic S-1 reveals 48 cents of compute cost per dollar of Q2 revenue — nmasc_ · 2026-10-26
- Persistent AI joins UR network to route private AI inference with encrypted, IP-hidden traffic — 0xSammy · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic's disclosed compute commitments: $114.5B Google, $161.2B Broadcom top the list — BenBajarin · 2026-10-26
- SpaceX strikes $40B deal with Apollo Global to lease AI chips and data center hardware — Polymarket · 2026-10-26
- SpaceX AI revenue up 830%, Claude designs 318K antivenom proteins in 64 hours — PeterDiamandis · 2026-10-26
- Meta plans up to $95 billion stock sale to fund AI buildout — The Decoder · 2026-10-26