A friend of mine recently picked up an Intel-based 2018 Mac Mini on eBay as he wanted a Mac that didn’t break the bank (he only paid around £350) and needed to run a Windows VM on it. I had to pause when he said, “It’ll be good for years. Apple is still selling them”.
I checked, and sure enough Apple is still making and selling it. It’s got an 8th gen (!) Intel chip that was released over 5 years ago and had production discontinued a year-and-a-half ago. Here in the UK, Apple wants £1099 for the i5 and £1299 for the i7. 
With 8Gb RAM.
What the hell is going on here? Why is Apple still selling these devices when they could simply slap an M2 into the existing enclosure and sell it alongside the M1 Mini? Or, at the very least, why haven’t they updated it with a newer Intel chip? The Mini lineup looks very odd right now, to say the least…
