The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.

• thekevan

  today at 6:05 PM

  I bought 2 Beelink s12 PCs just under 3 years ago and paid $254 total for both. (N95, 8gb ram, 256 ssd)

  The same PC is now shipping with a 480 ssd but is otherwise the same and selling for $300 - $319 depending on the day.

• yathern

  last Monday at 12:57 AM

  For sure - prices are bizarre right now - though if you sort by memory, there's some holdout units that have like 32GB of memory for $250 (though other poor stats)

This is so cool. Thanks for doing this. I was able to get the Optiplex 7050 with the i5-6500T and 8GB of RAM (no SSD) for $40 USD about 2 years ago, shocked it's $100 USD now! I brought 8 for some reason, this makes me feel better that I at least purchased it during the glut.

This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.

Nice homage to MiniPCs - I have a fanless N150 box with usb-c HDD as a carefree NAS/docker host for years.

It would help if you actually explained what the color means.

What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?

• yathern

  last Monday at 12:49 AM

  Colors are distance to the pareto frontier for the given setting for "dealscope"! Easily noticed when axis and color are set to the same dimension (EG CPU) - but setting to different things allows you to visualize two dimensions (three, with price) without needing a 3D chart. I found it really useful to find outliers, but I realize it's a bit nonstandard!

  Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal

  • yodon

    last Monday at 12:55 AM

    It's great that you understand the chart. Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us. We read green then yellow then red as a sign of DECREASING fit. And a bunch of blues next to that green to red progression reads as "no data" or "not relevant" or something.

    It's great that you have the data. I'm sure that took a lot of time to obtain. Spending a few more percent of your total time making the presentation of the data intuitive to others is almost certainly the highest ROI thing you can do at this point, if you want your site to be useful enough to get enough visitors to pay for the cost of acquiring the data.

    Feel free to tell me that red is the lowest Pareto value and that's why you made the frontier red, or whatever. I'll still respond that the details of the presentation matters enormously to adoption, and the current presentation is very far from optimally intuitive to those of us who didn't personally develop the data.

    • yathern

      last Monday at 1:12 AM

      Oh for sure - your feedback is totally helpful, I agree the colors are not obvious (especially red being good), perhaps my tone sounded dismissive but that was not the intention at all - symtom of a quick response from my phone! I'll definitely work on improving the readability of the colors and what it means (tricky to find the balance between nerdily over explaining how it works)

      • ozmaverick72

        last Monday at 1:27 AM

        If there was a key explaining what the colors meant that would be great. And maybe the option to select colors or pick between a couple of alternatives - i think in western culture green is good but in Chinese i think they normally think of red as the best - just being able to swap between those two defaults would probably be enough - thanks for your hard work - much appreciated

      • kristopolous

        last Monday at 2:30 AM

        the color allocation is closer to chinese symbolism than western. You don't need to change it, just describe it somewhere, probably with a rainbow strip, maybe bottom right, like a scale symbol on a map.

        • yathern

          last Monday at 4:23 AM

          An earlier version included a rainbow color scale but it felt cluttered - I'll definitely bring it back in some capacity for sure - thanks for the feedback

    • viccis

      last Monday at 1:49 AM

      >Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us

      Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.

      • pockybum522

        last Monday at 11:27 AM

        Yeah. It was so obvious to me I didn't think about it until I read the comments. Makes sense that it would trip some people up, though.

• last Monday at 12:51 AM

Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.

Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?

• pockybum522

  last Monday at 11:29 AM

  Kind of crazy to me that anyone would block an entire TLD. This timeline is bizarre. How often and with what services do you find zip blocked? Genuinely curious

  • yourusername

    last Monday at 12:21 PM

    My employer blocks it on our work computers. Looking around it seems like this is commonly done because one of the main uses of the .zip tld is to spread malware by faking links to zip files using "/" look alike characters and other URLs that look like download links to zip files.

    • ErroneousBosh

      last Monday at 1:50 PM

      Well by that token we should probably also block the .com TLD since that is actually an executable file suffix.

    • yathern

      last Monday at 1:18 PM

      https://luke.zip/posts/zip-defense/

      I get asked this a lot, so here's my defense!

Failed to load listings (500)

• yathern

  last Monday at 10:49 AM

  Fixed!

Could you also plot various Mac Minis for reference?

• yathern

  today at 5:33 PM

  I intentionally have them excluded - I guess because my use case is mostly gaming, homelab, plex server type stuff. But people use them for OpenClaw and whatnot right? I'll add em back in

500.

This is exactly the kind of chart that gets better the more suspicious it is of its own inputs. Since Gemini is extracting specs from listings, I would love to see a small confidence field or "last verified from listing" date next to each point.

Two fields that would make the Pareto view easier to trust:

1. New vs refurbished vs unknown. Mini PC listings blur that line constantly. 2. Power draw at idle and under load, even if it starts as a rough bucket. A box that wins on dollars can lose badly if it is going to sit in a homelab for three years.

The CPU/GPU/storage/memory toggle is nice. It makes the site feel like a tiny buying lab instead of another affiliate table.