Un Mac mini pot substituir totes les subscripcions? Estalvi, límits i riscos

Let's get nerds. So, I use a lot of tech and even if you don't even use a lot of tech, I feel like we've all seen subscription creep. So, it's like our budgets are getting death by a thousand different cuts. It's like I want to listen to music, I have to pay $15 a month. I want to watch something on Netflix, I have to pay $20 a month. I want to just store my photos and my phone doesn't have a lot of storage, then I have to pay another $20 a month to get iCloud storage. And I felt like there had to be another solution that was cheaper. So, I started researching all the different ways that I can go ahead and replace these subscription services and I found a lot of different alternatives and a lot of people were saying get a PC, turn it into a server. It seemed a little bit too technical for me. On top of that, it's like a PC draws a lot of power, it's pretty loud, and it's definitely not small, especially you can get ones in like big cases. I didn't want any of that. I just wanted something I could sit on my desk. I know it'll work. I don't really have to do too much maintenance on it. So, I figured out the best solution to that, and it's a Mac Mini. If you're new around here, I'm Tommy. I like to make tech videos, but I like to focus on not having like big sponsorships in my tech videos. So, this video is sponsored by myself, but if you want to support the channel or just check out some other tech videos, be sure to drop a subscribe down below or just check out my channel. So, as I was doing research, I kept coming back to this little guy. So, this is the Mac Mini. You've probably heard a lot about it because people were running like Claude code and stuff and it made the stock super limited for these things, but people were running AI models and stuff off of them. While it can do that, that's like the upgraded version. I found that you could run all of your subscription services, have tons of storage on this thing for $500. Now, that $500 price tag is only if you're a student, but if you are a student, it's a great deal. You get $100 straight off the gate. You just have to go to Apple's education store. And honestly, with the rising cost of everything like RAM, computer storage, all that, this is the best computer you can get nowadays. And on top of that, I suggest getting this pretty soon because I feel like the prices for computers just can't stay at the price they are at now, given all the world stuff going on right now. Not going to get too much into that. So, with $600, you could replace all of these different services. [music] And I really think that's worth it because you pay this one upfront fee, but you're honestly saving like $100 a month. So, later in this video, I'm going to show you how to actually change out each one of these subscription services, but honestly, altogether, this computer really pays for itself in about 4 to 8 months. So, it's super worth it and on top of that, you have a consistent backup storage, you know where everything is going into the future. And you know what? The crazy part is anyone can do this. I mean, if I'm able to do it, I feel like it'll be pretty easy for most people out there to do it. I'm not a super technical IT guy or anything like that. Um I do know a little bit more about computers than the average person. So, if you go in the description of this video and you want to learn how to install any of these in depth, I added tutorials down there that I watched that helped me install them. And when I list out the softwares, I'm going to list them from the easiest to do to the hardest and what they replace. So, that way you can kind of pick and choose whatever you need for your server cost. Now, I'm not saying you should go ahead and delete all your subscriptions. It's totally doable if you want to do that, but for me personally, I like sort of a hybrid scenario. So, something like Apple Music where if I'm a student, it only costs $5.99 a month, that's worth it to me to keep even though I could technically switch to my own MP3 library, but I like to have both. So, I like to have all my own songs on my MP3 library, but sometimes I like to listen

to new music. So, I also pay for Apple Music. And again, I don't think you should just delete all your storage, but I think the main idea here is to get those subscription prices down to maybe you're only paying $20 a month and the rest is all on your own personal server that you can access. And the crazy part about all of this is with the rise of AI and tools like Claude, really anybody can do this. Some of the more in depth softwares I'm going to talk about like image, make you install Docker. And just sort of as an experiment, I used Claude to install Docker for me and actually set up all the repositories for this. Now, I'll say use this at your own risk, but for me personally, this worked great. I actually didn't have to touch a single thing. It did it all for me. So, it seems like you don't really need to have any IT skill or like learn any of these softwares because they'll just install for you if you use Claude. Now, I will say Claude is $20 a month, but if you just want to use it to install these softwares, you can actually get a one month free trial of Claude and have it install all these for you. So, you actually don't have to pay anything to use this tool. And if you want to see anything specific like how to install a specific software or the price breakdown for everything, just go ahead and check out the timestamps in this video. I got it all mapped out. So, I think the problem here is you don't own any of your media. So, streaming libraries shrink, the prices go up, and accounts get hacked and stuff. And for me personally, I don't want to deal with that, especially if it's something that, I don't know, some random server is hosting all my media, all my photos, everything. And granted, I guess you could say there is some stability with a big corporation housing all of this because if their servers go down, basically everybody's servers go down, but I don't want to be there in the event where, let's say, Google, for example, goes down because of an AWS outage, which happens multiple times a year, and then I'm stuck without photos or I don't have access to all my own documents. And I will say, especially if you run a business or you just want to keep all your stuff local, this is a really important tool to have. And working in collaboration with Google Drive and having your own file storage, I think this is a great solution where you can really build a robust system, especially in the event of something like a power outage or all of this stuff is stored locally. You don't have to worry about it. Now, I will say you do want to have backups of everything in case of the event of a fire. Having something like Google Drive as your offsite backup could be a good tool to have. So, I don't want to completely knock all the subscription services, but if you just want to set this up, see how it works, I think it's a great thing to dip your toe into. And on top of that, you also get a really powerful computer for the price. And on top of that, you don't really own your own libraries, which is kind of the unfortunate part. So, for example, some artists like to switch out versions of their song as time goes on, but what if you really like the original version of that song? Well, I guess you're out of luck. You have to go find it on YouTube or something. I think there is an importance to owning your own media and that way you know that you own it. No one can really change it out unless it's you. And on top of that, I actually bought a movie from Amazon a few years ago and it disappeared from the library and I guess Amazon no longer owned the rights to that movie. But what does that mean for me? I bought the movie, but I don't own the movie. Like it doesn't make any sense where I actually paid Amazon, but I don't get the movie anymore. Like they they get to I guess gatekeep it to a certain region. Things like that really made me want to get more interested in hosting my own server. And another example of that, too, is where I bought a movie on Google Movies in 4K. It would only show it to me in 360p. So, all of that is just sort of a blatant scam to me. It's like I bought it, but I don't actually get full

rights and access to the media that I bought. So, owning your own server actually gets rid of all these problems. And trust me, there's ways to do it where you don't really have to pay too much money to do a lot of that. I'm not going to get into that in this video, either. So, I'm going to talk about the price breakdown and there's going to be a follow-up video to this one about a lot of the accessories that I have surrounding my Mac Mini that get this whole thing to work. But you really only need the base Mac Mini. And you might be wondering, well, the base Mac Mini is only 500 gigs. Is that enough? And I will say actually it is because the Mac Mini has Thunderbolt 4, which means if you have an NVMe drive or anything that accepts Thunderbolt 4, you can actually get faster read-write speeds than the internal SSD on this thing. The other option, too, is a lot of people have actually been modding the internals of the Mac Mini and you can go on Amazon and find these uh 2 TB NVMe drives that actually plug directly in your Mac Mini. Now, do keep in mind that does void the warranty and you do have to be a little bit more technical. For me personally, I just have this case that stores a 1 TB drive that I harvested from an old PC because you see, you do not want to be buying SSDs right now. They're like way overpriced. But I got this enclosure for about 40 bucks and I just plugged that one straight into my Mac Mini and there we go. I have an extra terabyte added on with almost internal level storage. I do want to mention as well that the Mac utilizes memory swapping, which means that you do want to keep the internal memory pretty low because it'll actually use the internal memory as VRAM, which speeds up your computer. So, if you have a lot of files hogging the main SSD, then the Mac's not going to use that as VRAM and you also can't use external drives as VRAM, but you can run apps like Premiere Pro and After Effects all from an SSD that's plugged into the Thunderbolt 4. Now, on top of that, I also have this 4 TB HDD drive, which basically means there's a hard spinning disk in there. So, if I drop it, then it basically all my storage is gone. So, for that, it's a lot slower, they're a lot cheaper, but it's great to have if you're just talking about storing like a big Google Photos library instead. You can store it all on here. I just keep that 1 TB one specifically for apps and cash and all of that. And then internal, I have 500 GB on my Mac, but I try to keep that pretty empty. And then I have that 4 TB drive that kind of just serves as big bulk storage if I need it ever. So, that's sort of my main setup in terms of the storage. And then for the Mac Mini, you can get it for $500 as a student or $499 and $699 if you're not a student, but still a great deal. So, next I'm going to talk about the different softwares that you can download for this thing and what services they replace. So, like I said in the intro of this video, I'm not really going to get in depth on how to replace each one. I'm sort of just going to go over what they are, how easy they are to install. So, like I talked about before, you definitely want to have something like Claude or an AI to help guide you through this just in case you run into any error messages and stuff. I found it super helpful for me. If I get some error on my computer, I can actually copy that error. You can ask like Google Gemini for free or you can ask Claude and Claude can actually do stuff on your computer for you, which is a pretty cool service. So, I'm going to mention Claude first as something that's pretty important to have. The next thing that's important to install is called Tailscale. And what this is is it's essentially like NordVPN, but instead of tunneling to a random network in a different country, you're actually tunneling into your home network. Now, this is important if you want to be able to access any of your files that you store on here from outside your home network, which I imagine you will, especially if you have like something like Google Photos and stuff. You don't want to have access to those outside of your house. So, Tailscale makes it super

easy. You can just go log straight into Tailscale, turn on the VPN, it'll connect right to your home network. So, I really won't feel like you're limited to only accessing all your content in your house. That way you can access it no matter where you go. And on top of that, you don't really want to expose all your stuff to the internet. There's other ways of doing this where you can set up your own domain and then log into your home network and stuff, but you don't want to really deal with that because then you're dealing with having people hacking into your own stuff and all that. You'd rather just have Tailscale where it just privately tunnels into your network. You don't really want to have to deal with any of that. Now, Tailscale is super easy to install. All you do is just go to the website, download and install on your phone, and then download and install on your computer. You can install it in as many devices as you want and that way they can all connect up to that same network. For the easiest thing for me to replace was Spotify because with a Mac mini, obviously it comes with Apple Music. And if you have an iPhone, you can hook up all this to iCloud, which means that your libraries will actually connect up whenever you're on the same network. So, all of your libraries get managed between your computer and your phone. So, you actually don't really need to do any setup. This comes pre-installed with the Mac. You just need to be on the same iCloud. And if you want to learn how to actually manage these libraries, just download an app called Meta. And what this allows you to do is put them all on the same album and change out the album cover and all the metadata within them. And I do want to say you want to be careful with this because if you do mess up some of the metadata, you could accidentally drag in one album and it'll make like 20 songs and they'll all be different on different albums. So, you do want to download something like Meta where you can change out that metadata and make sure your imports are good. But once you get it all set up, it's super easy to use on your phone. You can just go straight into Apple Music and you can load it all in there. And along with this one, you also want to make sure that your Mac can recognize your iPhone across the network instead of being plugged in. That way you can handle all of your backups and stuff remotely. Don't really have to worry about iCloud. And whenever your backups are on your computer, you actually have like physical access to them in the case that you ever need to like really access them. And there's apps that let you go through and pull out specific data from a backup of your phone. It's not something that you really think about having until you actually really need it. So, I will say setting up this backup on your MacBook instead of to the iCloud is a really great alternative and it's not something that I've seen anyone talk about with these Mac mini servers. Next up is Netflix. Now, if you've watched any like home labbing videos or anything about the Mac mini server, I'm sure you've heard of Plex, but it's really great. It's the easiest one to install. All you do is go to the website and you can install the Plex server. And then anytime you're on your home network, you can actually go ahead and watch any movie or TV show or song that you put on there. And there's also different additions to it. So, for me, I like to put books on there as well. You can read books through your Plex server as well. And the reason why I like Plex so much is it goes through IMDb and will automatically fill out all the details, the season numbers. You just have to make sure you have the correct file structure. And then once you have that set up, you can put your whole library on Plex and go ahead and watch that wherever you want. Especially with that Tailscale setup, you can watch it basically from anywhere in the world. So, I know I talked about getting a Claude subscription, but if you're not super into using any AIs, but you ask the occasional Google question or you ask ChatGPT a question occasionally, I think something like LM Studio could be

great. So, what LM Studio does is it lets you download open-source AI models and run them locally on your computer. So, not only are you saving money every month, but you're actually saving the environment as well because you're not querying a data center. You're actually doing it all directly on your Mac mini. I will say something like this is where an upgrade to the Mac mini could be good, but you can run some pretty decent models with a base Mac mini where you could get something like Gemma 4 which just came out, which actually can run on a phone, but you can get a little bit more of a powerful one for the computer. And it runs great. I mean, you can ask it any kind of question. Obviously, the longer that your chat history goes, the longer it'll take to respond. It's not going to be immediate, but it's something where if the internet ever shuts off or anything like that, you have access to all these different parameters on your computer. You can just query them right there. So, I think that's a great addition to have. I really suggest downloading LM Studio. It's not really a server necessarily. You can turn it into an AI server where you can log in with your phone, but I more suggest it just so you can cancel your ChatGPT or Claude subscription. If you're just really asking basic questions, you don't need the crazy computing power that Claude could have. So, next up, these two are a bit more intensive to install. The easiest of the two is Nextcloud. So, this one's great because it can replace everything that Google Drive does or Microsoft Office. And especially if you run a small business, I would highly suggest looking into this because you can customize your own server to not only host all your files and folders, but you can have a slideshow presentation through this thing. You could do different word documents. You can edit the word documents and you can also edit images and stuff. So, I think it's a great addition to have. And being able to customize it makes it even better. You can install it to whatever drive you want it to be on. So, for me, I have it on this 4 TB drive and it can handle all my backups. So, anything I was using Google Drive for, I now just use Nextcloud. And I do use Microsoft Word, but it's great because Nextcloud actually has support for Microsoft Word. So, I can drop in uh different docs and stuff. And you can share things through Nextcloud to people who are not actually part of your home network or anything like that. So, it's the same as just having a Dropbox or a Google Cloud subscription. But the main benefit here is that if you ever run out of storage, you're not paying monthly to lease out storage. You just go and buy like, let's say, another 4 TB drive. So, you spend another 50 to 100 bucks to get another 4 TB drive and you're good for another few years. So, this thing really pays for itself pretty quickly. And the built-in version of sheets and docs and slides. And how I found this was I was looking for a replacement. So, Google offers students like a free year of their pro plan, but after that, you have to pay for it. So, I get 2 TB for free through Google because you're stuck with that 2 TB and then if you downgrade, it's like a whole issue where you're constantly out of storage and you don't really get access to make new Google Docs or anything like that. And so, I found Nextcloud and using it has been great so far. I'm slowly replacing everything from my Google Drive. And something to note here as well is Google actually lets you download everything from your Google Drive all in one big export and they'll email it to you if you're trying to merge your library over from Google Cloud to Nextcloud. Now, I don't really know about OneDrive, but I feel like since it's Microsoft, it's going to be a bit more of a pain, unfortunately. And lastly, this was the hardest one to set up, but I think the most rewarding and the best and that one's Image. So, this is a Google Photos alternative. And I've been using Google Photos for I think more than 10 years now and I have not noticed a single difference between the two of them. It backs up all the same. Uh everything's stored locally on the

drive. Everything loads quickly. I don't have to worry. And it actually compresses the stuff down for you. And actually recently, Google Photos switched over from their old algorithm to now actually using an AI to figure out what's in your photos and it's actually gone worse. So, I used to be able to type in something as simple as white car 2022 and it would pull up all the white cars from 2022, but now it just sort of thinks about it and brings up images it thinks is close to a white car from 2022. It's not as good at all. Image has the same AI where it's able to pull up all those photos of white car from 2022 and it doesn't like think about it like an AI would. It actually just pulls up everything that you're looking for and it's worked out great for me. And I was actually looking for a replacement for Google Photos, but it's great I don't have to pay monthly for this. I just set it up running on my computer. Now, I do want to say there is a little bit of a caveat here. I have seen in the past that people have had issues with Image loading all their stuff, but the good news is since everything's stored on the directory of your drive, you can go ahead and find those still. And it's become more stable over the years, but it is something to point out that it is still under development, still in beta. So, you might run into a few problems. But for me so far, I've been using it about 2 weeks and I haven't noticed anything. And it even has the same auto backup feature, so I don't have to worry about backing up all my photos manually. So, this one sort of replaces Google Photos and iCloud. Anyway, that's it for me. If you want to see more about my personal Mac mini setup or if you enjoyed this video, be sure to drop a comment down below. I'm curious to hear what apps you'll be downloading on your Mac mini or if you even want to get a server like this in the first place. But I definitely think it's a great investment, especially with the rising cost of everything. You're really just locking in the price and it's going to pay for itself in a few years. But yeah, that's pretty much it for me. Anyway, later.