Really?
In the American car market annual updates seem to be the norm, but it is not so in other markets or for other products. Some things go unchanged for years, while others are updated as technology develops, consumer expectations changes and so on. Apple is no different from normal in that respect.
Oh, the lovely car analogy.
Yeah, the European car manufacturers have a model refresh every year aswell. If nothing else, just a facelift.
In my experience, all these refreshes, annual, facelifts, and new models serve to boost consumer interest against a backdrop of increasing costs due to inflation.
For European cars entire models last 5-7 years, with annual refreshes to justify the annual price increases.
Annual 'refreshes' usually involve making certain optional extras part of base specs over time - it's part of the expectation of consumers who may have otherwise balked at annual price increases year on year.
An exterior facelift is a major affair, giving the look of the model a refresh - this usually happens once during a model lifetime but can happen twice if the entire model hangs around for an 8th year.
This makes the model look fresher for consumers even though the underlying car is the same vehicle but obviously for repair purposes there are different panels to manufacture.
On an underlying basis, if something needs to be changed the manufacturer may choose to wait for a facelift model (halfway through the lifetime of a vehicle) to add wireless CarPlay for example, or fix the way some electrics are routed if there is an issue.
And finally, an all new model is there to take in new engine tech, improvements in materials, and electronics - which are notoriously slow to get updates on cars - CarPlay is only just starting to feed in cars having been around for years.
How does this apply to the Mac mini?
Well, over time consumers may have their interest piqued by a new form factor - having become bored of the old one - making the 2018 model space grey was a great way of setting it apart from the 2014 if they weren't going to completely redesign the exterior.
Apple may find that the cooling system on a model that's essentially looked the same since 2011 could be improved still further - that's something that was addressed "under the hood" between 2014 and 2018 because of the CPU choice and change in storage format.
And the world PC market usually sees PCs drop in price steadily over time. Apple don't do this which runs counter to how PCs are usually marketed. But to use a car analogy, new technology replaces old and one of the major arguments against the 2014 mini was the CPU that was superseded many times over the 4 long years that it never got the update.
This is part of the reason why Intel offer a refresh mostly every year. An annual refresh with the newly available Intel CPU keeps the Mini up to date.
Without annual 'updates' that consumers like us expect, interest will wane - some people think apple don't care, others refuse to buy because a refresh would mean a bigger leap in tech.
So a 2020 mini with the least amount of updating would just see a doubling in storage for no extra money because Apple can afford to do it judging by what they did with the 16" Macbook Pro - this is because Apple generally don't discount prices throughout the lifetime of a product.
There would be no engineering resources required and Apple would balance the cost of increasing the SSD on SKUs with the increase in sales.
A 'facelift' would actually see Apple updating the innards with a new more current CPU while keeping the enclosure the same. This would also bring a boost in sales but would it be worth it for Apple?
Obviously an entirely new model could see the Mini going further upmarket and becoming bigger to accommodate onboard discrete graphics, new CPU, and decent cooling. Let's call it a 'Mac'?
Freak out if they don't update the machine this Sept/Oct.
If they are taking the Mini seriously they'll have to look at it. If they want to see revenue from the Mini go up they'd also have to chase even higher spec customers to make more money per unit. This would require an external redesign of the existing chassis unless Apple were eyeing up a move to H series mobile Ice Lake CPUs to take advantage of extra threads for their Colo customers with TDPs going up.
