What malware in the wild? This isn’t the 90s anymore. A good quality add blocker and basic safe practices will do more to prevent malware than a OS will. If you are still managing to find viruses out in the wild these days, then god help your browsing history.
Data security and privacy is the big issue these days. Unfortunately your ISP is the weak link in that chain, so you are screwed regardless.
And the 3 letter agencies have back doors into every os at the kernel level. Some agencies even have backdoors built into the hardware itself. So again, you are screwed no matter what you do.
Cyber security is extremely extravagant security theater. If you want to protect your data, the best thing to do is to completely unplug your computer.
The main point to getting a Mac these days is if you need specific Mac only software, access to the ecosystem, or a specific hardware capability that only the M4 provides.
Does any of your use cases include any of the above?
Since one of your stated use cases is gaming, it is important to note that your experience will be vastly superior on Linux/x86 over MacOS these days.
As for baby’s first file server, Unraid might be a nice choice that provides lots of flexibility in the drive array department, allowing you to expand or contract things and mix and match old drives you have sitting around if you’re not entirely sure how deep you intend to go and dropping a lot of money from the start on lots of drives isn’t what you’re looking to do yet (but has room to expand into ZFS if you decide to go that route). They also have a nice community with lots of support available.
If you want to make a project of home lab, then proxmox with an HBA and a truenas VM. If you just want to serve files, then all the HDDs you have money or Sata connections for, a cli linux of choice, ZFS, and Samba or NFS (depending on who you need to serve files too)
one of the things I wanted to do with the mac was run some software that would let me use imessage on my android phone, but I decided I could live without it.
I have a roomate with a Windows computer (the one remaining Windows device in my house!) so I assume i would need Samba.
Might be worth looking at m2/m3 models used. Supposedly ‘old’ m machines are loosing a ton of value. Because the new entry level chips in some tasks can match old max chips. Effectively that puts a price seiling on those older max chips.
Often those machines have loads of ram and disk space. Youre not gonna pay new prices for that either.
And you get a better gpu this way.
Not 100% sure that works the same for the mini. Ive looked at macbooks. Dont see why it would be any different though.
I know, I get it, every company steals and sells your data.
But having a class action levied against you at least once per year from 2020-2024 would be my reason to avoid them.
Excluding yourself from privacy worries by stating ‘Don’t worry, we’re Apple. We would never!’ also does nothing to ease my concerns.