Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Next Mac Mini

rustyshelf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 361 posts

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#101

Post by Thrillington »

cesarb wrote: post #97
coldtea wrote: post #10

> Well, perfect except that six years in this machine is very creaky. It needs a reboot every week or so (otherwise it will refuse to launch anything). That sounds totally unrelated to the age of the machine, and totally related to what's installed, the mini running out of disk, etc. Maybe do a clean install of the OS? Aside from the mechanical parts (CD ROMS, Hard Disks, etc), the "digital" parts of a PC do not age…

There's one mechanical part which affects the execution speed: the fans. When they fail (or when the heatsink gets completely filled with compact dust), the CPU can overheat and throttle its speed.

I haven't looked at the mini line in a long time, but the whole point used to be that it was passively cooled so your media box didn't generate fan noise while you were watching TV.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#102

Post by nottorp »

arachnophobe wrote: post #46
arachnophobe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used a gigabyte Brix n2807 - it's slightly larger than other Brix models as it takes a 2.5" drive (using an old laptop drive to save costs). It's not powerful, but it runs Kodi and Windows 10 okay. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth don't work (or didn't when I first tried) with Linux out of the box. Up to 8gb LPDDR. No power brick. £80 on offer a couple of years ago.

Forgot to mention - fanless.

Well, I've checked the current offerings and I can't find any that doesn't have "19 V DC" as the power supply description. I guess I'm statistically irrelevant in their market.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#103

Post by windexh8er »

peatmoss wrote: post #68
windexh8er wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since there are a number of iterations of NUC I suppose you could have one that doesn't. However most of the Intel wireless chipsets are some of best supported. I own two Intel NUC and two Gigabyte Brix machines - all of them were specifically selected to run Linux and all of them work flawlessly out of the box under any major distro. One of my favorite desktop machines is the Intel Skull Canyon (NUC6i7KYK). It has a…

> I'd love to drop Intel from a pure privacy standpoint. Are you referring to the Intel Management Engine? I was under the impression that AMD was as bad if not worse than Intel in that regard: https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd Or is Ryzen expected to be better in that regard?

TBH I hadn't looked at AMD in that regard for quite some time since they hadn't been on my short list. Thanks for pointing this out, likely doubtful Ryzen will be any different unfortunately. sigh

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#104

Post by zuzun »

caleblloyd wrote: post #5

The NUC has full Linux support out of the box. You can configure them with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB-512GB SSD for $400-$500, especially if you go for the old model (Gen 6 Skylake instead of Gen 7 Kaby Lake, not much has changed)

I bought a Skylake NUC and I will buy more NUCs in the future but using them with Linux isn't all rosy:

- Getting the NUC to wake up after sleep is a hit or miss. Sometimes I can still SSH into it, but I never manage to get the display back on.

- One in every 200 boots the fan just doesn't start. Since the fan isn't very loud, some people might not notice this, which might or might not be a problem.

- One in every 1000 boots the fan seems to be the only thing that starts.

- Sometimes Wifi doesn't come up or goes down. Getting it back up is impossible.

- Getting into BIOS is annoyingly difficult.

I had some more problems but I think they were my monitors fault (looking at you, Dell). I've been using Linux since forever now and I never had so many problems with any machine.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#105

Post by nnain »

I hate to bring this up -- but I earnestly think that Apple would do better with a Product Manager at the top post. Tim did good work for the company in optimizing operations, however envisioning new products is a different ball game.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#106

Post by Brakenshire »

rwmj wrote: post #9

I would take a look at the Gigabyte Brix. The basic model is £119 [1] - considerably cheaper than the Intel NUC. I have a couple running a firewall and a little server, and they have trucked along for years without problems. [1] For a more complete spec including the other parts you may need, see: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/new-home-gateway-route...

> I would take a look at the Gigabyte Brix. The basic model is £119 [1]

Has anyone here tried these devices with Ubuntu, or maybe a more cut down distro? Could you use one of these as an internet and word processing box, with a normal/decent experience?

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#107

Post by windexh8er »

zuzun wrote: post #104
caleblloyd wrote: post #5

The NUC has full Linux support out of the box. You can configure them with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB-512GB SSD for $400-$500, especially if you go for the old model (Gen 6 Skylake instead of Gen 7 Kaby Lake, not much has changed)

I bought a Skylake NUC and I will buy more NUCs in the future but using them with Linux isn't all rosy: - Getting the NUC to wake up after sleep is a hit or miss. Sometimes I can still SSH into it, but I never manage to get the display back on. - One in every 200 boots the fan just doesn't start. Since the fan isn't very loud, some people might not notice this, which might or might not be a problem. - One in every 10…

Which model? I have NUC6i3SYH and NUC6i7KYK, neither exhibit any of the characteristics you've described. I've used Arch and Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on both as well as Windows 10 LTSB and Anniversary editions on the Skull Canyon. The latter is to run some graphics editing software (which is why I wanted dual M.2 slots so I could dedicate physical drives to each OS).

If it were really that bad I definitely wouldn't be able to use it as my daily driver. My Dell 5510 on the other hand is a PoS that I've had replaced 4 times now. I won't buy another Dell product because of that and their horrible support.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#108

Post by stoolpigeon »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #53
finstell wrote: post #34

Nowadays, I kind of enjoy seeing posts about people abandoning Apple ecosystem. Although it's painful, I myself have been yet another avid fan of pretty much Apple offered, it feels like this is not going to last forever. When they do the math, iPhone might seem the most lucrative (they seem not to care about anything else) but since they are killing the ecosystem with no Mac Pro, no Mac Mini and with so called pro M…

I had whatever the latest iPhone was for the past 8 years. But at some point I realized a whole Huawei/HTC/LG/whatever Android phone could be purchased for the price of an iPhone screen repair and it's pretty much adequate for what I want to do. So now I'm using a Nexus 5X. It's okayish, but costs 1/3 the price of the iPhone 7 that would also be relatively ok. Phones are just phones these days. The awkward part is th…

I chuckled at this because I have a 5X too and I like it but my wife's Moto G4 Plus is amazing and cost something like half of what I paid for my Nexus, so I feel like I paid more than I needed to for a solid phone.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#109

Post by gurkendoktor »

mobiletelephone wrote: post #73
finstell wrote: post #34

Nowadays, I kind of enjoy seeing posts about people abandoning Apple ecosystem. Although it's painful, I myself have been yet another avid fan of pretty much Apple offered, it feels like this is not going to last forever. When they do the math, iPhone might seem the most lucrative (they seem not to care about anything else) but since they are killing the ecosystem with no Mac Pro, no Mac Mini and with so called pro M…

I don't buy this argument. Developers will work on platforms that have users with money to spend, even if the development hardware is poor value. In this sense, Apple has us hostage!

I have no data, but I'd wager that iOS developers who sell directly to end users are rare nowadays. Most of us are paid good money to build apps for bigger companies that make their money outside of the App Store. Often we don't even use our own Mac for that, so as a first step, we might use a Mac at work and Windows/Linux at home.

If we left the ecosystem, the cost of native iOS development would increase, and companies would build portable (and/or crappy) apps instead. macOS indie apps would also lose some customers, and IMHO these apps are what makes the Apple world worthwhile in the first place.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#110

Post by protomyth »

Symbiote wrote: post #11

Especially useful, "VESA mount bracket included in the box". If you don't mind ~35mm more depth to your TV, you can mount the NUC on the back. Or, mount it to the back of a monitor, for an iMac replacement.

We just did a full lab (30 machines) of Intel NUCs (NUC6i7KYK) mounted on the back of LG 21x9 monitors. It is quite a nice setup. I dearly wish there had been an Apple Mac Mini update, but we can get by with Windows in that lab. Went with Samsung M.2 SSDs and 32 GB of memory.
Post reply on HN