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My Next Mac Mini

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Re: My Next Mac Mini

#311

Post by analog31 »

remir wrote: post #263
analog31 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the living room PC, I recently went even further downscale and replaced a wheezing old desktop box with a fanless mini-PC running Win10. It solves the problem of when both kids have homework at the same time. The only software on it is Chrome, since the kids do all of their stuff in the cloud. Oddly, it's the end of an era: The first computer I've owned that I'm not tempted to install MS Office on.

Why not go with a Chromebox or Chromebit instead? Seems like the perfect solution for your kids and no maintenance for you.

This is certainly a possibility, or even plain Linux. For myself, I'd like to be able to run Jupyter/Python, but I think this must be possible on a Chrome machine.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#312

Post by protomyth »

eanzenberg wrote: post #212
flycaliguy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are folding their desktop and laptop stuff into the IOS stuff, planning on a singularity in the next couple years. The iPhone will be able to carry their business over the hill of user discontent in the meantime.

That's exactly what they're not doing, and I dunno why everyone thinks they will.. maybe because that's what msft is doing? Apple repeatedly said their laptop/desktop/macos variants will remain for hardcore users who need that freedom, while ios is for users who want simplicity.

> I dunno why everyone thinks they will

Probably because we constantly hear stories that they have combined their OS teams. The recent problems with PDF Kit seem to confirm that there is a convergence and quality / features of the macOS side of the house are not a priority.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#313

Post by scott_karana »

ofcrpls wrote: post #126
nottorp wrote: post #17

Speaking of NUCs, are there any that are (a) quiet at load (b) have the PSU integrated in the case? Those are about the only redeeming qualities of a Mac Mini right now, and it pisses me off to no end that no one bothers with (b) on the Wintel side. Edit: please don't explain to me how a power brick that's sometimes as large as the NUC doesn't bother you, it does bother me.

I have a Skull Canyon Nuc and a Zotac EN1070 mini PC. The Zotac is quieter while gaming compared to the NUC and that surprised me.

Fan diameter is inversely proportional to speed, for the same volume of air movement.

Large, slow fans are much quieter (and easier on bearings!) than high RPM fans.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#314

Post by deeth_starr_v »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #179
MrTonyD wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I recently got a new position and I couldn't find the terminal on the company mac - and a fellow came by and said "you obviously aren't an Apple person". I didn't tell him that I was a Mach kernel engineer at NeXT and that I'd worked on code that is probably still in the OS - or that I've been in way too many meetings with Steve Jobs. Instead, I just quietly nodded and agreed with him.

My beard's not quite as grey but about a month ago I was asked in an interview to "design a garbage collector". Motherfucker. I BROKE Objective-C 2.0 and its GC in order to meet the soft real-time constraints of video rendering, I made all video related objects reference counted. Now there's ARC, but back then I took so much flack just to make video work appropriately. Anyways the guy 10 years my junior didn't know a…

Age discrimination is hardcore in tech! Especially programming. I get it, when I was 23 and people told me they were 40 I was like, "damn that's my mom's age. This guy is old." I was really stupid.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#315

Post by wolrah »

bsenftner wrote: post #96
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've been picking up Intel ComputeSticks: $99 gives you Win10, WiFi, 4GB RAM, HDMI & USB. I seem to remember I put a 32 GB SD card into my first one... I've been putting them behind our TVs, giving them web access. All I put on them are Chrome and Mame. The $99 ComputeSticks are just powerful enough to play standard def video from someone like NetFlix or Amazon. Higher bit rate streaming video is too much, and the'll…

> The $99 ComputeSticks are just powerful enough to play standard def video from someone like NetFlix or Amazon. Higher bit rate streaming video is too much, and the'll stutter. But they have higher spec ComputeSticks I've not played with for $199, and $299. (Maybe I'm being grumpy, but most video content simply does not need to be 4K, or HD.)

Even the slowest compute sticks had a BayTrail-T Atom in them which has support for hardware decoding of any 1080p content you're likely to come across and technically supports 4K 30FPS playback (though doesn't have the necessary DRM support to play any commercial 4K content). If your machine had trouble playing back any 1080p content you probably had something misconfigured in your player or video drivers so it was incorrectly using software decoding.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#316

Post by beautifulfreak »

nextos wrote: post #292
ScottBurson wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total laser focus on one thing seems like a great mantra for building a company (or turning around a failing one). But for sustaining a company that's already successful, I'm not so sure. If you really believe there's a Next Big Thing that you can bet the company on and win, like the iPhone, then maybe it makes sense to let other product lines languish. But, now that most of the world's population carry a computer in…

I agree. Is the Mac Mini so special it can't be updated by a small team periodically? Nope. It is in fact a quite mainstream machine, nothing too special about it. The uniqueness in the Mac Mini lies in Mac OS. No laser sharp focus is needed for incremental hardware updates. The Mac Pro has unique hardware, but between major redesigns it does not need any incredibly hard work. Just incremental improvements. I find it…

"It is in fact a quite mainstream machine, nothing too special about it." The mini introduced a form factor that has since been emulated so often that it seems less special than it was at first, but it was something new. Small computers extant back then were larger than the mini. Most were based on the Mini ITX motherboard design, introduced in 2001, and all of them looked like boxen (ugly). The mini's dimensions gave it a non-computer look. It might seem plain now, a very simple form, but that was the genius of it. To allege that it's mainstream and not special, something to be incremented, is to cast it as just another box, a mere container. To Apple, it's an optimum solution to both engineering and aesthetic challenges. Maybe they resist the idea that it is just a box, and that is why they don't just increment the internals.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#317

Post by slrz »

cbsmith wrote: post #253
tinus_hn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touchbar also increases security so it's not useless even if you close the laptop.

You mean the way my VPN software needs to have a backdoor in it just so that the touchbar keeps working while I'm connected? ;-)

Can you explain?

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#318

Post by slrz »

devdoomari wrote: post #42
pmorici wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I have one and the wifi definitely doesn't work out of the box and there are a couple other annoyances the worst being the machine locking up if you let it sit for too long. I haven't spent time to investigate but that isn't the definition of "works out of the box"

> the worst being the machine locking up if you let it sit for too long. uhm... look into power settings? That's common for most os.

I guess "locking up" is not intended to describe the kind of lockup you can fix by entering your login password.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#319

Post by deeth_starr_v »

yborg wrote: post #271
manarth wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Lifehacker article on building a Hackintosh, the process is a lot less fiddly than it used to be, and a lot more hardware is now supported. Other guides suggest that the NUC is mostly supported, bar a few issues (e.g. on-board mic doesn't work, not the infra-red sensor). However, even if you have a totally legit paid-up copy of OS-X, it's only licensed for installing on Apple hardware.

For most of the hackintosh ports onto the NUC or NUC-style hardware, the onboard Bluetooth/WiFi is usually not supported because there are no OS X drivers for the integrated chipset used. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me. The process of applying new OS revisions is also painful. I guess the hackintosh process is pretty straightforward on certain models of full-size motherboards, but I haven't seen a fully functi…

My experience is not recent, but I ran hackintoshs for about 3 years in the early days (dates are fuzzy but 2008+).

Recently, I looked into NUC's and mini-PC hacks and I don't think Broken BT/Wifi is correct as long as you pick a supported platform. There are mini pc's that work I'm sure. I had a Shuttle SFF working flawlessly back then. The main issue now is getting call forwarding working (call rings on your phone the hackintosh answers it). There is a place that sells an aircard/ide combo for $150. Yes expensive.

The updates. OMG. Yes, this is what made me buy a Mac Pro. Back then, when there was an update it was return to Windows land. Crashes galore until you tracked down every little issue on the boards and mitigated them.

For someone that doesn't need to update their system often, a hack could work out. I loved it, could boot into Windows and play games and then boot back to OSX for video editing etc. But eventually did a cost benefit analysis and I was spending too much time on the updates that were required by the s/w I was using.

Re: My Next Mac Mini

#320

Post by charrondev »

mstolpm wrote: post #308
AnOscelot wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see that too. Sales seems to be high for the MBP so maybe there's more quiet supporters than loud detractors. However the very existence of loud detractors about a product line, which historically has had far more fervent defenders than critics, indicates the hardcore users are unhappy overall. Apple, more than any other tech company, usually attracts the "can do no wrong" type of fans. They're still arou…

At any given time, some (heavy) users were critical about new Apple products and Apple decisions, lamenting that they forget about their most valuable and vocal fans. Apple killed the floppy drive, multiple connectors, "great" products (clickwheel iPod, anyone), resetted software products (FCP, Pages), killed services and so on. Heck, they even killed the Apple ][. And some users cried foul on each of these decisions…

In my mind it is not even so much that I need 32gb now, but as apps get more bloated it may be useful in the future, and seeing how the RAM is pretty much impossible to upgrade it seems very short sited to not have any more RAM than I've had for the past 5 years.
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