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2018 Mac Mini Review

marco.org

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Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#141

Post by matthewmacleod »

rado wrote: post #132
matthewmacleod wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's strange. I use an early 2015 13" model which happily drives two external 4k displays simultaneously. I'm not running them high-DPI though – the performance there is noticeably worse.

On scaling other than 2x, it's unusable, while the MBP mobile Radeon Pro is good enough. They should have included that at least.

Yeah, I was doing 2x4k plus the internal screen off of the MacBook with a 555, and it was totally fluid. I would have happily forked out for the Mini if it had that GPU; it seems like a bit of a strange decision for such an otherwise powerful machine!

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#142

Post by IshKebab »

josteink wrote: post #123
thresh wrote: post #9

The review doesnt tell you that you cannot upgrade or replace your SSD.

Or boot Linux, because the T2 chip prevents it[1]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2...

That turned out to be rubbish. You can easily disable secure boot.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#143

Post by someguydave »

lucideer wrote: post #59
dTal wrote: post #35

>Number one — and this is a big one these days, especially for this product — is that it’s not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports. If the previous one served a role for you, the new one can probably do it just as well, and probably better and faster, with minimal donglage. Wow. This is what it's come to. "It hasn't gotten worse! Yayy!"

> "Unless you used optical audio, audio input, or the SD-card reader" Craftily hidden in a footnote for that paragraph.

I use optical audio in a mac mini as a home theater TV driver. No thanks.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#144

Post by robk »

veidr wrote: post #49
blinkingled wrote: post #12

The pricing is not really justifiable especially given the most use cases of the Mac mini (Home Theater, NAS, Backup etc.) are better handled by other OSes. The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! If you needed the 6 cores sure but given most workloads other than encoding don't - it's questionable. Even then the 6C processor doesn't cost enough to make up for the difference.

What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow. I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than…

Buy a cheap NUC for server (run Ubuntu) and use an Nvidia Shield for front end. Works flawlesslh.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#145

Post by pjmlp »

veidr wrote: post #49
blinkingled wrote: post #12

The pricing is not really justifiable especially given the most use cases of the Mac mini (Home Theater, NAS, Backup etc.) are better handled by other OSes. The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! If you needed the 6 cores sure but given most workloads other than encoding don't - it's questionable. Even then the 6C processor doesn't cost enough to make up for the difference.

What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow. I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than…

XBox, PS4, Android with a NVidia Shield.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#146

Post by Alex3917 »

msh wrote: post #4
nzjrs wrote: post #2

I really wish people would more clearly disclose when they have been provided a product to review by the manufacturer.

Can it really be more clear than this: Apple lent me a high-end configuration for review — 6-core i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD — which would cost $2499 (much of which is the SSD)

> Apple lent me a high-end configuration for review — 6-core i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD

The problem is that the i7 has hyper-threading, which creates a giant security hole in your system. I'd be much more interested in the i5 benchmarks, since the i5 (supposedly) does not have hyper-threading.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#147

Post by ksec »

It doesn't seems Apple is interested in using AMD CPU / APU in their products, otherwise they would have a decent iGPU along side.

I was expecting the Intel + AMD GPU combo to end up in this Mac mini, turns out not.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#148

Post by josteink »

IshKebab wrote: post #142
josteink wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or boot Linux, because the T2 chip prevents it[1]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2...

That turned out to be rubbish. You can easily disable secure boot.

From the link:

> Update 2: It looks like even if disabling the Secure Boot functionality, the T2 chip is reportedly still blocking operating systems aside from macOS and Windows 10.

That seems to contradict your claim, and I haven't seen that refuted elsewhere.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#149

Post by someguydave »

someguydave wrote: post #143
lucideer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Unless you used optical audio, audio input, or the SD-card reader" Craftily hidden in a footnote for that paragraph.

I use optical audio in a mac mini as a home theater TV driver. No thanks.

Now that I think about it, axing the optical audio ports was probably a deliberate move by Apple to nudge home TV users of mac minis into using Apple TVs, where they have way more control over the interface and content.

edit: apparently Apple TV doesn't have optical audio either.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#150

Post by benologist »

Is anyone worried that Apple's transition to their own CPUs will render these x86 machines obsolete very fast? How long did it take for the pre-x86 Macs to fall behind when the software started focusing on x86 instead?
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