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2018 Mac Mini Review

marco.org

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Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#411

Post by copperx »

antsar wrote: post #389
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then is it going to come to desktop machines too, where people often use battery-powered Bluetooth keyboards, or peripherals not made by Apple? What about the tiny 12 inch Macbook? I don't see how this thing is practical across the entire Mac line.

From Apple's perspective, extending this to desktops kills two birds with one stone. 1. Widespread touchbar adoption 2. Increased sales of Apple keyboards

I don't see how you can add the Touchbar to desktops without creating a wired keyboard or adding an expensive big battery to it and jacking the price to $200.

Actually, I do: They'll raise the price of the cheapest iMac configuration and include the keyboard in the box. After seeing the starting Mac Mini prices, it makes total sense.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#412

Post by artursapek »

reaperducer wrote: post #348
phaus wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company where most of us use Macs. Everyone that has upgraded from a 2013-2015 MBP to the touchbar model absolutely hates it, including me. There's gotta be someone around here that actually likes it, but I haven't met them yet. Its OK if you like it. I'm sure lots of people do, but you know damn well significantly more people have had issues with this laptop than normal, so I'm not sure why you're implyi…

The touchbar made me realize that I have a habit of resting my fingers up there. I came to this realization because when I didn't think I was typing anything, stuff would happen. Eventually I realized I was touching virtual buttons on the touchbar. I don't hate it, but I wish more of the tools I use took advantage of it. I think it could be massively improved by shortening it a little on the left to make room for a p…

Doesn't it also get very distracting with how often it flashes into different states? I've heard this drives people crazy.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#413

Post by artursapek »

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.

Marco gotta keep those free gifts from Apple coming in

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#414

Post by MarkMc »

shurcooL wrote: post #377

> Unfortunately, we still don’t have any great standalone 5K displays. (The LG UltraFine isn’t.) What’s wrong with the LG display? It gets a lot of criticism, but I find it hard to understand why. There was an interference shielding issue, but it was fixed more than a year ago. For anyone familiar with the matter, what is it that makes the LG not great?

I found that the LG UltraFine is by far the best monitor for my MacBook Pro. Nothing else comes close.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#416

Post by artursapek »

thirdsun wrote: post #159
rado wrote: post #15

In a world of 5K displays and Apple's insistence on smoothness, this GPU just won't work.

Is that really an issue with Intel's integrated GPUs? Honestly asking. I'm considering a Mac Mini, but there's no way I'm going back to low PPI displays and the lack of affordable 5K / 27" options concerns me (in my opinion 4K/UHD at 27" is a borderline unusable combination with its effective resolution of 1080p - feel free to convince me otherwise). If those few 5K options can't be driven smoothly by an Intel GPU, i…

My Thinkpad with Intel integerated graphics is unable to power a 4k display as smoothly as my desktop with 1070. It definitely makes a difference.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#417

Post by chipotle_coyote »

ricardobeat wrote: post #344
saxonww wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a pro audio guy, but I think if you want to work with any external audio device and want that connection to be noise-free, your safest bet is still optical. I have an external DAC/amp, and I had been using optical until I recently upgraded my workstation. Now I am using USB, because the new motherboard doesn't have optical; I assumed USB would be fine, so the lack of optical wasn't something I considered with…

Since it’s USB, it has to be the DAC generating the hiss. No amount of electrical interference can do anything to the digital audio going Ofer USB.

The electrical interference can't do anything to to the digital audio, but interference on the USB cable can potentially be picked up by the analog amplifier circuitry in the DAC. I had a particular combination of headphone, DAC and amplifier years ago that I could hear electrical noise on when no music was playing.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#418

Post by GordonS »

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…

> 100% of Windows media players are garbage (VLC included, and there is no Movist). They can't play high-bitrate video without stuttering

Eh? I use VLC and Media Player Classic HD on a few different machines, including a rather old i5 that only had spinning disks, and I've never had any issue with high bitrate video.

I wonder if it's something specific to your setup?

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#419

Post by hrktb »

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.

There is a very specific use case for this: Apple ecosystem integration.

- Home theater -> iTunes movies play

- NAS -> iCloud clone with eventualy automation running

- Backup -> iCloud / Dropbox / Google Drive backup

- bonus: siri, xcode builds, local+ third party remote iOS backup

I have a raspberry pi setup handling the above for Google + dropbox. The day I want to switch to an Apple centric system I’d move to the Mac mini in a heartbeat.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#420

Post by iamdbtoo »

mijustin wrote: post #403
jillesvangurp wrote: post #83

People are missing the point about the integrated graphics. For me this is a feature not a bug because it has USB-C instead. That means that instead of hopelessly compromising thermals and power supply with some power hungry, yet limited GPU (because of the small form factor) you simply buy the CPU and memory that you need. It simplifies the job of keeping it cool. CPUs are evolving a lot slower these days. This one…

What would you recommend for a Mac-compatible eGPU these days?

I've been using the Razer Core X for a few months now and it's worked flawlessly.
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