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2018 Mac Mini Review

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Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#471

Post by Applejinx »

Mindwipe wrote: post #191
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!"

And it has got a bit worse. Just not as worse as we'd expect from Apple.

Well, quite a bit faster, in ways that are relevant to my interests. Stands to reason designing a thing like this together onto a bespoke board allows for some optimizations: it's hilarious that it's apparently faster than any other Mac anywhere ever, for single-core things that suit it. Including Mac Pros and iMac Pros… I just think that's amusing.

I'm now wondering if VCV Rack is sufficiently multicore that it will perform better on more expensive Mac boxes, or whether this little thing has now set the bar for ability to run demanding modular synth software live. That would be really convenient.

Building a PC mothership is certainly cool as hell and I'm not knocking it, but there's something to be said for 'this is my live performance rig, it's stable as a rock and it fits in my pocket. And it's cheap enough that if I'm headlining Coachella with my modular jams, I'll buy a second one and clone it so I have a backup, there onstage ready to be plugged in if there's a problem'.

I'm with Marco on this one. Looks nice. I know what I'm getting with a Mac of this type, and this definitely looks nice to me.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#472

Post by jdboyd »

saxonww wrote: post #305
kalleboo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use optical audio but it was superseded by HDMI for home theater and USB for hifi. edit: I'd be curious to see what people are using optical for today (I'm under the impression audio pros mainly use USB interfaces as well)

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…

> Unfortunately there's an awful amount of hiss with USB on this DAC.

If you used optical before, it can be reasonable to use USB->optical. A lot of USB audio interfaces already have this. I'm not making use of it, but the USB interface I have on my Mini has an optical out.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#473

Post by lovehashbrowns »

d35007 wrote: post #449
threatofrain wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

drcongo is making a statement about the population, and readers can be trusted to not be so confused as to think that this is the official speech of the people.

> Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these. If drcongo doesn't mean to speak for "Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar", drcongo should refrain from using those exact words. And you should probably refrain from speaking for drcongo.

It's pretty common to make sweeping generalizations in casual conversation, which this is. I find it really annoying when someone says something like "everyone likes cats!" and then someone, inevitably, will hop in and reply with "ACTUALLY, I hate cats." This isn't a mathematics proof.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#474

Post by poulsbohemian »

phaus wrote: post #341
crad wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with mine, but thanks for speaking for us all with your sweeping generalization.

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 model absolutely hates it

What kind of work do you / your teammates do? I walked into an Apple store last week prepared to hate the keyboards and touch bars, but was very pleasantly surprised. My ladyfriend wanted to see the Air, but was so taken with the Touch Bar for photo work that she will be buying an MBP instead. While it might not be everyones cup of tea, I think Apple may have figured is demographics correctly on this one.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#475

Post by gregmac »

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…

I haven't used any Apple stuff, but I've gone through many iterations of this over the past 15-ish years, going from MythTV to SageTV to Plex+Netflix, and using various iterations of Linux, Windows 7, 8, and 10 on everything from leftover PC part builds to the SageTV appliance to dedicated Mini-ITX HTPC systems to Raspberry Pis.

My main criteria is being able to use everything from the couch, using a single remote, and no keyboards. I was close to that with the SageTV boxes, but Google bought SageTV and it started becoming obsolete, and there was never really a good Netflix integration anyway.

I find the trouble with all PC-based stuff is switching between things and inconsistency between apps. Netflix on PC doesn't have a good way to do keyboard-based control, so remotes don't work well -- you pretty much need a mouse-style pointer. Plex works GREAT but the keyboard works differently than it does when you're using YouTube, and there's not a great way to switch. There's also all kinds of dumb problems getting multi-channel audio working with Netflix since they require some type of certified system or something.

A couple years ago I gave up on PCs and bought an Nvidia Shield, and it's basically the perfect device for me. AndroidTV is a great launcher, it supports everything I use (Plex, Netflix, Youtube, Weather, Baby cam monitor) and everything works with a single remote (I use a Logitech Harmony to control it + the TV + audio). No compatibility, rights or audio issues. And bonus: it is a Google Cast device, and also works with an OTA tuner (Silicondust HDHomerun -- though I never actually use that anymore). My TV never changes inputs: it's basically just a dumb display for the Shield, which now does 100% of content playback in my house.

It costs maybe a bit more than a nice MiniITX HTPC build, but just works (whereas an HTPC will take hours of time to get it working semi-properly).

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#476

Post by GordonS »

aequitas wrote: post #55
jpkeisala wrote: post #19

Slightly off topic but is there cloud Mac/Xcode that I subscribe to for my occasional App development?

There probably is but it will be built on top of Mac mini or Mac Pro farms as Apple does not allow virtualization of macOS on any hardware not carrying a Apple logo (I believe that is how it is actually stated in the terms even). So of it is available it might not be a cheaper option. But I believe Travis CI does have macOS workers available for free, but they might be scarce in available time slots.

I've been using MacInCloud at work for the past 2 years or so, renting a single server for use as a VSTS/Azure DevOps build agent server, for iOS builde. I'm very happy with it - the server we have is fast enough, both CPU and disk, and it's been rock solid.

I've only contacted their support team about billing stuff, but they were responsive and helpful.

Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a happy user.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#477

Post by Gorbzel »

phaus wrote: post #341
crad wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with mine, but thanks for speaking for us all with your sweeping generalization.

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…

> 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 implying otherwise.

Yup, that's exactly what the HN groupthink would like to believe. What is by definition a small user demographic complains repeatedly/loudly that their problems are the most important, indicative of "everyone", and Apple is doomed because so-and-so bought a Surface Pro/Dell/System76. The hyperbolie is kicked up a notch here, as clearly any $200 Walmart laptop keyboard is better.

As is typical, there's never any data to support the claims and a significant number of counter anecdotes are dismissed absent critical reasoning ("you know damn well...!"). Instead, the echo chamber resonates unabated by logic.

Throw in an out of context Steve quote and you can identify this drivel pretty uniformly. It's usually best to ignore, though at times a response is merited when it's completely off topic and unhelpful (as it is here, the new Mac mini seems awesome regardless of a hater's two year old take on the tbMBP).

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#478

Post by Matthias247 »

kalleboo wrote: post #194
throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days optical audio is dying when it comes to home theater systems, primarily due to its lack of codec support. You can't passthrough DTS-HD over optical, you can over HDMI.

I used to use optical audio but it was superseded by HDMI for home theater and USB for hifi. edit: I'd be curious to see what people are using optical for today (I'm under the impression audio pros mainly use USB interfaces as well)

Sonos, which might be one of the most hyped average user audio things in the last years, only offers optical inputs for their soundbars. Imho it's a pretty huge limitation on Sonos side, but maybe they did it because HDMI ARC is still flaky in many setups and they prefer ease of use. Or simply because of cost savings.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#479

Post by noja »

user68858788 wrote: post #454
noja wrote: post #452

Too expensive. If you just want a redundant NAS everything else is cheaper. If you want a non-redundant NAS asingle disk NAS enclosure costs 54 bucks: https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...

I'm fairly new to this NAS stuff. Is there a reason to have one hard drive per sever, or is that just a limitation of this one in particular? I'm sure that RAID over a network of hard drives is a solved problem, but I wouldn't know where to start.

It's a limitation of that odroid enclosure. You could do raid over iscsi (but I wouldn't). Buffalo do a 2 drive enclosure very cheap, but I'd go for a synology or qnap enclosure for a bit more money.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#480

Post by briandear »

sergiotapia wrote: post #387
crad wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty happy with mine, but thanks for speaking for us all with your sweeping generalization.

The new macbook pro keyboard is flimsy and easily broken. I bought my own macbook pro, delete key stuck. Got a new one from my new job, keyboard stuck. My brother bought a new one, keyboard stuck.

Clearly, you are holding it wrong.
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