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2018 Mac Mini Review

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Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#591

Post by kalleboo »

stonith wrote: post #584
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I used to use optical audio but it was superseded by HDMI for home theater and USB for hifi.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 probably in a tiny niche but I use it so that I can have optical out to my speakers and analogue out to an extension cord with a plug next to my keyboard that I plug my headphones into. This means I can swap between audio devices without touching cables or plugging things in to go headphones -> speakers depending on whether I want to annoy my wife with my music or not.

I have the same setup actually! But my speakers only take analog in so I use a cheap USB sound card.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#592

Post by aczerepinski »

ihuman wrote: post #504
aczerepinski wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a horrible mess of wires and power strips to me. If only they could make a single case to fit all these various computer components in, and one chord to supply power to all of them.

That doesn't sound like something with "mini" in the name. Maybe an alternative product with "pro" in the name?

It was a sarcastic attempt to point out that scattering the components of a computer into 3 or 4 units with separate power chords is an inferior design to the standard desktops we’re used to. I want a Mac desktop for under $3,000 that doesn’t require multiple accessories plugged in to behave like a desktop.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#593

Post by xvector »

dkonofalski wrote: post #556
reaperducer wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should snag an app called BetterTouchTool. Makes the TouchBar an amazing addition to the laptop. It's just a shame that Apple didn't build in a tool like it but I hope the developer gets lots of love.

Doesn’t BTT require enabling unsigned kernel extensions?

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#594

Post by bnastic »

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.

> 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.

I dont' know about "most", but pros who want quiet, small and fast (read: musician, audio engineers) will be all over this Mini.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#595

Post by lostgame »

robertsd247 wrote: post #219

There is zero justification for the pricing. It needs to be starting around $399. Apple is still working the privileged pricing model. Considering it has year old processor and 8GB RAM. For $800 an i5 and 16GB should be standard. I can forgive that 128GB SSD but not the CPU or RAM. Side note, why is a computer only for games, streaming, and mining bitcoin? It that what the end user experience is limited to?

>> I can forgive that 128GB SSD but not the CPU or RAM.

I had the curse of having to use a 2017 MacBook Pro 13” with a 128GB SSD...it’s not forgivable, it’s not usable.

By the time I put xCode in there as well as Office, et cetera, and project files, I was left with 20-30GB left, and anytime I dipped below...20? it bombarded me, literally, continually, with a message ‘you are low on disk space.’

You know what is never forgivable? Soldering a hard drive to the motherboard on a $1500 device.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#596

Post by spookthesunset »

gregmac wrote: post #475
veidr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

> 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.

Man I was pissed when Google bought and killed SageTV. It was probably the best DVR out there. Flexible in all the ways you'd want it to be. High Wife Approval Factor (MythTV was a disaster)

I guess they open sourced it a few years ago, but our family has moved on to just renting comcasts DVR. It's actually not that bad.

... That being said, the way we consume media has changed considerably since the days of SageTV. Youtube has almost completely taken over my TV watching time.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#597

Post by locusm »

Having a user serviceable M.2 slot would have made this the perfect Mac for me. Lets say I have Applecare for the first 3 years and the SSD dies on the 4th year, what are my options? Replace entire logic board with new CPU & SSD?

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#598

Post by spookthesunset »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #303
xfitm3 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t trust my TV enough to be on the network.

Yes, this precisely. Smart TVs of all flavors as well as Roku boxes voraciously mine your viewing habits, connected devices, network layout, mic input, and practically anything else they can get their dirty little hands on. They’re usually running out of date OSes and are full of holes to boot, making you a potential vector for smart device botnets. Smart TVs and Roku boxes simply cannot be trusted. I have a brand ne…

> Instead, I use an Apple TV 4K

Which is what I'd do but unfortunately Google insists on using it's own video codec for 4k instead of H.265. Meaning your 4k AppleTV can't play YouTube videos at 4K. My smarttv can though... We use AppleTV for everything else.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#599

Post by baddox »

rconti wrote: post #573
baddox wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plex is the least nightmarish of the video library apps I've used in the last few years (Plex and Kodi are the only ones I've ended up using extensively, though I've tried out several others). Transcoding is obviously a last resort, but I've used it on rare occasions for streaming live and recorded TV from home to the Plex app on my iPhone and it works reasonably well. For my home theater stuff I absolutely don't wan…

The issues I had were that, first of all, Plex server wouldn't run on my ARM-based Synology, and then later, I think there was a build for it, but it didn't have the horsepower to transcode, and it seems like it ALWAYS wanted to transcode things. I've also tried running Plex server on my Win7 HTPC with the volume mounted over CIFS, but I had various issues with that; for one, having to reindex the volume means I have…

Yeah, I just have mine running on my primary desktop (an iMac), but I've done a bit of research on consumer NAS products and the Plex support definitely seems spotty.

As for Plex wanting to transcode things, I mentioned having some issues with my Chromecast Ultra, but even that wasn't too bad. There should definitely be an option to not transcode video at all and let my playback device tell me that if it really can't decode the file. As far as I could tell, that option doesn't exist.

I haven't had any issues with library refreshing with Plex on my iMac and movies shared over SMB from my Linux file server. Plex seems to watch the shares and do small incremental refreshes for new content very quickly.

> I don't care about "album art" type stuff; I don't download/store/play hollywood movies or music, so those features would be irrelevant even if I cared about them in general.

That's definitely valid. Wouldn't basically any playback device that supports DLNA (and can decode your files) work fine for that? For me, the library features are pretty important. I had done a lot of work getting Kodi on my Raspberry Pi setup how I liked it, then I switched to Plex which is just as good or better but with a lot less work and maintenance.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#600

Post by ken »

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)

The easy answer is: same thing I was using it for 10 and 20 years ago. Audio equipment doesn't age nearly as quickly as personal computers. I'm not going to replace my entertainment system just because there's a new Mac.

Also, I've had compatibility problems with HDMI between my old Mac Mini and my receiver. I don't know how to troubleshoot those sorts of issues. I do know that optical audio always works perfectly with every device I've ever used it with, though.

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