2018 Mac Mini Review • Hacker News Board

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#611

Post by vosper » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 2:45 AM UTC

hamstergene wrote: post #585

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…

I wish someone made MacMini-sized eGPUs and external disk drives so they could be stacked on top of each other. That'd look very good aesthetically with minimal or no mess of wires. An ITX format video card (~7") should fit into MacMini-sized case (7.7"), not sure about PSU and heat dissipation though.

If it was the same shape as the MacMini but just taller then it might still look cool stacked.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#612

Post by PedroBatista » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 2:52 AM UTC

adamlett wrote: post #137

dev_north_east wrote: post #17

I bought a mac mini ten years ago (for about E400?). It still lives on today as my parent's desktop. I passed to them many years ago and not one problem. Fantastic machine. However I cannot justify the prices they're asking for these ones. I'm looking for a new machine for myself now, but no way will these be considered.

Let me get this straight: You would not consider paying a premium for a machine even though your experience tells you, that it has a useful life of 10+ years?

No, I wouldn't consider buying a Toyota Corolla for 60K.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#613

Post by robarr » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 4:00 AM UTC

xienze wrote: post #488

rconti wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll have to try this again. I put VLC on my AppleTV4, and I don't remember having luck playing things off my Synology. I'm using Kodi on my Android TV-equipped Sony to stream from the NAS, which works, but the UI is a disaster for adding sources. I finally got it to work, but I never want to have to change anything again. For me, using Plex is an utter and complete nightmare. Anything with transcoding and library re…

Plex sucks on the Apple TV (and likely most other devices) because unless the video fits in a very narrow band of codecs (AVC, maybe HEVC with DD audio) it's going to insist on transcoding the video. The absolute best setup I've found is Infuse ( https://firecore.com/infuse ) with Plex as the backend. Infuse will ALWAYS request the raw video/audio stream and does all the decoding on the Apple TV, so your Plex machine…

my apple tv 4 plays natively 1080p h265 with 5.1 audio with infuse 5 pro served by my pentium with 8 gigs of ram plex server over lan. Strangely, i am sure and old version of the plex app did the same. i think its more an issue of the way the videos are muxed and the audio codec.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#614

Post by someguydave » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #327

someguydave wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't that little headphone port a combo optical/electrical port that you can plug either headphones or mini-toslink-whatever into ? Isn't that what it was before ? I swear I had previous mac minis with a combo port like that ... why would they not continue that ?

Yes that is precisely the thing that used to be in all macs that they discontinued

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#615

Post by leoc » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 6:59 AM UTC

Elidrake24 wrote: post #318

drcongo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these.

Chiming in to agree that it wasn't a problem here. Though I also never understood why someone would be crazy enough to leave ESC as the default keybinding anyhow.

You'd think that Courage Incorporated would have had the gumption to officially move Escape to where Caps Lock is.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#616

Post by thirdsun » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #157

bo0tzz wrote: post #48

"...cost $2499 (much of which is the SSD)" The cheapest SSD I can find goes for €129.47, and it doesn't seem to get up to much more for consumer SSDs. Unless this SSD has some crazy specs that I'm missing, it seems seriously overpriced to me.

Plus I don't really see why a crazy-spec SSD is really key here. It's not going to be the bottleneck for most use cases in a Mac Mini that has an integrated graphics card (at $2.5k...) A regular SSD would do.

Everyone's use cases will be different. I have absolutely no use for dedicated GPU, but require fast storage. Of course that doesn't mean that Apple's SSD upgrade options aren't overpriced.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#617

Post by leoc » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #355

Elidrake24 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chiming in to agree that it wasn't a problem here. Though I also never understood why someone would be crazy enough to leave ESC as the default keybinding anyhow.

Some people use both ESC and Caps Lock all the time. How else would you bind ESC?

Well, tbh, if it's simply a choice of which key to map to the currently-Caps Lock key then Escape should be the winner even if exiling Caps Lock to the Touch Bar would cause significant annoyance to some heavy users.

However, while users are mostly just faced with perhaps-hard choices about how to remap the given keys, the keyboard manufacturer and integrator Apple had many other options. Caps Lock is currently 2U wide on both ISO and ANSI layouts https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3tJagPz-xIw/maxresdefault.jpg , so it could fairly comfortably be split into a 1U Esc and Caps Lock. You could even give Escape the outside position: that's not a big reach, just the mirror-image of the ISO English # key and more convenient than Esc's existing position in both ANSI and ISO, and there's an arguable case for not putting Esc on too much of a hair-trigger position near the home row anyway. Alternatively you could carve a 1U key out from the right of the right Shift, which is pretty uselessly overlong on both ISO and ANSI.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#618

Post by simonh » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

fogetti wrote: post #583

simonh wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN: This is the worst Apple product ever and Apple has abandoned satisfying their customer with the things they actually want. Reality: Apple product breaks sales records.

McDonald's also makes record sales in Japan right now. So by your logic that must be the best hamburger in the market.

Would you suppose that price and convenience might be factors aside from food quality?

This is the thing - narrow single issue analysis that doesn't even acknowledge that other factors of consideration even exist, inevitably will result in conclusions with very limited applicability.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#619

Post by dahauns » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

y4mi wrote: post #286

cheeze wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing vlc to a home theater setup is laughable at best. Can vlc scrape Metadata and download art? Can I browse my catalog through vlc? Does it work with my remote? How hard is it to get to the next episode when watching a season? Vlc is great, but it's just a player.

> Can vlc scrape Metadata and download art? yes > Can I browse my catalog through vlc? yes > Does it work with my remote? if you got a remote that connects to your pc, yes. there are quite a few of these around, especially if you buy a microserver or similar. > How hard is it to get to the next episode when watching a season? pretty easy.. actually, its imo way easier than anywhere else, as you can always use a wirel…

VLC has a lot of features, but it doesn't offer a 10 foot interface at all. Expecting to use the desktop interface in a home theater setup is ridiculous.

Re: 2018 Mac Mini Review

#620

Post by dahauns » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 10:42 AM UTC

folkrav wrote: post #315

copperx wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I thought Media PCs were a thing in the 00's. But it's 2018 now. Why would you have a Media PC?

I personally use Chromecasts, but HTPCs are still a thing, and for multiple reasons : - gaming (console "alternative", emulators, etc) - streaming a personal library of media files (e.g. through Plex) - it's way more versatile than the usually pretty terrible SmartTV onboard software in terms of what content you can access - like Amazon Video that only streams to their own crap stick Media PCs never stopped working,…

>it's way more versatile than the usually pretty terrible SmartTV onboard software in terms of what content you can access - like Amazon Video that only streams to their own crap stick.

The sad thing is: This has reversed. I gave up trying to Netflix and Amazon Video from my HTPC. The former at least has an app and now even supports all formats (Dolby Vision 4k, Atmos), but the controls are terrible for a remote. The latter doesn't even have an app, and all you get is HD+Stereo. And don't get me started on Blu-Ray.