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Mac mini

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Re: Mac mini

#61

Post by chrisfinazzo »

everdrive wrote: post #48
tabs_masterrace wrote: post #21

Still no real GPU. It's the reason I went back to a MacBook. What drew me in is the desktop class i7. At the time the Mini outperformed all other Macs in benchmarks, and it is noticeable and fast during compile times etc. Once you connect a 4k Screen (or even more screens), an eGPU becomes a must have. The integrated one just can't do smooth UI rendering. For example typing in IntelliJ always felt laggy, because it t…

Mac Mini doesn't need a real GPU in my opinion -- what they need is a mid-level desktop that accepts a real GPU. $1000 - $1500 with decent specs. But, we know they won't move into that space.

It probably doesn't, and in some sense, that's the problem.

Really hoping that the next major redesign of this looks less like an Intel NUC and more like a slightly smaller Mac Pro.

An actual mini tower! What a concept.

Re: Mac mini

#62

Post by jagger27 »

phkahler wrote: post #43
jagger27 wrote: post #6

Only up to 6-core 8th generation CPUs, and it looks like the base 6-core SKU is the i5-8500, which doesn’t have Hyperthreading. Ouch. It’s such a shame that’s the best Intel can do in that thermal envelope. AMD is about to ship Ryzen 4000 mobile chips with lower TDP, great integrated graphics, higher clock speeds and more cores. It would have worked fine in the Mac mini. Imagine how good the desktop APUs will be when…

>> Imagine how good the desktop APUs will be when those come out. I'm starting to think there won't be any more desktop APUs. The next logical step would be an 8 core CPU with better GPU than the 3400G. That would be good enough desktop for a huge swath of the market and might kill sales of higher end chips. I use a 2400G for software development. It's the fastest cpu I've ever owned. It runs a 4k desktop, 4k video,…

That’s a fair assessment and is probably why they’ve launched their high core count CPUs and $400 range GPUs in this order. I’m more than happy with my 2700X but I wish I didn’t jump on the 5700 XT. It’s too loud and hot.

Re: Mac mini

#63

Post by jagger27 »

hajile wrote: post #58
phkahler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Imagine how good the desktop APUs will be when those come out. I'm starting to think there won't be any more desktop APUs. The next logical step would be an 8 core CPU with better GPU than the 3400G. That would be good enough desktop for a huge swath of the market and might kill sales of higher end chips. I use a 2400G for software development. It's the fastest cpu I've ever owned. It runs a 4k desktop, 4k video,…

I'd love to see a 4800G chip with 8 cores, 20-30 CUs, and 16/32GB onboard HBM2 unified memory in the $400/600 range (depending on RAM).

Oh wow that’d be really cool. You could pretty much consider that to be L4 cache.

Re: Mac mini

#64

Post by jhoechtl »

qayxc wrote: post #42
thefounder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should buy something more in the price range of the mac-mini to make a real comparison rather than the cheapest dell.

I don't think they have much choice in what their employer deems sufficient for getting work done.

And I suspect their employer is right that they get their job done a cheap Dell. Excel works well on a cheap Dell!

Re: Mac mini

#66

Post by alexellisuk »

I'm using the 2018 Mac mini with 32GB RAM and the i7 + 4k monitor, it's great, however compiling Go's Kubernetes client still stresses its CPU. What's the main changes here?

The UK site is showing an 8th gen CPU

Re: Mac mini

#67

Post by reaperducer »

rvz wrote: post #5

The Mac Minis are still expensive and underwhelming (even when maxed out) when compared with the top of the range NUCs with even AMD GPUs. The Skull and Ghost Canyon NUCs are great for Linux CIs or building large projects or I could even go far to either Hackintosh a few NUCs to surpass the need to buy a Mac Mini anyway for next 5 years. Thanks, but I would skip this Mac Mini and go for the latest maxed out NUC inste…

The Mac Minis are still expensive and underwhelming (even when maxed out) when compared with the top of the range NUCs with even AMD GPUs

I've been considering getting a Mac mini, but haven't committed yet. Can you tell me which NUCs run macOS so I comparison shop?

Re: Mac mini

#68

Post by cpr »

Looks like both RAM and SSD are upgradable? I thought they had gone to hardwired everything in the Mini.

Re: Mac mini

#69

Post by dep_b »

bradstewart wrote: post #51
emsy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try pressing the windows key (granted, it's not as pretty as Spotlight).

This is honestly the thing I miss most while using macOS. The windows key search always seemed to work better than Spotlight.

I don't know what you like about it? When I use Windows I try to use it to find Control Panels to set up stuff and it does a horrible job at that.

In macOS you'll find Disk Utility by typing "disk utility" in CMD+SPACE, even when you're on a different language system that has it's own name. I couldn't find anything in Windows even when that was the literal name of the panel. And hunting for formerly easy to find settings is one of the things that already drives me crazy in Windows 10.

Also when I type "alert sound" I still find the Sound and Notifications Control Panels even if they're not full matches, but they do deal with alerts.

There's a lot about Windows I like though. It's just not the UX, apart from the Explorer once I exactly set it up as I like it (well it looks the same as Windows 95 mostly).

Re: Mac mini

#70

Post by whalesalad »

Still got my fingers crossed for a desktop machine that isn’t a Mac Pro and isn’t a Mac Mini.

Would love iMac Pro firepower without being tied to a set display.

I’ve been alive 30 years. A good portion of that was growing up as a PC user, overclocker, teenage hacker, etc. My professional career however has been on Unix and MacOS, and as much as I try to get back to desktop Linux and open source OS’s I just find them to be so brittle and hacked together.

I tried to daily drive Linux and just couldn't do it, and I am not a newb to Linux either. I got my feet wet on SuSE (Kernel 2.4!), and then saw the light of Debian and Ubuntu and have used that primarily since. Remember when you could order free install CD's for Ubuntu? There were copies of Warty Warthog all over my high school. I have installed arch by hand, btw. I’ve used Fedora and RHEL and CentOS and Slackware! Gnome and KDE and XFCE. Remember Compiz? It isn’t the desktop environments. It isn’t the distributions. It’s just the unavoidable consequence of an entire ecosystem of desktop Linux being designed by committee.

So I’ve accepted I’ll be on macOS for a long time to come (not unlike DHH - https://m.signalvnoise.com/back-to-windows-after-twenty-year...) and have started to seriously consider building a hackintosh. But when your time is billed hourly and you have a half dozen clients, time is money and the novelty of a Ryzen-powered hate tank hackintosh for my professional work is starting to look less realistic.

So how about a Diet® Pro for those of us who want something that isn’t a laptop in a big AppleTV chassis and isn’t a desktop in a monitor chassis.

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