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Mac mini

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Re: Mac mini

#181

Post by jayd16 »

dep_b wrote: post #69
bradstewart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sett…

Hit the windows key and type "disk man" and the disk manager pops up. Maybe you're just used to the OSX names for things?

Search "alert" brings up the audio settings.

I'm not sure what you're doing differently.

Re: Mac mini

#182

Post by emsy »

bradstewart wrote: post #144
dep_b wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sett…

I generally have the opposite experience you've described--I can find exactly what I need in settings/Control Panel on Windows, but rarely on macOS. Could be that I'm just used to the names of things in Windows? Realistically, they both get the job done.

Spotlight is better at understanding multiple languages (accidentally typing the English name on a German System often yields the right result), synonyms and results inside windows. I think this is mainly due to Apples accessibility efforts. Windows is much more picky. But most of the time you just want to start an app anyway.

Re: Mac mini

#184

Post by teilo »

This was originally posted with an (updated) suffix in the title. The Mac Mini has not really been updated. All they did was adjust the storage tiering. Minimum is now 256G. So this amounts to a price drop.

Re: Mac mini

#185

Post by moondev »

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…

Which NUC has 6 cores and 4 thunderbolt ports with integrated 10GbE?

I have 3 hades canyon nucs (homelab) and also a fully maxed mini. The great thing about the mini is it's versatility for expansion via TB3, as well as allowing me to triple-boot macOS, windows, and linux with minimal effort (no hackintosh workarounds needed)

Re: Mac mini

#186

Post by vbezhenar »

dep_b wrote: post #69
bradstewart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sett…

I pressed "Win" and typed "Control". Control panel was the first and default choice. And my Windows is not even using English locale.

I admit that this search sometimes works strange, but it adapts to me, so when I'm launching some program often, it remembers that and will always put that program on the top.

Re: Mac mini

#187

Post by dr_kiszonka »

mceachen wrote: post #100
whalesalad wrote: post #70

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…

Installing and applying security updates on a Linux desktop is fairly automatic and uneventful. Keeping a hackintosh updated (for even stuff like graphics card drivers) turns out to be a lot of time doing research, scrolling through endless forum posts, and bricking your install quarterly because you "did the wrong thing" (like absent-mindedly accepting a security update notification). Yes, you can get it running. Bu…

Is there a Linux distribution that fully supports the desktop version of Office 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)? I would love to migrate to Linux, but need Office to work on papers and presentations with the rest of my lab. LibreOffice doesn't cut it. I tried Wine in the past and it was too buggy.

Re: Mac mini

#188

Post by whalesalad »

askafriend wrote: post #157
whalesalad wrote: post #70

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…

What are your needs? Because the current Mini serves a lot of Pro needs with the crazy powerful I/O it has. With eGPUs in a fairly mature state, the Mac Mini can serve pretty powerful video/graphics workloads.

I have a slightly upgraded 2018 Macbook Pro right now that does most of my work really well. It has 32gb of RAM, an upgraded GPU and the i7-8750H chip.

I want more cores, faster cores, and more thermal headroom. A Mac Mini would be a slight performance bump from where I am right now, but the ROI isn't really there.

My workload varies, but I am a freelancer with 3-4 contracts at any given time which vary from wordpress sites or rails apps, vue apps, python apps, up to 'big data' processing pipelines. I usually have a handful of services running for any client, redis, es, postgres, mysql, etc... and the Docker/mac story needs work.

I essentially don't want to ever wait on IO ever again. That is another reason I would like a full desktop chassis: I want PCIe slots so that I can outfit them with something like an Optane SSD.

Attemping to spec out something that would perform better than my current MBP:

    3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz)
    64GB 2666MHz DDR4
    Intel UHD Graphics 630
    1TB SSD storage
    10 Gigabit Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ‑45 connector)
Same generation chip that I have now. Same core count. Higher boost clock. $2600 is the final price and that is certainly not worth it.

Re: Mac mini

#189

Post by saagarjha »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #167
whalesalad wrote: post #70

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…

Such product would cannibalise their line, so they'll never make it. They wouldn't need the Mini, and the mid-tier would be too far from the Mac Pro.

> Such product would cannibalise their line, so they'll never make it.

Apple does this quite frequently.

Re: Mac mini

#190

Post by FpUser »

hugi wrote: post #176
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…

If IntelliJ can't handle realtime rendering of text on modern hardware, perhaps the problem is with the software? My kid spilled a glass of water on my 2018 MacBook last year ( sob ). At that time, word was out about the 2019 MacBooks with the new keyboards, so I decided to hold out, took out an old 2012 Mac Mini and have been doing my (Java/Swift) development on it for the past few months. It works so well, I've bee…

IntelliJ tools always felt like molasses to me. Maybe has something to do with them being done in Java. Most of my dev tools are native and the feeling is totally different.
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