231–240 of 333 posts
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Did you just compare the $700 Mini to a $140 ECS Liva or some $200 HP or Asus Chromebox?
Did you just compare a $200 HP or Asus Chromebox to a $0 free 15 year old Dell tower from your local Freegeek? We can do this all day.
I find it amusing that every single one of our high-speed standards (ethernet, HDMI, PCIE, displayport, USB) are basically just the same high-speed differential pairs under the hood with different framing. I don't know exactly what we can do about this situation, but at some point it probably makes sense for all of them to converge into a multi-lane, differential-pair standard (or just support nesting each other arbi…
IIRC Thunderbolt essentially is "PCIE but in a cable"
There is also U.2 for shorter links. There are relatively trivial risers (not sure if it needs a chip or not, but either way they're under $30) that let you turn regular PCIe x4 or M.2 x4 slots into U.2 cables. It's intended for the enterprise space but if you just want "pcie in a cable" that's what it does.
ExpressCard actually also was a PCIe 1.1x1 or 2.0x1 link as well, and people used risers to break out to external GPUs just as people do with thunderbolt. There are various eGPU setups "GDC Beast" is one I remember?) that are still available for ye olde thinkpad if you want more/better display connectors.
Also obviously miners use those shitty USB-based riser cables (they aren't USB, but use USB wiring?) with x1 connectivity.
I dunno whether any of those are "legal" according to the PCIe signalling requirements but in practice you can get short runs pretty reliably especially at lower speeds, and good PCIe riser cables can even do 3.0x16 or 4.0x16 capability.
USB-C seems to be hit & miss in general, it not only depends on the connector but also the cable and what's on the other side. I use my M1 with a Lenovo USB-C dock an theoretially it's capable of piping 4k at 60 Hz to my monitor, but in order for that to work I'd need to buy cables that cost half as much as the dock, so I just plug the HDMI cable directly into the Macbook (and am thankful they included an HDMI port a…
In case it's helpful, have you looked at Monoprice? They sell great USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 cables for $10 (0.5m).
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My M1 Mini is the best computer I've ever owned, bar none. Most of that junk you are whining about is irrelevant niche stuff. Nobody GAF if they can replace the internal SSD, or if there's any difference between replacing the SSD and replacing the entire motherboard. It has two USB ports, two USB-C/TB3 ports, HDMI, ethernet, bluetooth, wifi, and a headphone barrel jack, like any other computer. WTF are dongles?
My m1 max laptop is so good that if it broke today, I'd lament having to wait for a replacement, but wouldnt hesitate. Felt the same way about m1. And thats coming after three decades of low level programming work on dos, windows and linux x86 with the best hardware money could buy.
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Isn't the Mac M1 mini $699?
Did you just compare the $700 Mini to a $140 ECS Liva or some $200 HP or Asus Chromebox?
It is going to be extremely limited in what it can do.
In that case the iPad at $329 becomes a legitimate competitor and it includes a screen.
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May I ask why? I assume you were aware of this limitation, as Apple was pretty clear in the specs about it, that it only supports one external monitor. If you pull the trigger on a purchase without reading the specs, then it's pretty much on you, no?
It didn’t become widely known until after the M1s had shipped - I was caught unexpected after someone at work couldn’t connect two to theirs.
This is nonsense.
For every product Apple sells they list the technical specs on the website at the same time it is on sale.
And it clearly states for the iMac that it supports a single display.
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Use a filesystem that does end-to-end error detection and correction. I use ZFS on all of my USB drives (even "real" SATA and M.2 SSDs via adaptors) and it frequently finds checksum errors (and thanks to the design of ZFS, is able to completely recover without any risk of further corruption).
Isn't any filesystem that runs on top of a SSD or flash drive at risk from the SSD/flash drive controller corrupting the disk or making it inaccessible, when the volume is not cleanly unmounted? I can remember losing a USB drive that way, even though it was using a journaling filesystem.
ZFS does have defensive mechanisms, like doing a read after write to try and be sure that what is written is actually committed to disk, but if the storage controller chooses to serve that out of cache then that could be a lie too. It's the old "trusting trust" predicament, there's no way for hardware higher in the stack to prove that lower levels aren't simply a tower of lies, only instead of viruses it's flush.
That said, in practice very little hardware is actually a giant tower of lies. Flash drives typically do not have enough of a controller to actually cache anything, thus no real capability to lie about writes/etc. SSDs do, but they also generally obey the expected behavior around flushing actually flushing and not just lying about it.
RAID controllers and similar are the danger zone, because they may have cache and may lie to the CPU about it on the assumption that it actually will eventually be flushed, and that's the dangerous thing.
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The fact that I can't connect more than one monitor to my M1-based iMac is a fucking travesty.
May I ask why? I assume you were aware of this limitation, as Apple was pretty clear in the specs about it, that it only supports one external monitor. If you pull the trigger on a purchase without reading the specs, then it's pretty much on you, no?
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> as seen with the limit on external screens on some M1 models (…) I hope Apple fixes these issues soon It’s only the base M1 used in the low-end devices that has limited support for external screens. A MBPro with M1 Max can drive 3x6k (DP1.4) plus 1x4k(HDMI2.0). That seems like more than enough for a laptop. Sounds to me like these issues have already been fixed.
They still don't support DP MST, so you have to use multiple TB ports or use a monitor that supports TB daisy-chaining.
CalDigit's new dock takes a single TB4 cable to drive, and can do:
- 2x TB4
- 1x DP 1.4
- supporting
- 2x 5K60 OR
- 1x 8K60 OR
- 1x 4K144 OR
- 1x 1440p240
Or, as CalDigit puts it (see final paragraph):
Single 8K or Dual 6K Monitors
Users on Windows can connect a single monitor up to 8K resolution, and users on macOS can connect up to a single 6K 60Hz monitor.
When connecting dual monitors Windows users can connect up to dual 4K 60Hz monitors, and macOS users on M1 Pro or M1 Max computers can connect up to dual 6K 60Hz monitors. Users on original M1 computers cannot connect dual monitors as original M1 computers do not support dual displays.
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All gripes I don’t have, and my m1 max is a kickass laptop, expensive but you get what you pay for. And I have quality. Reliable, clean and fast, both on the software and hardware side.
We've got ~100 engineers in our company and there are essentially two categories of engineers: the ones that are enjoying their M1s and those who are looking forward to moving from Intel to M1. Admittedly that's still pretty anecdotal. It's not like each one of those engineers has rigorously tested all alternatives. But still, no complaints and people are loving the battery life and lack of heat. The dongle situation…