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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#151

Post by ErneX »

etempleton wrote: post #102

What a great little computer at a very reasonable price. A few interesting things with this announcement: 1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup wi…

iMac was yesterday, Mini today and MacBook Pro tomorrow.

Mac Studio and Mac Pro are getting upgrades next year apparently.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#152

Post by bdcs »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #12

No AV1 encode?

That is correct[0], as known from the iPad M4 analysis.

I will say SVT-AV1 has had some significant ARM64 performance improvements lately (~300% YoY, with bitrate savings at a given preset[1][2], so call it a 400% increase), so for many use-cases software AV1 encoding (rather than hardware encoding) is likely the preferred modality.

The exceptions, IMO, are concurrant gaming with streaming (niche on MacOS?) and video server transcoding. However, even these exceptions are tenuous: Because Apple Silicon doesn't play x86's logical core / boost clock games, and considering the huge multi-threaded performance of M4, I think streaming with SW encoding of AV1 is quite feasible (for single streams) for both streaming and transcoding. x86 needs a dedicated AV1 encoder more-so due to the single-threaded perf hit from running a multi-threaded background workload. And the bit-rate efficiency will be much better from SW encoding.

That said, latency will suffer and I would still appreciate a HW AV1 encoder.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4 [1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-1.8-Released [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SVT-AV1-2.0

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#153

Post by JKCalhoun »

alberth wrote: post #135
jsheard wrote: post #8

16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.

It's not just RAM. It's Unified RAM. So that memory is also used for the GPU & Neural Cores (which is for Apple Intelligence). This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago. It'll be interesting to see as AI continues to advance, if Apple is forced to depart from their unified memory architecture due to growing GPU memory needs.

At this point it feels like (correct me if I'm am wrong) that Apple's AI is often performed "in the cloud". I suspect though that if Apple moves increasingly to on-device AI (as I suspect they will — if not for bandwidth and backend resource reasons then for privacy ones) Apple's Silicon will have adopted more and more specialized AI components — perhaps diminishing the need for use of off-board memory.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#154

Post by Y_Y »

wongarsu wrote: post #100
rtkwe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.

That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency

in the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#155

Post by kstrauser »

diggan wrote: post #123
pdimitar wrote: post #113

I've been pondering giving up on Macs for a while and this blind and rather stupid deferral to "AI" is going to accelerate the process. Almost nobody asked for this. I personally would have wanted one program to not stop starting with a cryptic message after upgrading to macOS 15.1 earlier today. But hey, crazies like me who want a decently working software are apparently not welcome in the customer base. The only re…

> Apple is now in decline I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. At that point it was clear that professional users weren't the focus anymore, and I promptly left the ecosystem. I still have a iPhone (12 mini) that I only keep because it still works, but every time CarPlay tries to murder me in traffic, I get one step closer to just yeeting that phone into the sea.

That was the low point for MacBooks. The newer models are much better.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#156

Post by Someone1234 »

donatj wrote: post #121

It would appear the air intake is on the bottom like the Mac Studio. As someone who lives in a very dusty 150 year old house, My Mac Studio does not appreciate the air input being directly on the desk. It collects all the dust that lands anywhere near it. I have a large levoit air filter running 24/7 in my office and still end up with this[1] regularly. I wish I could at least reasonably take the thing apart to clean…

Three points:

- Running an Air Filter 24/7 has huge diminishing returns (i.e. waste of electricity). They are best run at max fan speed for short durations instead.

- Elevate it with a platform.

- Get a vacuum (or even a robo vacuum). I grew up in a 100+ year old house, it wasn't dusty, and had hard-woods/brick everywhere.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#158

Post by pantulis »

wongarsu wrote: post #100
rtkwe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.

That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency

Edit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#159

Post by yodon »

alberth wrote: post #135
jsheard wrote: post #8

16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.

It's not just RAM. It's Unified RAM. So that memory is also used for the GPU & Neural Cores (which is for Apple Intelligence). This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago. It'll be interesting to see as AI continues to advance, if Apple is forced to depart from their unified memory architecture due to growing GPU memory needs.

>This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.

I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#160

Post by spiderfarmer »

donatj wrote: post #121

It would appear the air intake is on the bottom like the Mac Studio. As someone who lives in a very dusty 150 year old house, My Mac Studio does not appreciate the air input being directly on the desk. It collects all the dust that lands anywhere near it. I have a large levoit air filter running 24/7 in my office and still end up with this[1] regularly. I wish I could at least reasonably take the thing apart to clean…

Maybe don't rely on air filters too much. I vacuum my office like every 2 days. Not even my air filter gets this dirty.
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