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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#281

Post by DrBenCarson »

grahamj wrote: post #215
yunohn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned yesterday that all M-chip Macs with enough RAM are getting Apple Intelligence? This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! Heck, even the Neural Engine has turned out to be basically useless despite all their grandstanding. So alas, their prior greed has resulted in their most popular consumer iDevices being the least AI compatib…

> This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! What they shot was us. My 14 Pro won’t do AI despite having a better NPU than an M1, all because Apple chose - intentionally - to ship it with too little RAM. They knew AI was coming and they did this anyway. Although having played with it on my MBP it’s clear I’m not missing much. But still.

They knew they were releasing Apple Intelligence before ChatGPT went live? lol

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#283

Post by _ph_ »

rapfaria wrote: post #77

From the specs: Up to three displays: Two displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI Up to two displays: One display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI Are these set in stone? Would it be…

I can't say it from first hand experience, but usually that are just example stats. The limit usually is pixels/sec for the bandwidth, so any configuration which requires less bandwidth should work too.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#284

Post by modeless »

> With M4, Mac mini delivers up to 1.8x faster CPU performance and 2.2x faster GPU performance over the M1 model

They're comparing three generations back now?

Oh, I see that they never updated the Mini for M3. So it's only two generations of Mini. Still, I prefer to see one generation comparisons. And it's kind of weird that Apple doesn't keep their smaller product lines more up to date. They certainly have the resources to do so.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#285

Post by Etheryte »

Someone1234 wrote: post #156
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.

In many big cities, getting a lot of dust is nearly out of your control, the only factor you can control is how often you gather it all up. I used to live practically next to a four-lane road when I was younger and even if you kept the windows closed, the dust would still creep in with every coming and going. If you ever opened a window, you'd know you'd need to vacuum soon.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#286

Post by non-nil »

They may have higher ambitions for this generation! In the presentation (roughly at the 10-minute mark), they show off the standard target demographics and setups for creative work, then complementing that with some more enterprise-flirty stuff about making workers more productive and lowering office energy usage, only to finish off with this:

"And with the industry-leading reliability of macOS, healthcare systems can count on mini when providing critical care."

A bit out of character, and also – what?!

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#287

Post by hollerith »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #242
hollerith wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple employees who worked on this product cause a lot of CO2 emissions just living their lives. I'm guessing Apple didn't try to offset that CO2.

Just like all of us. Your spending is a pretty good measure of your impact on the climate.

Agree. Well put.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#288

Post by angoragoats »

Y-bar wrote: post #272
angoragoats wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory bandwidth on Apple silicon is only sometimes comparable to, and in many cases worse than, that of a GPU. For example, an nVidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB GPU (not a high-end card by any means) has memory bandwidth of 288GiB/sec, which is more than double that of the M4 CPU. On the higher end, building a machine with 6 to 8 24GB GPUs such as RTX 3090s would be comparable in cost (as well as available memory) to a hi…

Note that they said the _Mac Studio_ which in the M2 model has between 400GB/s and 800GB/s memory bandwidth. https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/ Edit: since my reply you have edited your comment to mention the Studio, but the fact remains that the M2 Max has at least ~40% greater bandwidth than the number you quoted as an example.

Yeah, sorry, I realized that as well so I edited my post to add a higher end example with multiple 3090s or similar cards. A single 3090 has just under 1TiB/sec of memory bandwidth.

One more edit: I'd also like to point out that memory bandwidth is important, but not sufficient for fast inference. My entire point here is that Apple silicon does have high memory bandwidth for sure, but for inference it's very much held back by the relative slowness of the GPU compared with dedicated nVidia/AMD cards.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#289

Post by baq »

mathnmusic wrote: post #180
magnio wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't we just add extra drives into the extra internal SSD slots? Or does Mac Mini not have those?

AFAIK, Apple took away those slots when Mac minis transitioned to Apple silicon. Attempts to replace SSD with re-soldering have not been successful.

So not even milling off the ssd works now?

Fortunately I don't really see the point of using a mac mini, so this doesn't bother me too much, but... it's poor taste. You're holding it wrong was not cool the first time.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#290

Post by nordsieck »

Hamuko wrote: post #234
nordsieck wrote: post #9

The new model is looking really good. * Kept HDMI * New, much smaller form factor * Front facing USB-C * Base model has 16 gb of ram

I think I’d miss my USB-A ports if I switched my Mac Studio for this. Apart from that, it looks pretty good. Not really sure if it’s worth saving a couple of hundred when you spec it up to par with an M4 Max Mac Studio when that comes out though. It’s the same price as the base M2 Max Mac Studio when you upgrade the memory and SoC.

I have lots of USB-A devices, so I get what you're saying. But converters are pretty cheap and seem reliable.

And Apple has a long history of making this change ahead of the rest of the market. It's been years since they've move to all USB-C in their laptops, so IMO, it was only a matter of time.

And yeah - upgrades are awful price wise. From what I can tell, it's basically only worth it to buy base models unless the machine is making you money. Hopefully they upgrade the Mac Studio to M4 down the line.

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