Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Mac Mini with M4

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 789 posts

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#291

Post by nxobject »

hggigg wrote: post #218
madeofpalk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't see the "1.7x more Excel productivity" chart from yesterday's new iMac? https://youtu.be/eaB7nCdId0Y?t=364 https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/28/24281965/honestly-this-i...

While that sounds pretty funny I know people who actually burn the CPU on Excel so that might be significant. Granted they should not be using Excel for what they do but you know, it's easier than learning something new!

Once people learn Goal Seek and the matrix extensions to Excel’s macro language, it’s game over for corporate standard-issue Dell 11” laptops, that’s for sure.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#292

Post by ayewo »

ErneX wrote: post #205
terramex wrote: post #19

How good are modern external hard drives? Is it worth paying for more internal SSD storage or is it more reasonable to get high quality USB one?

I have an NVME SSD on a TB enclosure and I get 2600MB/s read speeds on my Mac Studio.

Mind sharing which brand you use for external storage?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#293

Post by ayewo »

kissiel wrote: post #36
terramex wrote: post #19

How good are modern external hard drives? Is it worth paying for more internal SSD storage or is it more reasonable to get high quality USB one?

I get 2GB/s+ with a USB4 NVME enclosure. If I buy this, this is where the main storage will be.

Can you share more details about your external storage setup?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#294

Post by sib »

wongarsu wrote: post #29
mentos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mention of the SSD size that was the reason I returned my Mac mini 256Gb last year was just a pain juggling files

Base model is 256GB configurable up to 2TB, all others start at 512GB, the M4 Pro model can go up to 8TB

It's USD2,400 to upgrade the M4 Pro model from 512GB to 8TB, which feels a bit steep, but it's an option.

Alternatively, you can get one of these[1] external Other World Computing NVME SSDs for USD1,190 right now. And then you can easily move all your files from your laptop to your desktop when you get home.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4EXP1MT08/ (15% off list price as of writing)

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#295

Post by nextos »

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.

Exactly, the M2 Ultra is competitive for local inference use cases given the 800 GB/s bandwith and a relatively low cost and energy efficiency.

The M4 Pro in the Mini has a bandwidth of 273 GB/s, which is probably less appealing. But I wonder how it'd compare cost-wise and performance-wise, with several Minis in a little cluster, each running a small LLM and exchanging messages. This could be interesting for a local agent architecture.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#296

Post by prewett »

amelius wrote: post #56
vineyardlabs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly. Asahi linux is getting pretty useable on M1 and M2. They don't support M3 yet, let alone M4, but support will surely come eventually.

There are no guarantees that it runs correctly, though, as it's all based on reverse-engineering work that includes a lot of guesswork.

I would be shocked if they weren't using a test suite, especially given all the platforms and devices Linux supports. POSIX has a test suite, and there are several Linux test suites [1], [2]. Although, I would think that an architecture port is fairly straightforward. It's reverse-engineering and writing all the device drivers, but devices generally have a well-known interface (and, therefore, presumably tests). The OpenGL drivers are being tested against the official OpenGL test suite.

Of course, there are no guarantees that it runs correctly. Probably doesn't, given that even Apple and Microsoft's software don't run correctly, either. But saying software doesn't run perfectly in all cases is almost tautological.

[1] https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/phoronix-test-suite

[2] https://github.com/linux-test-project/ltp

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#297

Post by diggan »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #259
diggan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> Apple is now in decline >I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. It doesn't look like it: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie...

Obviously, by the context, it should be clear we're not talking about the stock price, probably the least interesting data point.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#298

Post by rtkwe »

wtallis wrote: post #221
jsheard wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.

Right. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.

I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#299

Post by angoragoats »

nextos wrote: post #295
Y-bar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, the M2 Ultra is competitive for local inference use cases given the 800 GB/s bandwith and a relatively low cost and energy efficiency. The M4 Pro in the Mini has a bandwidth of 273 GB/s, which is probably less appealing. But I wonder how it'd compare cost-wise and performance-wise, with several Minis in a little cluster, each running a small LLM and exchanging messages. This could be interesting for a local…

See my sibling reply below, but I disagree with your main point here. M2 Ultra is only competitive for very specific use cases, it does not really cost less than a much higher-performing setup, and if what you care about is true efficiency (meaning, W/token, or how much energy does the computer use to produce a given response), a multi-GPU setup and Mac Studios are on about equal footing.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#300

Post by Hamuko »

nordsieck wrote: post #290
Hamuko wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I actually recently discovered that my USB DAC was skipping a lot because I had it connected to a hub. Threw it directly onto the Mac Studio and now everything's peachy, so there are definitely downsides to trying to get a bunch of USB-A devices attached to one of these.
Post reply on HN