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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#431

Post by rsync »

ErneX wrote: post #172
rsync wrote: post #118

How many 4k screens can be attached? The published specs call out 3 6k screens but is that a display bandwidth limit or an arbitrary “screen” limit ? I’d like to drive four displays and 4k is sufficient for me … possible? Perhaps with Number four on the HDMI port?

Website says it supports 3 6K displays, here you go: M4 (Thunderbolt 4): - 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…

OK, so unnecessary and arbitrary restrictions on screen numbers, once again.

There is really no reason you couldn't drive four (or more) lower resolution (4k) screens, given the array of ports.

In case anyone is wondering, the use-case here is a triple-monitor configuration at a desk with a much larger "TV" positioned, or hung, elsewhere in the room.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#432

Post by kridsdale3 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #311
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is huge for AI / ML at least for inference. Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing, the only downside is the lack of cuda

I consider that a plus. Maybe the AI community wil start to wake up and realize that going all in on cuda is ridiculously stupid.

Not if you're an NVDA shareholder!

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#433

Post by slashdave »

eastbound wrote: post #414
_mlbt wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a desktop, so plugging in a USB external hard drive isn’t too painful or expensive.

Dockers can’t run off external drives.

That's an interesting claim. An external drive is just another block device. Is this something you experienced?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#434

Post by sangnoir »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market).

This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum.

I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten, but not "easily"), and also supports memory upgrades of up to 256GB.

1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#435

Post by vineyardlabs »

pantalaimon wrote: post #303
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.

> support will surely come eventually I wouldn't be so sure - if marcan loses interest (already looks like it), who is going to keep up with supporting the latest Apple chips? When the M series chips were the hot new thing, there sure was developer interest - but now that a new chip is released every year, it becomes boring drudgery. Look at support for T2 Macs - it took a decade to get them supported, not because th…

Fair enough, I suppose I could be overly optimistic. I just figure it's garnered enough interest that even if there's turnover in the team somebody will carry the torch. Especially since Apple seems to be actively tolerant if not even supportive of the project.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#436

Post by hbn »

mikepurvis wrote: post #410
hbn wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone 7 in 2016 was the one that dropped the headphone jack. iPhone 8 launched alongside the X in 2017.

Oh that's right yeah— 6/7/8 all had the same form factor as that was the time that the off-year S versions were also dropped, so I always get confused. And to further muddy the waters, the space in the 7 chassis for the jack was mostly still available, which led to that one madlad bodging in his own headphone jack, for a one of a kind iPhone 7: https://hackaday.com/2017/09/07/bringing-back-the-iphone7-he...

The 6 actually had an S release, as well as the X.

But yeah the headphone jack dropping was obviously just to get more people onboard with AirPods that launched at the same time. And you can't say it didn't work! I remember when the first images of people wearing AirPods came out and it was the laughing stock of the internet. People said it looked like you had Q-tips hanging out of your ears, or the tips of an electric toothbrush.

A few years later and they're pulling in tens of billions of dollars per year, just on AirPods sales alone. AirPods could be pulled out into its own business and it would be seen as a wildly successful tech company.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#437

Post by farawayea »

xenospn wrote: post #415
farawayea wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a solution when your main SSD dies. The system no longer boots. The guy from the youtube video explains that as well. Normal computers with NVMe storage will always be more repairable than Apple's hardware with everything soldered on the board.

You can boot Macs from external drives.

Yes, you can. Can you boot them from external drives when their internal SSD is dead? This isn't about booting them when their OS is wiped out.

Having a dead SSD seems to kill these computers. That's expected for something with soldered flash chips.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#438

Post by SoftTalker »

setgree wrote: post #393
huijzer wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do note only 256 GB of storage. Should be enough for most people, but at the same time can become very annoying once it gets full.

We can reasonably expect 1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface) 2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game co…

Cloud storage is still painfully slow compared to local.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#439

Post by architect64 »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

One issue to watch out for: Sub-4K res monitors look surprisingly bad on newer versions of macOS with Apple Silicon Macs. And no, it's not simply a matter of non-Retina obviously not looking as nice as Retina monitors - something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux. This is partly caused by a lack of subpixel rendering for text on macOS, but it doesn't affect just text, with app icon graphics and such seemingly optimized for High-DPI resolutions only and thus looking awful too. You commonly see people using 3rd party apps such as BetterDisplay to partially work around this problem by tricking the system to treat 1440p displays as 5K displays and then downscale, but it doesn't solve this completely. So yes, the price for the machine is fantastic, but you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#440

Post by tmikaeld »

sangnoir wrote: post #434
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum. I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten,…

When you factor in memory bandwidth (80GB/s for DDR4) - that's not even close to the M4 (120GB/s base model).
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