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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#601

Post by singhrac »

mkagenius wrote: post #568
celestialcheese wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value. You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.

Is there a black market for old macbooks/minis? My macbook pro 15 inch, mid 2017 is valued at $195 by apple trade in. Bought for 2k iirc.

No need for a black market, there's plenty of public ones (Backmarket, eBay, etc.). That being said $200 seems not terrible given the step change in performance since then (I own a 2019 MBP and think we were very unlucky with our purchase timing). Backmarket seems to sell yours for ~$350-500, so maybe you'll get a little bit more trade-in for it.

I owned a 2014 MBP (~$1200?) for a long time and as late as 2019 it was resellable for $500.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#602

Post by angoragoats »

DrBenCarson wrote: post #274
talldayo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing Not really? Apple is efficient because they ship moderately large GPUs manufactured on TSMC hardware. Their NPU hardware is more or less entirely ignored and their GPUs are using the same shader-based compute that Intel and AMD rely on. It's not efficient because Apple does anything different with their hardware like Nvidia does, it's efficie…

Frankly you’re very wrong. NPUs and GPUs aside, 16gb of GPU memory is very rare in consumer hardware

I'm not sure what you mean. RTX 4060 Ti/4070 Ti Super/3090/4090 cards can be easily purchased at any major electronics store in person or online and have 16GB or 24GB depending on model. Once you get up to 32GB, your point would stand, but 16-24GB GPUs are common.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#603

Post by OnionBlender »

jeffbee wrote: post #116
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...

It's funny that they advertise this because a Mac comes with a spreadsheet application that is hard to use and unbelievably slow. If they sent some engineers to work on that program they could get a 10x-100x improvement on the software side instead of grinding it out on the hardware side.

It's also funny because Visicalc was a big contributor to the Apple II's popularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#604

Post by sylens »

mkagenius wrote: post #568
celestialcheese wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value. You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.

Is there a black market for old macbooks/minis? My macbook pro 15 inch, mid 2017 is valued at $195 by apple trade in. Bought for 2k iirc.

It’s a casaulty of the Apple Silicon transition. The Intel Mac’s are not worth much

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#605

Post by angoragoats »

transitorykris wrote: post #363
whartung wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, do you think that when the Mac Studio gets upgraded, it will also come with less max RAM, but be unified? Is the whole "unified" RAM a reason that the iMac and Mini are capped at 32G?

The Mac Studio has always had unified memory

Fun fact: any PC with integrated graphics has also had unified memory (yep, including Intel Macs), for at least the past decade!

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#606

Post by toasterlovin »

vbezhenar wrote: post #312

I wish they would add small UPS inside (like super-capacitor or something like that) there to provide way for forced sleep when power is cut off. It's a neat small device which must be accompanied by huge bulky UPS for reliable operation. If someone didn't know, macOS ignores fsync, so without UPS your data is not safe. Not an issue for laptops, obviously, but issue for battery-less devices.

Is it common for desktop computers in this size to have a built in UPS?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#607

Post by baq »

architect64 wrote: post #439
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…

Can confirm, you absolutely need BetterDisplay and a tiny bit of elbow grease to configure the 5k clone to downscale to your real monitor. Not rocket science, but could be more streamlined.

If you say it looks fine without it, I don't know what to say.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#608

Post by baq »

calf wrote: post #563
architect64 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there a review that demonstrates and corroborates this issue? Is it a difficult problem if choosing to buy a new display for a Mac mini? My old display is 10 years old and I would have to get a new one then.

It's most visible with the macbooks because you have the retina display and the low dpi display next to each other.

In short: you probably want to get at least a 4k display anyway, but if you want to delay that, you should buy BetterDisplay. The difference is night and day.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#610

Post by newman314 »

Looks like it is not a big price differential to get 4x the cheapest Mac mini vs. a fully loaded 64GB mem version with the Mac mini Pro. That and we would end up getting more GPU cores (4x10 vs. 20).

And if this is cross connected with TB4 networking and using exolab, might be good for a nice local setup.

Anyone up to try this out?

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