641–650 of 789 posts
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It is not USB-C powered. It needs 100-240V, 50hz-60hz AC power.
A missed opportunity though. If it’s USB-C powered, it could be even smaller and Apple could simplify its BOM by including a MacBook Pro charger with it.
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Thunderbolt is significantly slower than gen 4 NVME. In the PC world, gen 3 speeds are considered an extreme budget-tier option these days.
TB5 is 15GB/s. So gen 5 equivalent. I'm not saying there are tb5 enclosures in the wilds, but it's a matter of time. Also if you're bottlenecked by buffered, linear reads and writes so much that there is a difference between 3GB/s and 7GB/s then I envy you. Most of what I choke my desktops and servers with is random IO that wouldn't saturate gen2 :)
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It kind of undermines the sleek form factor if you need to have a clunky NVMe enclosure dangling off the back though. Even with this tiny new design I bet they could fit a hatch on the bottom with space for a 2230 M.2 drive, but they don't want to because that would let you upgrade to 2TB of fast internal storage for $200 instead of $800.
There are a number of companies that specialize in making hubs/NVMe enclosures that match the aesthetics of the Mac Mini and sit directly underneath it. For example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S47KBMC/
Love to see that it still starts at $599. My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value. Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the…
It will make me a mac owner for the first time in 25 years. I was just looking at a mac book air yesterday but I just can't get over the complete ripoff of a memory upgrade from the base model. 16 gig starting at $599. I honestly don't need to know anything else to buy one.
As far as I am aware, there isn't a single competitor from big brand manufacture at $599 price point regardless of size. M4, 16GB RAM, Thunderbolt 4. The SSD is the main failing point but with TB4 you can easily get an external SSD. You can also get 10Gbps for extra $100. With EDU or Staff pricing this thing stars at $499. Which is practically a steal. I am thinking it may be better for cooperate to buy this and run…
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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.
Yes but the average user is not purchasing those, let alone putting together a system with one for $600
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Sadly it's been common for USB hubs to be dodgy ever since the advent of USB 3. I rarely had trouble out of 1.x and 2.x hubs, but 3.x+ hubs are consistently trouble. The only ones that haven't been problematic are those integrated into Thunderbolt docks, probably because those undergo more stringent certifications.
Are the ones in Thunderbolt docks actually USB hubs, or just USB host controllers speaking PCIe to the Thunderbolt controller?
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Why would you prefer an external power brick? The internal power supplies in Mac minis have been extremely reliable and the fewer cables the better, in my opinion.
There can be advantages to an external brick, but I see parent's comment mostly centered on having USB-C as input. That gives a lot more options IMHO on how to handle power for this machine, including portability, even if it's supposed to be a desktop machine. I thought the same for the minisforum machines which would be competitive to this, they have a 19V input that really should be USB-C at this point.
The thing is, M chips run so efficiently that even with the power loss from conversion, it’s still pulling less power than a lot of PCs.
But yeah it running on a sleek dc battery would be a lot cooler
16GB still seems tight in 2024
Depends on what you are doing? Our daughter has the original Mac Mini M1 with 8GiB, has a habit to keep everything (PowerPoint, Word, DTP, web browsers, etc.) open and the machine is still lightning-fast. Developer that wants to run IntelliJ, a load of Docker containers, etc.? Sure, that's going to be tight, better get 32 or 64 GiB. Remember that many Mac users are just folks that do web browsing, Office, and a bunch…
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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 this with newer Apple Silicon Macs? My 2020 M1 Mac Mini looks unremarkably normal on my 1440p display. I'm also going between that and my 14" M1 Pro Macbook Pro, which of course looks beautiful but doesn't really make the 1440p on the Mini 'bad'. Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.
The same way someone might not notice motion smoothing on a TV, or how bad scaling and text rendering looks on a 1366*768 panel, or different colour casts from different display technologies. All three took me a while before I could tell what was wrong without seeing them side by side.