Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like we are basically reliving the COVID era supply chain crunch, that it's basically inevitable that in 18-36 months more capacity will come online and prices will crash back to earth. Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.
Memory orders for the whole 2027 were already reserved. There is little indication that in 2028 situation will be any better unless something drastic happens like AI crash. And then the opposite can happen like an unknown drone with 100 kg warhead striking memory production facility.
New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
281–290 of 349 posts
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#282It's a bit of an emotional goodbye to the super cheap Mac Minis we got to enjoy for a while. I got some for family members, we had some serving as iOS/macOS build servers sitting in a closet at my last job, they were fantastic. Not that they're a bad deal now, but at European prices of over €1000 for M6/16GB/256GB it's a psychological barrier that's been broken.
If you adjust for inflation, is it a big change from the super cheap Mac Minis of the past? Probably still somewhat more expensive, but not as much as the nominal difference would imply.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#283Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#284One of the things that Steve Jobs got very right was "and you can order right now". Announcements where you have to wait a month to order throw away all of the hype. Even allowing pre-orders and shipping later is a better idea and so silly that Apple has started walking away from that.
Don't give them ideas...
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#285So happy with my base M4 purchase for $499 when it released. I even snagged a 1TB replacement drive for $199 a year ago. Feels like I got the last train out.
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the "neural accelerators" in the M5 GPU cores really do 4x pre-fill performance over M4. You can find benchmarks online since M5 has been out for months now. I assume the M6 has whatever the next-gen version of those is. These are not the "neural processors" that have been there since M1 (those still exist) but are additionl matrix math accelerators inside the actual GPU cores. Like "tensor cores" on Nvidia GPUs…
Thank you, found some benchmarks and they look really promising. To my understanding those Neural Accelerators are like AMX but for GPUs. With those accelerators the GPU performance on a M5 Max in LLM inferencing would totally be on par with a 5090, that's quite impressive!
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…
Isn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am shocked every time I see one of those driving in SF. street parking must be awful!
I drove one as a loaner. It is big. No dashboard. square steering wheel without turn signals or gear stalk. The rear-view mirror doesn't see out unless you lower the cover in the back. The side mirrors are strangely shaped and small. The front corners are a mysterious mostly unpredictable distance out the front window. But then... It has cameras in all directions including the front bumper. There is a top-down sort o…
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a n…
“It costs a lot to buy a new computer better than the one I have” is another way of saying “computers aren’t going obsolete as fast” which sounds like a great thing.
Re: New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
#290After watching a video about how the filesystems are > 2x faster (and testing this myself in my mac mini vs a linux machine), I feel like Apple is leaving a lot on the table, and I hope that they get APFS to be as fast as the linux filesystems. Because otherwise a lot of this hardware (including their blazing fast SSDs) is wasted. Cuz my M1 mac mini is awesome otherwise.
It might not be the fastest, but at least it supports setting/keeping file creation time - unlike the clusterf*ck we still have on basically all Linux filesystems unfortunately
It's the Linux kernel that deliberately does not provide user land a way to change file creation times.
Meanwhile XNU/macOS does.