101–110 of 789 posts
Putting the audio jack on the front is a strange design choice to me if you plan on hooking it up to wired speakers all the time. Did they run out of space to keep it in the back?
1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup will just receive a spec bump soon.
2. On the product page (https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/) Apple highlights a number of third party accessories. Notably the PS5 controller and several keyboards and mice from different manufacturers. This seems small, but it would have been almost blasphemy under the jobs era.
3. This is quite the little powerhouse. Honestly it is so good it eliminates the need for most people to even consider the Mac Studio.
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It does not apply to memory. It’s much harder to maintain signal integrity. 200+ 4GHz signals.
If a CPU is socket-able, so should memory chips be.
Have you installed a server CPU?
It’s really easy to fuckup and lose a few channels of memory due to the contact being bad. Right now I’ve got a 3647 Xeon phi cpu that’s refusing to train dimm a1 for _reasons_
That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have.
Here’s an example BGA socket: https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/bga-sockets/
Not something that’s going in a tiny laptop chassis.
As usual, no upgradability. There's evidence that it's possible with SSDs with no loss of performance. Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips and a simple switch. More future landfill material.
For drives at least, the upgrade path is the USB-C port.
Apple knows how to make money, I can buy a quality 4TB Nvme for 300$( you can definitely go lower if you want to risk it ). The upgrade to 4TB on the M4 Pro Mini is 1200$(it's not supported on the base model) , on top of 1400$ for the actual computer.
It I had to guess, most of Apple's margin is on users riding the pricing ladder up into the stratosphere.
I had an experience a few years ago at an Apple store, where this clerk refuse to sell me the cheapest m1 MacBook Air. There's probably some direction from up top which is trying convince people they need the more expensive Macs.
As usual, no upgradability. There's evidence that it's possible with SSDs with no loss of performance. Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips and a simple switch. More future landfill material.
I actually think Apple's way of managing upgrades isn't as harsh as many people think.
The first thing to get to sustainability is to use less. If you don't need the hardware to make hardware easily upgradable, you simplify the hardware and use less of it. This is one of the reasons Apple do it.
Secondly, they're using a lot of recycled material in this thing. Their lede line on it is that its carbon neutral. Show me another desktop PC like this that can make that claim.
Thirdly, the "half-life" of a Mac is kind of insane. When I was buying Thinkpads, Dells, and the like, I'd get 2-3 years down the line and I'd "need" to upgrade the whole thing. I've got a 2017 Mac Mini, and an 2015 MBP in regular use. I have a G4 iBook that was in active use by my parents from 2004 until _this Spring_ - they only gave it up because they couldn't upgrade Chrome on it any more, so it's about to become a retro Linux term for me, because the hardware is still sound (albeit too under-powered for anything modern).
And lastly, they take old hardware in and recycle it back into the new stuff in the first step. They give relatively decent trade-in prices, and are one of the few consumer brands doing that.
Given that they're shipping it with 16GB of RAM, which is fine for my needs, I think I'm confident in saying I could buy one, use it for 5-8 years, and then get it recycled when I upgrade at that point, while most PCs with upgradable RAM being sold today are going to landfill within 4 years, perhaps.
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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.
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Isn't steamdeck a better option for this use case?
I have a Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, M2 Mac Mini, M1 Pro laptop, M2 Max laptop (work). All of this runs on either an LG C3 42" OLED or a 34" 1440p ultrawide. Linux GeForce Now can only do 720p or 1080p, can't remember which. Also, it's just kind of laggy in desktop mode. The Macs run so much smoother. My current "main" desktop is actually my Asus ROG Ally. I use one USB C hub that is capable of 4k120hz, and I can move…
At least it boots.
I purchase a Surface Pro 8 a year ago or something, thinking Windows would surely work better than usual when it is Microsoft's own hardware too.
But no, yesterday it got stuck in a boot loop, after a Windows update broke the audio drivers somehow. The Windows logs/reliability report can just tell me it "shut down abnormally" without any technical details what so ever.
I still have to use Windows on my desktop because of Ableton, but I'll never purchase any Microsoft hardware again, and as soon as I can, I'll run Ableton on Linux like the rest of my software.
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On a desktop computer it's not as bothersome to have an NVME plugged in to one of the thunderbolt ports.
Thunderbolt is significantly slower than gen 4 NVME. In the PC world, gen 3 speeds are considered an extreme budget-tier option these days.
The vast majority of people who will buy this will be just fine with that level of performance for many years to come.
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> Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips The memory chip is embedded in the SoC, how do you envision a way to do replacement of memory chips with this design/architecture?
I am not talking about DIMMs. Talking about the chips themselves. I am pretty sure they don't make different APUs for different memory sizes, it's just a fuse or something like that. If CPUs can use sockets, so do memory chips.
The pin density on a bga memory is like, 0.3mm for the type typically used by apple. That’s 200 0.3mm pins that have to line up and work at 4GHz and survive you dropping it 5 feet.
What a great little computer at a very reasonable price. A few interesting things with this announcement: 1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup wi…
The mac book air with the M chip was absolutly a steal already. I'm surprised by this.
Is that some thing to allow cheaper MX / Arm architecture in DCs? Is getting Apple affordable oO?!