111–120 of 134 posts
Not a bad price until you see it costs $300 to go from 4GB RAM to 16GB RAM. Do these have user-upgradeable RAM? I can buy RAM a lot cheaper than that.
"With the new type of ram, this is so small that we need to solder it to the logic board. So it is not user replaceable any longer. We can only offer upgrade at the point of purchase"
The PICe SSD storage is also soldiered onto the machine.
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which is totally insane. Yes, let's alienate the group of people who build 3rd party software and want a reasonably priced headless mac, and user upgradeable memory/HDD. Idiots. $100+ billion in cash or marketable securities and total spite for the dev/performance market. Just blind arrogance at this point - 'we don't need to offer this option anymore'
Apple has never been shy that "developer" Macs are the MacPros. The fact that you can get a reasonable developer experience on a Mac Mini or an iMac the last few years has been coincidental.
Previously there was the XServe platform that I could have in a rack along my other infrastructure. They ditched that. The old MacPro's you could install in a rack, though they were massively overpriced for what it was a purely CPU-bound job. Now the new MacPro's are not rackable any more.
Mac Mini's were never great, but they were cheap enough you could buy a few and small enough that you could put somewhere, although it sucked.
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Apple has never been shy that "developer" Macs are the MacPros. The fact that you can get a reasonable developer experience on a Mac Mini or an iMac the last few years has been coincidental.
Let me put it this way. If I do a pkgsrc bulk build, what do I build it on? Previously there was the XServe platform that I could have in a rack along my other infrastructure. They ditched that. The old MacPro's you could install in a rack, though they were massively overpriced for what it was a purely CPU-bound job. Now the new MacPro's are not rackable any more. Mac Mini's were never great, but they were cheap enou…
I seriously do not understand how can it ship with a 500GB 5400rpm drive by default. This gives such poor experience to the user that Apple should have opted for all-ssd approach two generations ago. Very disappointed by that.
I bought a low-end Mac mini last year, upgraded it with 16 GB memory from Crucial, installed a Samsung SSD with Fusion Drive and bingo: reasonably fast desktop system for less than $900. I guess you can do it for $800 now. The stock 5400rpm drive is unusable, but it's an easy fix if you're willing to open the box. With Fusion Drive, even a small SSD will make a huge difference.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but they appear to have done the same thing with the Mac Mini to achieve the lower price point as they did with the iMac earlier this year, by introducing a 1.4Ghz i5 model? I don't recall the base Mac Mini being as weak before...
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as I said else where small mac shops when they get to 10-15 people start to need a mac midi if they want to stay in the mac ecosystem
Not sure that's the right number - I worked in a Mac shop (an engineering firm) with 20-30 users with 21" iMacs, served off a single Mac Mini server. If your users are just normal users, iMacs are fine. (Though the Macs did come under fire from the finance folks - taking the line that "equivalent" PCs are "industry standard" and a third of the price. I think this argument won out in the end, and the Macs all disappea…
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then why 5400k? At work (90% mac shop) we are just looking at what to do for a central server. Apple isn't supporting that market very well - they need a shuttle sff size mac midi that uses full fat non mobile parts. The gen 8 HP micro severs are just so much better
Honestly, it could be due to heat issues. It's a small device and faster drives can get hot. Apple has tried to support that market before, and it's just not a big market, and it isn't a one-size fits all market. Many people have been clamoring for an Apple solution for SMB server, and it just isn't profitable. This is especially true when you take into account cloud shared storage providers like Dropbox or Box.net.…
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Do you know of any good ITX hackintosh howto writeups? I might go that route too as I want small form factor and OSX, but do not want to pay an apple tax (even if their case is way prettier).
tonymacx86.com is a decent enough community. I've built 10+ machines using the site-promoted build tutorials (with some modifications) for myself and friends. The forums are hit or miss in terms of helpful information, though.
I was unaware of the theft, could you go into more detail? I read OSx86 sometimes but could never get chameleon installed on my own. The tonymac software was the easiest for to install. That's my fault for being lazy. This is disappointing.
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Not sure that's the right number - I worked in a Mac shop (an engineering firm) with 20-30 users with 21" iMacs, served off a single Mac Mini server. If your users are just normal users, iMacs are fine. (Though the Macs did come under fire from the finance folks - taking the line that "equivalent" PCs are "industry standard" and a third of the price. I think this argument won out in the end, and the Macs all disappea…
but 2tb is just to small and id want to use esxi to virtualise the server we have tools that run on Ubuntu