So get a stronger one. There will be always something that is better on one or another side. I have 13th gen i7, with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB ssd (and 2.5 GbE). It was 800 EUR + VAT, last year. How much would similar Mac Mini cost? Not a fair comparison either. Edit: 69W for the NUC is not TDP. It is 69W power brick that ships with the machine.
How noisy is it? I made a fanless NUC 7 (!) years ago with a special case, and it's perhaps due for replacement.
Still can be heard, but it is not so annoying as it was. The fan noise is, how to describe it, softer?
I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…
> In 1.25U of rack space, you could run three Mac minis I mean, 1.25U at 5" deep. Lots of cabinets are 35+" deep, if memory serves. So technically it would be 21 Mac Minis in 1.25U of space, so it's more like almost 6 teraflops. Again, button-on-the-bottom and wiring and thermals aside.
Also interesting, the M4 Mini has the flash storage on a replaceable module, instead of being soldered to the motherboard, although the NVMe controller is still integrated into the SoC. iFixIt and others have already posted videos showing that the flash storage is now upgradable. > M4 Mac mini Teardown - UPGRADABLE SSD, Powerful, and TINY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdGxBeSkz8
"Upgradeable" is too big of a word here, specially considering that they're using different form-factors even between the models released on the same year (e.g. pro vs non-pro) ; and also different from models released on the previous year (e.g. studio). This almost certainly means that next year's model will also use a different interface, so you won't be able to upgrade your storage at all.
The M4 Pro Minis support higher capacity modules, so it's not too shocking that they are not identical.
We've already seen videos from the usual suspects showing that people who are sufficiently skilled with a soldering iron can replace the flash chips in the modules with higher capacity chips, in addition to replacing the whole module.
all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses. That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable
Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.
I've seen this FUD repeated for a long time. Hasn't happened yet. Probably the worst that will happen is they'll start requiring some type of verification again.
> NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT 4 cores instead of 10 cores, 69W TDP instead of 22W, UHD Graphics 730 versus Apple's 10 core GPU (0.5 TFLOPs vs about 4.3), 23% worse single core performance, 45% worse multicore, and much louder cooling. It's not a fair comparison.
So get a stronger one. There will be always something that is better on one or another side. I have 13th gen i7, with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB ssd (and 2.5 GbE). It was 800 EUR + VAT, last year. How much would similar Mac Mini cost? Not a fair comparison either. Edit: 69W for the NUC is not TDP. It is 69W power brick that ships with the machine.
I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…
At this point maybe the main benefit of an x86 machine is it has a spot to plug in an Nvidia GPU :-)
I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures. How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink? I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading bu…
I have an N100 in that listing on the linked GitHub project, it's the best Intel system I've tested, and it gets around 2.5 Gflops/W (which is a little less than a Raspberry Pi 5, which is not known for being the most efficient Arm system).
This isn't the market for MacMinis though. Why are people on this forum so bad at understanding market segmentation? Apple made an incredible desktop machine that happens to work pretty damn well as a server if you poke around. This machine is for people at home to for editing video. It's great in the field for production where it goes from pelican case to hotel desk to folding table to pelican case to cargo hold to…
Have you ever thought that maybe people understand "market segmentation", but at the same time, they'd like to know how broad a range of computing options one would have on these general purpose computers, with price tags in the many-hundreds to thousands range?
Sure, but to complain that a Mac, which, come on, at this point is a known quantity for 20 years, doesn't run Linux is just looking to complain. If you want more options there's endless x86 choices, and if you want ARM then demand better from other manufacturers as well. Apple showed its possible, why doesn't Dell come out with something comparable? I'm not a fanboy, I run systems of all stripes, but Macs aren't designed to be servers (even though they operate perfectly well as one) and people need to stop complaining that they aren't.