The thing that's truly insulting is their trade-in offer for a late 2020 M1 8G/512G is only $330 vs. an eBay average selling price of over $500.
New Mac Mini
171–180 of 424 posts
Re: New Mac Mini
#172"Available starting 1.24"
January the 24th? January 2024?
I wish the US would start writing dates in a sensible way!
Re: New Mac Mini
#173Kind of surprised to see a 10G Ethernet port as an option on these.
But it adds a month to the lead time.
Re: New Mac Mini
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 Mac mini On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software? I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to war…
What was the resolution a decade ago? Just having the Web in 4K is going to require significantly more memory. And something like Discord is not exactly comparable to an IRC client.
A lot of Discord’s memory usage is because it uses Electron/embedded Chromium. I agree that it does a lot more then IRC clients do, but I think it uses a lot more resources and is a lot less snappy then a native app.
Re: New Mac Mini
#175disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
8 GB is perfectly fine for most people who just use the web, office software, and play media. Even when I have dozens of Chrome tabs open it's always been zero problem on my 8 GB M1 Air.
Also, starting last month, Chrome aggressively unloads tabs in the background with its new "memory saver" feature [1]. So if you were having issues with 8 GB before because of your tabs, you might not anymore.
[1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...
Re: New Mac Mini
#176"Available starting 1.24" January the 24th? January 2024? I wish the US would start writing dates in a sensible way!
They only have 1 unit available. And the CPU of the second unit.
Re: New Mac Mini
#177disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
I will go a step further and state that they appear to top out at 32GB which is asinine. These are not manilla envelope laptops, but semi-compact bricks where the form factor in other brands can commonly take 64GB or more.
Its sad for me that my initial reaction to this is where previously a corp Windows laptop was for email and MS Office, and the Mac was for "actual work", now Mac's are headed to the "email and Office" role, and a halfway decent machine running Linux is where "real work" happens.
Re: New Mac Mini
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a whopping £200 to add an extra 8gb. Ouch.
This is the real problem. M2 is just using LPDDR5. The memory modules themselves don't appear to be anything special; it's just the memory interface bus that is different. Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs. The entry-level product is a decent value, but the upgrades are ridiculous.
> Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs.
Yup. I just checked Newegg, and laptop form factor DDR4 (not DDR5ᵃ) RAM is selling for $126 for 64 GB (2 x 32 GB).
So market price for 1 GB of DDR4 small form factor RAM is $1.96 per GB.
ᵃ DDR5 is almost twice the cost.
Apple is charging 200/8 = $25 per GB.
Apple charges 12 times the retail price of DDR4, and about 6 times the retail price of DDR5.
It's crazy, but they get away with it by soldering these chips down.
If we could legislate a working effective Right to Repair bill, we might be able to fix this predicament.
Re: New Mac Mini
#179Why get the M2 Pro Mini when you can just opt for Mac Studio with M1 Max? They're roughly in the same price bracket.
If you need 32GB in your Mac Mini the price difference is $1999 for the Mac Studio vs $1699 for the Mac Mini M2 Pro 32GB. Indeed that's a tough sell for the Mac Mini. It shows how much Apple is charging extra for those capacity upgrades.
To truly be Apples to Apples, I would factor in the $100 option for 10Gb ethernet, which brings the price difference down to $200... and the extra $200 is getting you an M1 Max.
Re: New Mac Mini
#180disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
"disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. "
I can assure you that the shareholders are not disappointed. The premium you pay for more RAM (and SSD) is insane.
Besides that fact that no one is making a computer for the ordinary user anymore. Hardly anyone needs that much power in a computer.