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What's crazy is that the M4 Pro is in the Mac mini, something so tiny can handle that chip. The Mac Studio with the M4 Max will be awesome but the Mini is remarkable.
Indeed, the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini beats the current $3999 M2 Ultra Mac Studio on GeekBench 6 multi-core: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/31/m4-pro-chip-benchmark-r...
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Does anyone know if this Mac Mini can survive longer than a year? Apple's approach to hardware design doesn't prioritize thermal issues*. In fact, the form factor is why I'm leaning toward taking a pass - I don't want a Mac Mini I would have to replace every 12 months. * or rather, Apple doesn't target low enough temperatures to keep machines healthy beyond warranty
Do you have any source on this?
That Rossman guy, the internet-famous repairman, built his youtube channel on videos about Apple's inadequate thermal management. They're probably still archived on his channel.
Hell, I haven't owned a Mac post the year 2000 that didn't regularly hit temperatures above 90 celsius.
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AMDs upcoming flagship desktop CPU (9800 X3D) reaches about 3300 points on singlecore (the previous X3D hit 2700ish)
Are you saying a product that has not been released yet will be faster than a product that is? And that a desktop part is going to outperform a laptop part?
For how long? There are a lot of superlatives ("simply incredible" etc) - when some new AMD or Intel CPU beats this score, will that be "simply incredible" too? New chips are slightly faster than previous ones. I am not incredulous about this. Were it a 2x or 3x or 4x improvement or something, sure. But it ain't - it's incremental. I note how even in the Apple marketing they compare it to generations 3 or 4 chips ago…
Apple is just marketing to the biggest buyer group (2 generation upgrades) in their marketing material?
This isn’t like iPhones where people buy them every 1-2 years (because they break or you lose it etc), laptops have a longer shelf life, you usually run to the ground over 2+ yrs and then begrudgingly upgrade.
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My assessment is that ARM is running away from the competition. Apple is indeed designing the chip, but without the ARM architecture, Apple would have nothing to work with. This is not to diminish the incredible work of Apple’s VLSI team who put the chip architecture together and deftly navigated the Wild West of the fabrication landscape, but if you look at the specialized server chip side, it’s now dominated by ARM…
Even compared to other ARM cores, Apple is in a league of its own.
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Indeed, the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini beats the current $3999 M2 Ultra Mac Studio on GeekBench 6 multi-core: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/31/m4-pro-chip-benchmark-r...
Back in the early 90s, when Apple was literally building their first product line with the Mac, they would come out with their second big honking powerhouse Mac: the Macintosh IIx. It blew everything out of the water. Then they would come out with their next budget all-in-one machine. But computing was improving so fast, with prices for components dropping so quickly, that the Macintosh SE/30 ended up as impressive a…
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014791
Mac Mini with M4 Pro is the fastest Mac ever benchmarked
So what is the role of the Mac Studio now? It only has: - faster memory and up to 192 GB. - 1 ekstra Thunderbolt port. That is not much for such a large price difference: Mac Mini (fastest CPU, 64 GB ram, 1 TB SSD, 10 GbE): $2500 Mac Studio (fastest CPU, 64 GB ram, 1 TB SSD, 10 GbE): $5000
The Mac Studio hasn't been updated yet. The equation changes once it's also on the M4 Max and Ultra.
I'll admit to some reflexive skepticism here. I know GeekBench at least used to be considered an entirely unserious indicator of performance and any discussion relating to its scores used to be drowned out by people explaining why it was so bad. Do those criticisms still hold? Are serious people nowadays taking Geekbench to be a reasonably okay (though obviously imperfect) performance metric?
You’re not the only one — but just curious where this skepticism comes from. This is M 4 — Apple has now made four generations of chips and each one were class leading upon release. What more do you need to see?
Buying up most of TSMC's latest node capacity certainly helps. Zen chips on the same node turn out to be very competitive, butAMD don't get first dibs.