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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#221

Post by dsr_ »

yzydserd wrote: post #171
mrtksn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people have a relative or something still in education, just buy it through them. It's not like this is government subsidy, just a promotion to increase sales and maybe hope to have long term customer by hooking them at younger age. Probably much less immoral than blocking ads on YouTube.

It seems viable that doing so increases the price for those of us who don't.

The typical .edu discount from Apple on largish purchases is about $100, regardless of whether that's a $600 final tag or a $2000 final tag. So, somewhere between 14% and 5%.

If Apple sells 50% of Macs to the .edu discount market, that's a difference to you of somewhere between 2.5% and 7%.

Or, you can accept that Apple's prices are not set by the market so much as by their marketing department.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#222

Post by JohnTHaller »

jchw wrote: post #74

While it may not be the literal fastest CPU ever, it still seems very, very fast, and the efficiency is pretty compelling. I'm not sure how much of those efficiency gains are a product of the design constraints that Apple is not beholden to (external memory, x86 backwards compatibility, other aspects of the AMD64 architecture, etc.), the slightly better process nodes, or superior design. I'm honestly dying to know, b…

The SSD in the new small Mac Mini is replaceable, though it is proprietary (not standard NVMe) and uses different physically sized and shaped drives that are incompatible with each other physically between the M4 base version and M4 Pro version.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#223

Post by MBCook »

pier25 wrote: post #128

The M4 Pro is less efficient than the M3 though. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-analysis-Extremel...

Wait wait wait.

That’s comparing a M4 Pro (middle level) to a M3 Air. The Air is a lower power machine with the low spec processor.

There is no M4 Pro Air. They have to be using a MacBook Pro. That likely has a bigger display, a display capable of getting way brighter, showing more colors, better speakers, all sorts of other stuff.

That’s not a very valid comparison.

If anything, the fact that the M4 Pro gets so close to the M3 is impressive.

The M3 was on a process that was known to run hot. I strongly suspect that every M4 chip is more efficient than the equivalent M3 chip.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#224

Post by matt-p »

MBCook wrote: post #211
nextos wrote: post #9

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…

There was a comparison mentioned on last week’s episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, I don’t remember if it was pointed out to them or they noticed it themselves. Base Mac mini: $599, 16/256 GB Double storage and ram: $600 upgrade. Price of 32/512 config: $1199 Two 16/256 machines: $119 8 . The ram is (Apple) reasonable at $200, but $400 for the storage doubling is insane.

I think you have it the wrong way round? Ram is 400 (200/8GB) storage is 200

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#225

Post by ewzimm »

MBCook wrote: post #211
nextos wrote: post #9

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…

There was a comparison mentioned on last week’s episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, I don’t remember if it was pointed out to them or they noticed it themselves. Base Mac mini: $599, 16/256 GB Double storage and ram: $600 upgrade. Price of 32/512 config: $1199 Two 16/256 machines: $119 8 . The ram is (Apple) reasonable at $200, but $400 for the storage doubling is insane.

Also, the 256 uses 2x128 drives while the 512 uses a single drive, so you even get slightly slower storage with the upgrade. The base model is a great deal.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#226

Post by MBCook »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #222
jchw wrote: post #74

While it may not be the literal fastest CPU ever, it still seems very, very fast, and the efficiency is pretty compelling. I'm not sure how much of those efficiency gains are a product of the design constraints that Apple is not beholden to (external memory, x86 backwards compatibility, other aspects of the AMD64 architecture, etc.), the slightly better process nodes, or superior design. I'm honestly dying to know, b…

The SSD in the new small Mac Mini is replaceable, though it is proprietary (not standard NVMe) and uses different physically sized and shaped drives that are incompatible with each other physically between the M4 base version and M4 Pro version.

Plus it’s not like it’s designed to be user accessible. Yeah, you can get to it. But it’s not easy.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#227

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

GustaBOT wrote: post #183
mcv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)

Since the first ARM systems (may be before) you can’t upgrade things on your own, i had an Air which can be SSD upgraded but not memory upgraded. Memory can only be upgraded from factory.

You could just solder on a new ram set

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#228

Post by ghostly_s »

7thpower wrote: post #208
josephg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don’t know why 8gb base models get so much hate online. 8gb is 64 billion bits of memory. If you’re writing everyday software and you need more memory than that, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.

Seriously? What if you want to have a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet open? Or containers? My M1 routinely rests around 22gb of RAM.

Using Chrome I'd guess?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#229

Post by jchw »

jeffbee wrote: post #217
jchw wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's enough high quality benchmark information to really make a statement like that, but most importantly, I care about both single-core and multi-thread performance. I don't really have any workloads that only use one thread. Comparing the M4 with PC CPUs will be hard. Typically when comparing two PC CPUs, to make the comparison more realistic, you'd set some reasonable similar constraints, like usi…

Nah that's all pointless trivia. It is dark inside the box. Nobody gives a rip whether the mini is faster because it's got better ram or if it's faster because it's got better arithmetic logic. So you do not have to control things like memory because you don't have a choice anyway.

You don't really seem to understand the point of benchmarks. You're trying to compare the performance between two devices to quantify which one is better at some specific task in some scenario. The tricky part here isn't that people care whether the CPU is better or not, the problem is that on the PC side you can fix the variables between CPUs so that you can just look at the value of individual CPUs, but you can't do that when comparing across PCs and Mac devices. So what do you pick to compare with? There is no correct answer, but there are some answers that are more sensible than others. e.g. you probably don't want to jump massively into another price class.

If money is no object and you just want ridiculous multicore performance it's going to be pretty hard to beat EPYC. Yes, the single core performance is going to be worse; it won't probably be the best even among PC parts, but many use cases gladly take that tradeoff.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#230

Post by triyambakam »

GustaBOT wrote: post #183
mcv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)

Since the first ARM systems (may be before) you can’t upgrade things on your own, i had an Air which can be SSD upgraded but not memory upgraded. Memory can only be upgraded from factory.

Unless you are dosdude on Youtube

"MacBook Air 16GB RAM Upgrade"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxbVxaScZQ4

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