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Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger…
I want to like these, but they hit the opposite of a sweet spot (sour spot? sore spot?): More expensive than a laptop (which also have a screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, etc.) and much larger than a dongle. The true "next unit of computing" now would be something like a Chromebox the size of a Chromecast.
The AMD models from MinisForum, BeeLink etc have been pretty competitively priced.
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The NUC was never going to be a mass market product. Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.
> Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops The 10% figure is spot-on and that really threw me - I was expecting something like 25-30%: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Fin... It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) o…
I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case.
But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
I think you're right that Apple has lost a lot of creative professionals over the years who migrated to Windows, and the lack of plug and play GPUs may well keep some of those professionals away.
But I think it's actually precisely the indies that represent Apple's best chance at making inroads into the space again over the long run. If you're a kid trying to bootstrap a new YouTube channel or experimenting with filmography and building a portfolio, it's hard to recommend a better combo than FCP and a Mac Mini for performance and cost.
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The Mac Mini is a totally different market: it 1) runs macOS 2) has Apple Silicon 3) has no competitors for running macOS 4) is the cheapest entry point into iOS development which is a high paying job
In the US, maybe. Android rules the rest of the world and Europe, Japan and China.
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> Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops The 10% figure is spot-on and that really threw me - I was expecting something like 25-30%: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Fin... It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) o…
> Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case. But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBoo…
The frustrating thing is just how quickly value decays with Apple's pricing strategy.
When it comes to the Mac Mini/Studio, outside of some extremely niche applications, it really only makes sense to get base models. It is infuriating how much Apple charges for additional ram.
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> Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case. But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBoo…
> But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar. The frustrating thing is just how quickly value decays with Apple's pricing strategy. When it comes to the Mac Mini/Studio, outside of some extremely…
But I'll also say as a software engineer, the MacBook Pro 16 with an M1 Max is the best tool I've ever used for my work.
I dock into a thunderbolt setup with a couple high resolution monitors. I have docker running. Often multiple IDE instances with large codebases. Multiple Chrome windows with dozens if not hundreds of tabs. Zoom calls running screen shares. The machine barely gets warm and I never hear the fans. My prior work laptops would have been howling and begging for mercy.
I often forget that I leave applications running, only to remember later "maybe you should kill those processes". With past work machines, I'd routinely have to hunt for processes to kill to claw back CPU cycles and quiet down the spinning fans.
And then I unplug it from the dock and do all of this at the airport for a few hours. Still silent, cool, and performant. I've never seen anything like it before. And while it's not "thin and light" it's also not the heaviest workstation quality laptop I've ever used.
Not sure how this fits into your personal value propositions, but I can tell you I'd pay far more than I did for this quality of a machine.
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I think its a bigger issue that the next gen NUCs will be good enough to cannibalize the rest of the desktop market. Look at the recent amd offerings and the mac mini with M1. They can replace my destop fully. The only reason I have a desktop now is for gaming.
That's not happening. The new high end application for PCs is running AIs locally. No way you can fit a 4090 in a NUC, the GPU itself is larger than a NUC, heat dissipation requirements cannot be 'optimized' away.
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Something like this? https://hackaday.com/2012/12/09/160-mac-minis-one-rack/ 160 Mac Mini’s in a rack. That’s ~4-nodes / 1U. And you don’t have the added expense of the blade enclosure.
It's a thing because Apple doesn't sell rack mount Mac. Blade servers must be better for cost, cooling and high reliability.
Oh, I'm sorry to hear this. :( I've bought many NUCs over the years. I'm literally sitting in my office right now with 8 NUCs set up -- 1 as a workstation, and 7 as servers performing various tasks. I know people have always complained that they are a bit more expensive than the alternatives, but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability. That said, I've been expecting this fo…
>but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability. Yeah it is quite strange. Even the Vision Five 2 RISC-V has better software support than your usual ARM SBC. The big caveat is that the opensource drivers only support Vulkan but Imagination ™ has planned on releasing a Vulkan based OpenGL implementation. Of course application software support is worse than ARM because of recompi…