My Next Mac Mini

Post by mattnewton » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 8:44 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #241

mattnewton wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an apple alumnus, I believe it has to do with a culture of "laser focus" There is an internal course called "what makes apple apple" that you can take, but it's not necessary to pick up one of the key pieces of culture: the importance of saying No to most things. Apple has built their reputation on high quality. To continue to deliver takes immense effort, even for incremental programs, and often almost if the tal…

I see what you are saying but you'd think you could update some of the chips in the mini without needing much company attention?

Post by remir » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #28

Joeri wrote: post #14

One of the big selling points of the mini is that it's really quiet. Does anyone with actual experience know how the NUC compares? From what I've read it's significantly louder, which is not what you want from a living room PC.

For the living room PC, I recently went even further downscale and replaced a wheezing old desktop box with a fanless mini-PC running Win10. It solves the problem of when both kids have homework at the same time. The only software on it is Chrome, since the kids do all of their stuff in the cloud. Oddly, it's the end of an era: The first computer I've owned that I'm not tempted to install MS Office on.

Post by maolt » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 8:54 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #224

eanzenberg wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what they're not doing, and I dunno why everyone thinks they will.. maybe because that's what msft is doing? Apple repeatedly said their laptop/desktop/macos variants will remain for hardcore users who need that freedom, while ios is for users who want simplicity.

The same hardcore users who dislike the new Macbook Pros?

Post by mahyarm » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 8:56 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #163

fowlerpower wrote: post #157

Someone here needs to explain it to me because I just don't understand. We have the largest computer company in the world, a shit load of people work there, supposedly smart people. Yet they can't put together a refresh of many of their desktop machines. Why the fuck not? What do all those people getting paid all that money do all day? I can only imagine the conversations, "it takes years it has to be super innovativ…

I guess they've painted themselves into a bit of a corner with the way they do their pricing, and product announcements with a lot of hype. If they were to do the kind of update you suggest, there would be a lot of bad press stating the obvious ("It's just the same as before, but faster and more RAM. No new alloys or anything!"), and it would drive down prices for inventory of the old model.

Post by ScottBurson » Sat, Jan 28, 2017, 9:00 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #37

coldtea wrote: post #10

> Well, perfect except that six years in this machine is very creaky. It needs a reboot every week or so (otherwise it will refuse to launch anything). That sounds totally unrelated to the age of the machine, and totally related to what's installed, the mini running out of disk, etc. Maybe do a clean install of the OS? Aside from the mechanical parts (CD ROMS, Hard Disks, etc), the "digital" parts of a PC do not age…

There is one factor that heavily affects performance that you haven't addressed though: Software demands on hardware increase over time. MacOS today is more demanding than the MacOS of six years ago. Even if the hardware is in perfect condition, you can't run all six-year-old software, so it's going to be slower.