271–280 of 632 posts
Any feedback on how it comes along for regular Software Development (backend stuff) activity and as a common home PC? Looking at the benchmarks looks like there shouldn't be any issue but any first hand experience would be greatly appreciated.
The regular backend stack on docker is smooth. Vs code / jetbrain is smooth. Nothing to complain about.
I could use more ports however. That is easily fixed with an USB hub.
The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7). Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps. The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt. It's becoming a dedicated video ren…
>The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7). You could pick a variety of non Apple CPUs that easily deliver 4-5x the performance of an 11th gen i5. Maybe don't be disingenous and compare the M4 to a more recent CPU like i5-14600K, which is also 4x the performance. I'm not comparing on power efficiency, since that was not mentioned at all as part of your…
Passmark shows 38,951 / 4,282 versus 24,724 / 4,555:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-14600...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+10+Core&id...
So i5-14600K is 1.57x on multi-core, slightly worse on single-core. $235 for the CPU versus $599 for a whole system. Could maybe match the total price, but Intel won't be able to come anywhere close on the power efficiency.
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> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly. That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too. For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient. The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but t…
For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.
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> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.
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.
Suppose I know of a non-Mac that has similar performance and silence for €1000 non-educational. To decide if that meets the requirement I'd need to either look up the non-educational price of the Mac to compare to €1000 or I'd need to look up the educational price of the €1000 machine (if it has one) to compare with €650.
They are more likely to get useful answers if they post the non-educational price so that people don't have to do extra work to figure out if they should respond.
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> They almost certainly won’t get rid of it because people are abusing it. It always depends on the ratio (valid cases vs abusers), if the amount of the abusers gets too high, then the discount is not correctly fulfilling its purpose. > If they want to end the abuse they will simply toughen the verification procedure. It also depends on how expensive or difficult it is to maintain such verification procedure. At some…
It's not cheating if they intend for you to do it (but just can't explicitly say it's allowed because then everyone would do it and that would collapse their self-assortative price-discrimination strategy.) > If you can "cheat" on getting the discount, people just keep finding reasons why they are justified to cheat. "They should toughen the verification procedure if cheating is possible". You seem to misunderstand t…
It feels like you are proving my point of people finding excuses to buy the Mac with educational discount, when they don't meet the requirements :)
The intend it clearly for educational setting. For students and teachers. You dishonor the intend if you still try to claim the discount. Whether you are punished or not.
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Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [ 1 ] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmwa…
That's a valid concern but I personally avoid going into this rabbit hole just for the sake of my (already fragile) sanity. Speaking of issues, the other one with these low cost mini PCs is low-quality SSDs. The one that my UN100D was supplied with was pure garboleum in terms of speed so it had to be replaced.
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NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT, with no RAM or storage. For the other 250 EUR, surely you can get more RAM than 16 GB and more storage than 256 GB.
RAM is completely fair. Apple is certainly out of their mind on storage. But on a desktop it’s trivial to plug-in an external disc that you can buy at an absolutely reasonable price instead of the insane Apple one.
And while you can plug in storage, I think it does kind of ruin the appeal of having such a small device by having a bunch of spaghetti cables. And if the boot drive goes it's not easily replaceable and makes the machine a brick until it is.
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Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.
Pretty sure people already are abusing it. I think this is a lot like the situation with oldschool Photoshop: for a long time, people pirated Photoshop, and Adobe really didn't care — didn't bother to do anything to make piracy the least bit challenging. This was seemingly because they considered the amount of money they could make off of sales to individuals , to be relatively trivial next to the amount of money the…
Exactly. At that point when the amount of abusers gets too high (because this will become mainstream knowledge and people think it is generally acceptable to dishonor the intention), then this will end. Or if they are able to improve the verification process with negligible costs.
So, the more people talk about "educational price", and more think that is acceptable to "cheat", more likely the count of abusers reach that threshold and good things end.
> (Or, if you think about it another way: this is essentially customer-driven price discrimination. Like coupons are for grocery stores. The discounted price is Apple's true price — the price that builds in a profit margin they're happy with. The higher price is pure gravy if they can convince people to part with it. They put the higher price front-and-center, and make the lower-priced offer a bit obscure. People "spending someone else's money" don't care about hunting for deals; they just want to get the thing and get out. So you can milk the gravy from them. People who hold their bank balance more dearly, hunt for the deal, and find it. Still fine; still made a profit from them!)
You are finding again an excuse to cheat. It is perfectly okay to take an advantage of discount if you are eligible for that. But this was not the case.
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Depends what 'home server' means. MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later. I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you…
The network stack is very different now - BSD doesn't run on cell phones after all. But no syncookies, no. But IMO the real advantage of ARMv8 for a server is that it has better security.