First time I've really been aware of an Apple product not just being like-for-like $->£ but actually a higher £ number: £649 vs. $599. For reference, $599 is £489.
The UK price includes VAT at 20%, so it's really £540.84 vs $599.
New Mac Mini
301–310 of 424 posts
Re: New Mac Mini
#302I miss getting real innovation from Apple like in the 90s and 00s. For laptops, I still understand the appeal of serious power with all day battery life, here I am just getting less software choices and less upgradability than a Windows desktop for same price. It used to be that software innovations like running UNIX out of the box, automatic full backups and good music/photo/video tools made up for it. Now Windows a…
I've thought the same but I'm not really sure what else I'd want in my laptop. With the M1s they've just hit such a sweet spot.
Battery life is great, the laptop is fast enough for everything I need. TB 3 hubs allow me to use external peripherals, two 4k 27" monitors, plenty of real estate.
Update: I just saw a couple other comments – camera for sure. A much better camera than the garbage they include nowadays.
Re: New Mac Mini
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way fucking cheaper than 40. Closer to $16 unless you really need DDR5. Even then, it's still around $29/8gb if buying 32gb or more. The issue is that Apple is integrating the RAM in the SoC. Personally, I'm not really a fan of "smart-phonification" of my desktop computers. I get that the mini is in a bit of a weird spot, since it's still got fairly challenging size constraints, but still... not my cup of tea.
The integration into the SoC is partially responsible for the amazing performance. The extra travelling distance for a click-in ram stick adds up, in terms of latency, quickly
That should happen in the future, but so far Apple hasn't really taken advantage of the massive improvement in signal integrity and their latency is similar to desktop x86. If someone figures out how to overclock one of these machines, we can find out if they're just being extremely conservative or if the memory controller is extremely weak compared to what you see on x86 desktop CPUs.
Re: New Mac Mini
#304Nice hardware.
Too bad I can never put it in one of the industrial machines my startup builds, as these Apple computers are completely oriented towards end-consumers, locked with an AppleID, etc. in summary totally useless from a builders perspective.
It is quite sad that top tech companies nowadays produce mostly consumer electronics.
Re: New Mac Mini
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real news here! "One display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI" https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
This also applies to the new MacBook Pros as well, to be clear.
Cynic in my wonders if they finally have an 8k display they are ready to sell then.
The previous Macs supported so many 5k/8k display at once, they arguably should be able to drive a single 8k display, technically.
Example, Mac Studio supports up to 4 x 6k displays AND 1 4k at once. So that is 4 x 18M pixels + 8M pixels = 80M pixels
8k displays are 32M pixels, so Mac Studio is arguably already able to push 2x that many pixels...
Or maybe it's related to the HDMI chipset they chose specifically until now.
Re: New Mac Mini
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
No Man's Sky and a Resident Evil reissue are the two big ones currently that Apple is touting.
More-or-less this generation's Tomb Raider and Monument Valley, if you ask me. It's nice that Apple reaches out to AAA developers to prove that Metal ports aren't impossible, but it's a lost cause today. No Man's Sky and Resident Evil both work out-of-box on Linux without any intervention from their developers. Apple's efforts are entirely misplaced and it's obvious that they're going against the grain of the rest of…
> shot themselves in the foot by depreciating 32-bit libraries as fast as they did
My relatively anemic "Mac compatible" list of games, in my Steam library, went from about 20 to 3.
Re: New Mac Mini
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will go a step further and state that they appear to top out at 32GB which is asinine. These are not manilla envelope laptops, but semi-compact bricks where the form factor in other brands can commonly take 64GB or more. Its sad for me that my initial reaction to this is where previously a corp Windows laptop was for email and MS Office, and the Mac was for "actual work", now Mac's are headed to the "email and Offi…
My NUC11Pro has 64GB of RAM and 2x SSD, and is way smaller than Mac Mini. Not sure why Apple thinks they need to dumb down smallest form factor for market segmentation reasons.
It's way smaller, but only if you ignore the external power supply. The Mac mini has an internal power supply.
Re: New Mac Mini
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
This also applies to the new MacBook Pros as well, to be clear.
Cynic in my wonders if they finally have an 8k display they are ready to sell then. The previous Macs supported so many 5k/8k display at once, they arguably should be able to drive a single 8k display, technically. Example, Mac Studio supports up to 4 x 6k displays AND 1 4k at once. So that is 4 x 18M pixels + 8M pixels = 80M pixels 8k displays are 32M pixels, so Mac Studio is arguably already able to push 2x that ma…
No, this seems to have nothing to do with Apple's own monitors. Apple just didn't support the proper display connection standards previously.
Now they support HDMI 2.1, based on this announcement, so they're finally catching up to everyone else. It would have been dumb for them to fall further and further behind on a display connector regardless of what monitors Apple has in the pipeline.
Re: New Mac Mini
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
The abstraction doesn't have to be perfect. Most apps don't even take advantage of native platform functionality.
So now you’re going to have half assed cross platform products that you still have to have a bunch of #if ios preprocessing statements and won’t take advantage of the native features. As a developer you will always have applications that are behind and have to wait on the third party. This has been the case with every cross platform framework ever. See also JNI.
Nothing's perfect and often when there are platform inconsistencies like that someone abstracts the functionality away in a package so the application developer doesn't need to worry about it. I'd rather have 80% code sharing across platforms than no code sharing.
Re: New Mac Mini
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels like they're always wasting the potential of the Mac Mini. I assume the whole point of the product is to be the cheaper desktop option (I could be wrong), but when you compare it to any Windows desktop, it's a bad value. The base model has lame specs, if you upgrade to something reasonable, it's no longer competitive on price, and most components can't be upgraded later, which is half the appeal of buying a…
If you're looking only at idle power usage, the difference is around 20 watt compared to an idle pc. That's 0.5KWh. With the currency energy prices in NL (40ct/kwh, subsidized by the gov btw, because it's actually around 70ct now), this will save you €73 per year when idling, and even more when it's in use. So the macmini essentially for free after a few years compared to your windows machine
meh, only if you run it 24/7 and only if you live in Europe with very high energy prices. If the machine sleeps for 16 hours a day while the user goes to sleep or goes outside, you'll never break even. There's also no guarantee that next year will be as shitty as the last one regarding electricity.