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New Mac Mini

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Re: New Mac Mini

#311

Post by NavinF »

wrldos wrote: post #41
crypt1d wrote: post #7

disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.

16Gb is minimum on M1 I found. I hit problems on my 8Gb machine regularly. It’ll work fine but you do get heavy pauses. The thing to be careful of is if your custom config breaks then the turnaround to fix it can be a couple of months. Ergo only buy stock configs. That makes the market somewhat less friendly.

Agreed, 16G on my 2021 M1 Pro macbook is just enough for software development. I'm definitely upgrading to 32G when the M2 Pro is released so I can have more headroom.

Also worth mention that 64G is pretty cheap on desktop and that's what the Mac Mini should be compared to.

Re: New Mac Mini

#313

Post by rollcat »

szastamasta wrote: post #253

I really love the idea of Mac mini, but when you add some more RAM and disk price is almost the same as for MacBook PRO, where you get almost the same hardware a superb display and a keyboard built in. And you can carry it around with you. These machines almost make no sense because of that.

Yes, these are more niche than a laptop. I explicitly chose an M1 Mac Mini however (as opposed to a Macbook) for several reasons that have less to do with price/specs:

- I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc

- 10Gig ethernet

- HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two external displays)

- If your computer is docked close to 24x7 (as was the case with most of my previous laptops), the battery becomes a liability

- Better cooling (I know these barely ever get hot... until you actually try to push them)

Plus also any kind of headless application, like a server rack where you also want the box to be a bit more more rugged.

Re: New Mac Mini

#314

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #306
smoldesu wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Mini

#315

Post by NavinF »

winter_blue wrote: post #178
coder543 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real problem. M2 is just using LPDDR5. The memory modules themselves don't appear to be anything special; it's just the memory interface bus that is different. Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs. The entry-level product is a decent value, but the upgrades are ridiculous.

> Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs. Yup. I just checked Newegg, and laptop form factor DDR4 (not DDR5ᵃ) RAM is selling for $126 for 64 GB (2 x 32 GB). So market price for 1 GB of DDR4 small form factor RAM is $1.96 per GB . ᵃ DDR5 is almost twice the cost. Apple is charging 200/8 = $25 per GB. Apple charges 12 times the retail price of DDR4, and about 6 time…

Soldered chips are here to stay. DDR5 already struggles on 4-slot desktop mobos and laptops with SODIMM slots. You can use 2-slot mobos and CAMM to solve those problems for now, but I would be unsurprised if the DIMM/SODIMM DDR6 never sees wide adoption and everyone moves to soldered RAM by 2030.

Re: New Mac Mini

#316

Post by scarface74 »

friedman23 wrote: post #309
scarface74 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever done GUI development of a large app that was meant to be cross platform using Java?

What happens when it isn’t just an inconsistency. But a feature doesn’t exist at all? They have different number of parameters?

How do you handle the different permission models?

The apps are never as good. You still will have just as many shitty half assed apps as you have today with Electron.

Both Google and Facebook have both decided that cross platform apps weren’t good enough.

https://blog.xojo.com/2021/10/12/google-switches-to-native-o...

Re: New Mac Mini

#317

Post by nomel »

mempko wrote: post #259

Kind of shocked how many people here on HN are like "I'm totally fine with 8GB of ram on my mac". What? Isn't this hacker news? What are you guys doing with your computers? Are computers just toys now? Is HN no longer a space for professionals and hackers? It's like a plumber saying they are totally fine using a $2 Walmart wrench. I just don't get it.

I have about 20 Safari tabs open, an IDE, Excel, Slack, Discord (web), Tableau, mail/calendar/etc, and some terminal windows. Activity monitor says I'm pretty much maxed out, but this is all I need, daily.

Memory compression is a thing, and these SSDs are fast, but I still don't understand how this is working so well. I was fully expecting to exchange this for a higher memory model, since it's supposed to be a temporary computer. I'm keeping it, for now.

Re: New Mac Mini

#318

Post by misterprime »

rollcat wrote: post #313
szastamasta wrote: post #253

I really love the idea of Mac mini, but when you add some more RAM and disk price is almost the same as for MacBook PRO, where you get almost the same hardware a superb display and a keyboard built in. And you can carry it around with you. These machines almost make no sense because of that.

Yes, these are more niche than a laptop. I explicitly chose an M1 Mac Mini however (as opposed to a Macbook) for several reasons that have less to do with price/specs: - I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc - 10Gig ethernet - HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two ex…

I always imagined a 24x7 docked laptop was a good setup for a couple reasons: 1. built in UPS due to the battery. 2. easy to grab and go in an emergency situation.

Could you tell me more about the liability it creates? Is it a fire hazard? Decaying battery performance?

Re: New Mac Mini

#319

Post by jasonpbecker »

misterprime wrote: post #318
rollcat wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these are more niche than a laptop. I explicitly chose an M1 Mac Mini however (as opposed to a Macbook) for several reasons that have less to do with price/specs: - I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc - 10Gig ethernet - HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two ex…

I always imagined a 24x7 docked laptop was a good setup for a couple reasons: 1. built in UPS due to the battery. 2. easy to grab and go in an emergency situation. Could you tell me more about the liability it creates? Is it a fire hazard? Decaying battery performance?

The battery will be useless in 8-12 months if you keep it plugged in nearly 24/7.

Re: New Mac Mini

#320

Post by nimish »

coder543 wrote: post #238
tadfisher wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SSD controller is part of the SOC, so you're both half-right.

True, but it is a rather lame excuse for soldering the SSD, considering Apple's SSDs have not really performed better than anyone else's SSDs for a long time. Moving the controller into the SoC is a cost saving measure for Apple, but none of the cost savings are passed onto the consumer. Something as huge as the Mac mini could easily have a regular m.2 NVMe socket. Apple could presumably still do their proprietary th…

Integrating the ssd controller into the soc allows for it to scale with the process used for the soc and also removes what is essentially a multicore system from being an external, potentially compromised unit. This way there is never any chance unencrypted data is written to the flash.

Not the best reason but it's there. Thunderbolt 4 is fast enough to attach external flash anyway.

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