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New Mac Mini

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Re: New Mac Mini

#341

Post by qwytw »

dijit wrote: post #26
austenallred wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You can add more 2. New RAM is not like old RAM. Macs are dramatically more optimized than they used to be. I have a MacBook Air (M1) with 16GB of RAM and it runs more smoothly than older systems that had twice that much. 8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to. 8GB of RAM can handle very process-heavy tasks, like... running Chrome ;)

Everything you said is true; I'll even add that MacOS is probably the best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions! However the parent is right, it's disgusting how much memory capacity is needed to run a basic environment. Maybe having exceptionally fast machines with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage.

> best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions

Not it's not. Gnome or KDE can have 2x if not 3x memory overhead.

> with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage

Why? Memory is cheaper than designing new CPUs. 8GB in the base model is just a way for Apple to upsell upgrades and improve margins through market segmentation. If they shipped 16GB in the base model they'd have to cut prices or lose customers. It's a simple as that.

Re: New Mac Mini

#342

Post by qwytw »

nottorp wrote: post #25

[flagged]

They probably don't want it to cannibalize the Studio. Then again the price of a maxed out 32GB mini is the same as base Mac Studio (with the same amount of memory).

Re: New Mac Mini

#343

Post by dijit »

qwytw wrote: post #341
dijit wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said is true; I'll even add that MacOS is probably the best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions! However the parent is right, it's disgusting how much memory capacity is needed to run a basic environment. Maybe having exceptionally fast machines with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage.

> best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions Not it's not. Gnome or KDE can have 2x if not 3x memory overhead. > with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage Why? Memory is cheaper than designing new CPUs. 8GB in the base model is just a way for Apple to upsell upgrades and improve margins through market segmentation. If they shipped 16GB in the base model they'd have t…

GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, not operating systems.

Linux (probably the operating system you mean) performs terribly when there is no available memory. Solaris run (ran?) GNOME and was also excellent when there was low memory

Why force people to build software more efficiently? Because I have a desktop with 64G of ram and it is doing the same thing my desktop from 2008 was doing, only a few more pixels, a few less animations and a whole bunch of people thinking that hardware can pick up the slack from development companies externalising their costs (since devs cost money, right!?).

well. hardware costs money for us. fix your software.

Re: New Mac Mini

#344

Post by deergomoo »

Varloom wrote: post #182

I can't use my M1 mini with non-retina monitor because of how blurry it is. They stopped providing font anti-aliasing (default on Windows) few years ago in MacOS to make retina displays more relevant.

Yeah, you can really tell no-one at Cupertino uses @1x displays. I don’t find it to be unusable, but jesus christ it’s ugly—far uglier than the same monitor driven by a Windows machine. It’s not just text either, throughout the UI a lot of scaled images (e.g. App Store preview images) look awful. You can tell it’s just not a priority.

The problem is my alternatives are a 4K display with non-integer scaling on macOS, or a 5K Studio Display that my Windows work laptop can’t drive which costs almost as much as my MacBook again[0]. So I guess I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

[0] I’m intrigued by the recently announced 5K Samsung ViewFinity S9, but I’m not expecting it to be meaningfully cheaper than the Studio Display considering it’s a captive market.

Re: New Mac Mini

#345

Post by coder543 »

nimish wrote: post #320
coder543 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This way there is never any chance unencrypted data is written to the flash.

That has nothing to do with the SSD controller. The OS never has to send unencrypted data to the SSD in the first place. Offloading encryption to SEDs (self encrypting drives) is probably more helpful in server environments where you have dozens of disks and mind-bogglingly large amounts of data flowing around, but SEDs are completely uninteresting for consumer applications, and if Apple is integrating the SSD controller directly into their SoC, then it's effectively no different from using an integrated crypto accelerator prior to sending data to an external SSD controller.

Re: New Mac Mini

#346

Post by cherioo »

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.

I don’t think apple would allow that to happen. The same configuration of cpu and ram between mini and MBP differs by $700, unless you are comparing base MBP to speced-up mini.

Re: New Mac Mini

#347

Post by rollcat »

jasonpbecker wrote: post #319
misterprime wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the actual usage patterns, whether you keep it charged at say 100%, 80%, 40%, etc; its temperature (hot=bad), age, number of charge cycles, technology, how often you actually unplug it, etc - but yes, if you mistreat it, it can get dangerous.

My old 2017 MBP met that fate after mere couple of years, these machines tend to run annoyingly hot (I can hear it right now from the other room - partner is still using it). When it was mine, I kept using it with the lid closed (because the internal screen+keyboard were useless to me). I totally wasn't expecting the battery to suddenly become a spicy pillow! The Apple tech was a little bit scared to touch it, said it's gonna take a while to repair, I guess they can't open this sort of thing on site.

Of course some things changed with M1 (less hot) and later macOS updates (smarter/delayed charging), but the general advice applies to literally any device with a battery.

Some relevant links for Macbook and Thinkpad owners: https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente-Charge-Limiter https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/tp_smapi

Re: New Mac Mini

#348

Post by qwytw »

dijit wrote: post #343
qwytw wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions Not it's not. Gnome or KDE can have 2x if not 3x memory overhead. > with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage Why? Memory is cheaper than designing new CPUs. 8GB in the base model is just a way for Apple to upsell upgrades and improve margins through market segmentation. If they shipped 16GB in the base model they'd have t…

GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, not operating systems. Linux (probably the operating system you mean) performs terribly when there is no available memory. Solaris run (ran?) GNOME and was also excellent when there was low memory Why force people to build software more efficiently? Because I have a desktop with 64G of ram and it is doing the same thing my desktop from 2008 was doing, only a few more pixels, a…

> Linux (probably the operating system you mean) performs terribly when there is no available memory.

I assumed you were talking about system with low amounts of memory rather than well almost all available memory is already used. You might be right about the second case (of course why would anyone have a new Linux PC with just 8GB of memory. Linux laptop OEMs charge the same for an upgrade to 64GB as Apple does for 16GB)

Why do you need to buy the latest macbook with a very fast CPU? Well you wouldn't, if software was more efficient. It's exactly the same argument as with memory.

> doing the same thing my desktop from 2008

Similarly to how your desktop from 2008 was doing the "same" job as a Windows 98 machine? Except it's not really doing the same job, expectations consumers have on software have changed dramatically over the last 15 years.

> well. hardware costs money for us. fix your software.

Yes it does cost money. Because Apple charges extremely high margins on memory upgrades. If you could update your own RAM or if Apple's upgrades had the same margin as the base model itself additional 8GB wouldn't be more than extra $50 (maybe a $100 at most if the memory Apple uses is so 'advanced' AFAIK it's not..).

Re: New Mac Mini

#349

Post by ubercow13 »

jasonpbecker wrote: post #319
misterprime wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the mechanism by which you think that'd happen? My understanding is that if you did that, the macbook would stay 80% charged and would use the power supply directly to power itself.

So the battery stays about 80% charged and gets topped up to 80% intermittently when it naturally discharges. Is that not basically they optimum case for battery longevity?

Re: New Mac Mini

#350

Post by gymbeaux »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #201
dbbk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $599 model is for a basic user who barely does anything more than browse the web and send emails (which is to say, a lot of people). It's not a pro machine.

I feel this website is a strange bubble. I use an underpowered laptop from 2013 for all my daily tasks including light photo, video and audio manipulation and I have no problems. Why does it always have to be about videogames, heavy creative work, multiple VMs or compiling gigantic codebases?

One thing to keep in mind is the demand of the specific OS/applications you are running. For example, 1GB of RAM is plenty for Windows XP, but 4GB for Windows 10/11 is abysmal. This is more or less why Linux is such a popular choice for repurposing old computers.
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