351–360 of 464 posts
Given repair isn't practical with soldered DRAM and such, I prioritized small form factor, price, and quick delivery.
The Framework Desktop was a much larger form factor, 3x the price, and delivery wasn't for months.
That said, I still hope the company is successful so they have more competitive offerings in the future.
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You have to account for resale when it comes to TCO. Resale value for a non-Apple PC is essentially zero - i.e. no one will buy it, or you'll get pennies on the dollar if they do. Whereas there's a strong market for used Apple hardware, and you can easily recover 50% or more.
Do people actually buy used computers and sell them? Like, apart from graphics cards... Seems odd to me. Most computers I've ever had last for ~10 years, at which point resale value is definitely zero...
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Not to defend Apple here, but it's also a bit apples to oranges (heh) because the power consumption is not easily comparable. I would hazard a guess and say: at that spec, if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar. Since they're in spitting distance of each other, just get the one you're most comfortable with. Personally I prefer Linux and I'm really happy that non…
> if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar. Only if you're buying artesinal single source electricity sustainably sourced from trained dolphins. Average US electrical power is $.18/kWh per google. Figure the desktop draws 300W continuous (which it almost certainly can't), and that's 0.3 kW * 24 hr/day * 365.2425 days/yr == $473/year. So even if the mac was complet…
I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings
Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point
> The Framework Desktop with 64GB RAM + 2TB NVMe is $1,876. To get a Mac Studio with similar specs [...] you'll literally spend nearly twice as much [...] The Framework Desktop is simply a great deal. Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price?? I don't know that it logically follows that anything is a great deal when it undercuts Apple. Half sounds about right -- I thought Apple was a bit more competitive these day…
> Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price?? He didn't pick the equivalent Mac to compare to. The closest Mac would be a an M4 Pro Mac Mini, not a Mac Studio. Right now I see a 64GB M4 Pro Mac Mini with 2TB SSD is $2600. Still more expensive, but not double the price. The Apple refurbished store has the same model for $2200. The M4 Pro Mac Mini probably has the edge in performance, though I can't say how much. The…
You have to admit this reads as grade A cope.
Is it that hard to acknowledge that Apple price gouges all their product line?
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You have to account for resale when it comes to TCO. Resale value for a non-Apple PC is essentially zero - i.e. no one will buy it, or you'll get pennies on the dollar if they do. Whereas there's a strong market for used Apple hardware, and you can easily recover 50% or more.
Do people actually buy used computers and sell them? Like, apart from graphics cards... Seems odd to me. Most computers I've ever had last for ~10 years, at which point resale value is definitely zero...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar. Only if you're buying artesinal single source electricity sustainably sourced from trained dolphins. Average US electrical power is $.18/kWh per google. Figure the desktop draws 300W continuous (which it almost certainly can't), and that's 0.3 kW * 24 hr/day * 365.2425 days/yr == $473/year. So even if the mac was complet…
A device with no moving parts, only 5 years of expected life?! I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point
But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make up the big Mac price tag on power savings, and no, you won't, not nearly, before you hawk it on eBay to buy another.
[1] And also that you posit that the device is in a compute farm or something and pumped at full load 24/7. Average consumption for real development hardware (that spends 60% of its life in suspend and 90% of the remainder in idle) is much, much, much closer to zero than it is to 300W!
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A device with no moving parts, only 5 years of expected life?! I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point
First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1]. In practice they're 40-70% the consumption of a competing desktop (depends on usage and specific model, yada yada yada). So figure a few decades or thereabouts. But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make…
>The AMD 395+ uses unified memory, like Apple, so nearly all of it is addressable to be used by the GPU. This is why they went with the “laptop” cpu. While it’s slightly slower than dedicated memory, it allows you to run the big models, at decent token speeds.
unified and soldered :( I understand it's faster but still... Did they at least do an internal PSU if they went the Apple way or does it come with a power brick twice the size of the case? Edit: wait. They do have an internal PSU! Goodness!
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My main worry about all the Minisforum, Beelink, etc. PCs is: potential lack of UEFI firmware updates (does anyone have experience with how good they are with updates?) and potential backdoors in the UEFI firmware (either intentionally or unintentionally). A China-aligned/sponsored group has made an UEFI rootkit targetting ASUS/Gigabyte mainboards: https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/vulnerability-managem... Why n…
I bought 3 Minisforum machines for a Kubernetes cluster and they didn't make it 11 months. They weren't even powered on most of that time. They just completely freeze with a black screen, and randomly enough to where every time I think maybe I figured out a fix it just crashes again a day later.