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New Mac Mini

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Re: New Mac Mini

#361

Post by dijit »

qwytw wrote: post #348
dijit wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Send messages to people, write some code, do some online shopping. I don't see how much has changed except battery life and a few more pixels.

8GB of ram is more hardware cost than 16,32,64- thats just how it goes.

Now, I dont want to make it sound like I am an apple fanboy, but iPhones have less ram than android phones, and for some time this had a material impact on size and battery life: the reason they got away with this is because in order to make software for iPhone, you had to deal with what you were given.

the situation today is: “everyone has 16GiB of ram, why would I spend company resources prematurely optimising”, and since every fucking company has this same mentality it leads to slack, teams, asana, jira - fucking everything basically, using more RAM each than my first computers had disk space.

The state of hardware progress has slowed, for most of the last decade you could barely buy a laptop with more than 16GiB of memory, I had to buy some godforesaken workstation laptop to get 32G in 2017- It is not OK to externalise this cost on people, and some downward pressure is needed.

I’m not really defending Apple like you think I am, I’m saying 8G is enough for doing most things, but our apps have become bloated as fuck and make us think that 8G is nothing.

My last linux laptop used 300MiB (not including filesystem caches) for everything, including mail, chat, development (but that bursted during compilation); until I opened discord, teams, a web-browser with all of its integrated product suite, or slack.

then I was up to 12 or even 15GiB of resident memory.

I wont apologise for that and force my hardware vendors to give me more ram at a lower price because of that.

The better performance of the CPU helps everything, battery life (race to idle) included.

More RAM helps people who don't close tabs; and people making software that does not even attempt to constrain its resources.

Re: New Mac Mini

#362

Post by yamtaddle »

Nextgrid wrote: post #66
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.

> More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 Mac mini On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software? I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to war…

A few years back I was given an old 4GB Macbook to use temporarily when I started at a new job. Thing is, I could have kept using it indefinitely for the actual work, for which it didn't feel slow—but Slack (Electron) and Asana (project management... webapp, thing, that liked to eat tons of memory & cycles for no reason, at the time) were must-use tools and just having them open with nothing else brought that poor machine to its knees.

Cut out webapps/Electron and it was entirely fine, though. Like if we'd just used XMPP or something instead of Slack I might even have been able to make it work without serious issues

Re: New Mac Mini

#363

Post by [deleted] »

jbverschoor wrote: post #327
skydhash wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about the current M1 CPU, but my last work computer was a 2015 MBP and the fan was always on. Plugging a monitor enabled the dedicated GPU. So I had to keep it plugged so it does not crawl to a stop due to throttling. Being in tropical weather did not help either. The battery bulged within one year. And the one I replaced it was deteriorating fast. My current mac mini has much better thermal and I bought…

The mba doesn't have a fan or any moving parts, which was one of the reasons I chose it over the mbp

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Mini

#364

Post by highwaylights »

phonon wrote: post #202
highwaylights wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really hopeful for these, but so disappointed. I have a triple monitor setup, and there's essentially a 117% surcharge to add support for the third display.

There are workarounds. https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-o...

I know, but they all require granting full screen recording access to third party software on an ongoing basis, which is a complete non-starter in my case.

Re: New Mac Mini

#365

Post by jbverschoor »

coder543 wrote: post #115
isolli wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?

If macOS is installed on it, Photos won’t even think of it as an external drive. However, yes, you can: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

Big question for me is - how will it behave when you also use icloud photos as well? And what if it's an encrypted disk?

I'm asking because of the following:

Let's say your laptop is 1TB, but everything except photos and for example dropbox is under 512gb.

If you then need to restore, your new laptop has to be able to contain the full restore (1TB, or whatever is used). This also means you can't just run to the store an get a standard model (instead of built-to-order) and restore, unless you buy something that has enough storage.

Having multiple apfs volumes helps here, and I'd love to have all cloud storage off of my main one.

Re: New Mac Mini

#366

Post by nottorp »

qwytw wrote: post #342
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).

Yeah, it's very murky at the intersection between high end minis and low end studios. Let's see if Apple updates the Studio to M2. I can still wait on x86 for a bit longer.

Re: New Mac Mini

#367

Post by yamtaddle »

astrange wrote: post #278
loufe wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Memory latency on the M1/M2 is no better than other systems. Other things are better, but not that.

The memory bandwidth is a hell of a lot better than that $16 8GB stick mentioned upthread, though. 100GB/s on the M2 or 200GB/s on the M2 Pro. It may be possible to find actual comps with similar performance at a much lower price than Apple charges, but that $16 stick ain't it, or even close.

Re: New Mac Mini

#368

Post by coder543 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #365
coder543 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If macOS is installed on it, Photos won’t even think of it as an external drive. However, yes, you can: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

Big question for me is - how will it behave when you also use icloud photos as well? And what if it's an encrypted disk? I'm asking because of the following: Let's say your laptop is 1TB, but everything except photos and for example dropbox is under 512gb. If you then need to restore, your new laptop has to be able to contain the full restore (1TB, or whatever is used). This also means you can't just run to the store…

I’m not recommending any of this for laptop users, at all.

If the external drive won’t be connected 100% of the time, there are all sorts of headaches that can occur because Apple doesn’t really design their software to handle intermittently available disks, in my experience, except (for obvious reasons) for Time Machine.

Re: New Mac Mini

#369

Post by raydev »

rayiner wrote: post #279
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.

They didn’t stop antialiasing. They stopped sub-pixel antialiasing and snapping stems to the pixel grid, which is less relevant on retina displays, to avoid artifacts when text is translated and animated.

I had the 24" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema Display for several years, and I vividly remember that text looked objectively worse after I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite.

I now use a 27" 1440p monitor and I'm always struck by how bad text looks on it compared to my 2009 MBP that's stuck on Mavericks until it dies (not due to text reasons, it's just slow as hell/no benefits to upgrading).

They did something that was relevant to 1x displays, because it used to be better.

Re: New Mac Mini

#370

Post by ErneX »

lvl102 wrote: post #257
ErneX wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my current dilemma, but now I think I'll just wait for the Studio with M2 Max.

I am pretty sure it will be released in March along with Mac Pro which will undoubtedly be one of the headline releases. I am going to wait and pick up an M2 Max Studio.

Yup, I’m doing the same.

I think the Mac Pro will be announced months before it releases, announcement at WWDC then fall release.

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