371–380 of 632 posts
I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…
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Official Linux support would help, is anyone running MacOS on a server?
This isn't the market for MacMinis though. Why are people on this forum so bad at understanding market segmentation? Apple made an incredible desktop machine that happens to work pretty damn well as a server if you poke around. This machine is for people at home to for editing video. It's great in the field for production where it goes from pelican case to hotel desk to folding table to pelican case to cargo hold to…
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It seems viable that doing so increases the price for those of us who don't.
The typical .edu discount from Apple on largish purchases is about $100, regardless of whether that's a $600 final tag or a $2000 final tag. So, somewhere between 14% and 5%. If Apple sells 50% of Macs to the .edu discount market, that's a difference to you of somewhere between 2.5% and 7%. Or, you can accept that Apple's prices are not set by the market so much as by their marketing department.
I’m contemplating whether this can handle editing 8K video. Does anyone have any idea? My goal is to venture into 180-degree VR production. With the Canon R5C and the RF 5.2mm f/2.8 Dual Fisheye Lens, I want to produce stereoscopic video at 8K. However, rendering such high-resolution footage demands substantial processing power, and my current setup definitely isn't enough.
Base version, probably not. If you went with one with M4 Pro cpu and the 48gb or greater ram you should be ok. Storage isn't as much an issue with Thunderbolt 4/5 drives easily meeting similar speeds to the internal storage. I've done some 8k fisheye footage and converted for Vision Pro / Quest with the prior gen hardware kit and was able to edit and process it on an M2 Max with 96gb ram.
Wondering if it's worth spending that much money on the M4 Pro or just building a PC tbh.
The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7). Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps. The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt. It's becoming a dedicated video ren…
Have you tried 8K video? How does each machine handle that?
Playback works well - up to 60fps. However, export to H.265 creates a lot of Swap. Rendering went with 15-18fps. All videos on a SMB network drive but the GPU was the bottleneck for rendering.
Swap was even around 24GB with 5 videos which I tested first. Using 4x4K it went 9 GB before stabilizing at around 2GB. No effects or grading whatsoever - plain 4K60 SDR videos.
One single SDR 4K clip renders to 8K at 25fps. Using Superscale 2x makes that 0.5-1fps.
For 8K rendering you may be better off with 32GB RAM minimum or trying the M4 Pro model maybe with 24GB. For 4K/6K editing the base 16/256 M4 Mac mini seems sufficient when all video storage will be on external drives or network.
Edit: added single 4k->8K rendering performance
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Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)
> € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. "Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent [...] because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture." - Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing (who apparently never heard of zram)
Sorry Bob, architecture may be different now, but Apple has always been egregious.
“If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom.” While I think Apple was off the rocker on this particular decision, I do respect their org structure that allows this type of decision to occur. Believe me, there are companies where a dozen people or more would weigh in and prevent an unpopular choice. Consensus sometimes hinders a desired result (both good and bad).
Keep it on the bottom where it's hard to hit accidentally.
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After buying one, I actually like it. I know exactly where it is, and can reach for it by feel more easily; I could never tell you whether the power button was on the left or right side of the old Mini/Studio without checking each time. It's also larger, more satisfying tactile/clicky, and concave compared to the old button (which was rounded into the outside curve, not particularly be satisfying to press). I think t…
Jobs and Ive had their head scratchers. Like the Magic Mouse with the bottom charging port, or the Cube with all its cables coming in from the bottom.
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Does that mean the discount is only for Americans? I don't see anything about it on the Dutch version of the Apple site. Still looks pretty affordable. Until you look at the upgrades. € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. I suppose doing your own upgrades isn't an option anymore? (My last Mac was a 2011 unibody.)
> € 230,00 for +8 MB RAM?! There are places you can get that for a tenth of that price. "Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent [...] because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture." - Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing (who apparently never heard of zram)
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The 120GB/s memory bandwidth of the unified memory helps especially with video, I guess. The M4 CPU isn't really stressed out most of the time. Only multicam and HLG conversations it maxes out. Once I patched my old Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support yet the iGPU of the i5 1135-g7 had similar GPU performance for video as the Intel Arc A380 in the desktop PC. The old PCIe3 speed limited its performance. I heard others…
How did you patch the Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support?
The PC was given for free, the CPU €11 yet overall I wouldn't recommend the process just for the result. It's only little benefit, if at all, though fun. On that occasion I also added some NVMe driver which works well, demonstrated for the similar Dell Optiplex [2][3]..
[1] https://github.com/xcuri0/rebaruefi
[2] https://www.tachytelic.net/2021/12/dell-optiplex-7010-pcie-n...
[3] https://github.com/jrdoughty/Dell-7010-rebar-guide
Edit: some wording