Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 632 posts

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#391

Post by kamranjon »

rwalle wrote: post #322
kamranjon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here. much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7? Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you we…

I'm talking about memory bandwidth - maybe your workloads don't take advantage of that but most do and that's why apple designed their new chips to take advantage of it.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#392

Post by _mlbt »

solardev wrote: post #387
wodenokoto wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educational discount is a pinky swear that you are a student or buying it for a student. So it is in practice available to everyone if you want to ruin nice things for students.

Don't you usually need to verify somehow, like an .edu address?

I am actually currently a college student, but I can confirm that Apple did nothing to verify that this was the case when I bought mine.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#393

Post by solardev »

_mlbt wrote: post #392
solardev wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you usually need to verify somehow, like an .edu address?

I am actually currently a college student, but I can confirm that Apple did nothing to verify that this was the case when I bought mine.

Wow, really? Thanks for the tip.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#394

Post by kamranjon »

Rohansi wrote: post #273
kamranjon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

With what kind of workload? If you need 32GB of RAM then the computer that actually has that much RAM should be almost guaranteed to be quicker.

Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#395

Post by derefr »

atonse wrote: post #326
phillco wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GP's same argument also applies to the Magic Mouse, as it happens:

> It's a way of signaling how the product should be used.

In the Magic Mouse's case, it came out just on the cusp of wireless mice becoming "a thing." Most people, if they were allowed, would have just left the mouse tethered to a computer by its charging cable at all times, since that's what they were used to. But Apple thought you'd be happier once you stopped doing that. So someone (Ive?) decided to make it so that you couldn't charge the Magic Mouse and use it at the same time. This did two things:

1. it forced people to try using the Magic Mouse without any cable connected, so that they would notice the added freedom a wireless mouse affords. It was a "push out of the nest."

2. it made charging annoying and flow-breaking enough that people would put it off as long as possible — which would make people realize that the Magic Mouse's battery lasted for weeks on a charge, and so you really never would need to interrupt your flow to charge; you'd just maybe leave it plugged in to charge when you leave work on a Friday night (and even then, only when it occurs to you), and that'd be it.

---

One could argue that the truly strange thing, is that Apple has never changed this design, 15 years and one revision later. That's an entire human generation! Presumably people these days know that peripherals can be wireless and have long battery life.

But consider: Apple's flagship mousing peripheral — the one shown next to the Magic Keyboard in all product marketing photos — is the Magic Trackpad, not the Magic Mouse. The Magic Trackpad is the first-class option for multitouch interaction with macOS; some more-recent multitouch gestures don't even work on the Magic Mouse. (The Magic Mouse never got "3D touch", for one thing.) In other words, the Magic Mouse is basically a forgotten also-ran at this point — something just there on the wall in the Apple Store for those few people who can't stand the idea of using a desktop computer through a giant trackpad.

Which leads to an interesting question: what is the user-profile for the person who buys (or is bought) a Magic Mouse in 2024?

Well, probably one major user-profile is "your grandpa, a retiree from a publishing company, who's been using the same computer he brought home from work 20 years ago, until it broke last week — that computer being a Power Mac G5 with a Mighty Mouse; and who has never had a laptop, and so never learned to use a trackpad."

And if the Magic Mouse user is your grandpa... then said user probably does still need the cord-cutting lesson that the Magic Mouse "teaches"!

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#396

Post by derefr »

redler wrote: post #347
vunderba wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mind this design decision a hell of a lot less than the baffling deliberate decision to map EVERY KEYBOARD BUTTON to be equivalent to the power button (which the damn thing already has) on their laptop line-up. I love it when my macbook is turned off and I accidentally nudge a single letter on the keyboard and it powers back on - not to mention when you're drying to clean it with a micro fiber cloth.

Just lock the screen and you’re good to go for keyboard cleaning.

What's the equivalent of "locking the screen" for cleaning an Apple TV's paired remote?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#397

Post by jiriro »

xeanotods wrote: post #231
naoru wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp. You're definitely correct. But that's the only machine in my opinion that comes close (and offers some advantage like a whole PCIe 5.0 x16 slot). There are other mini PCs that are cheaper, some other commenter suggested Beelinks which are also quite popular among enthusiasts, SER8 for example: Ryzen 8745HS, 24 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD for 467 Euro. Seems competitive enough.

Maybe it's not performance-comparable but $284 (BF35 coupon discount from $319 list) for Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD [ 1 ] in my mind is a good value trade-off versus the Mac Mini. The only thing that gives me pause is the concern expressed by some that Chinese MiniPCs are susceptible to Bios malware. I've looked into Coreboot, Libreboot and System 76 open firmware to mitigate the risk of infected Minisforum firmwa…

The Minisforum needs an external power brick which probably almosts doubles the size.

The Mac Mini does not need any external power adapter which is quite amazing.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#398

Post by ricardobeat »

rwalle wrote: post #322
kamranjon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here. much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7? Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you we…

Repeating what I just commented elsewhere, but Mac uses several advanced memory management features: apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks, it will compress memory instead of paging out, better memory allocation, less fragmentation.

Bandwidth for copying things into memory is also vastly faster than what you get on Intel/AMD, for example on the Max chips you get 800GB/s which is the rough equivalent of 16 channels of DDR5-6400, something simply not available in consumer hardware. You can get 8 channels with AMD Epyc, but the motherboard for that alone will cost more than a Mac mini.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#400

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

cchance wrote: post #306
throawayonthe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well asahi is going to bring M4 support eventually and there is https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon also you could just Containerize All The Things on macos idk

Ya like i get the love for linux, but seriously give MacOSX a try for a while, its pretty damn good lol

macOS simply doesn't work if I want to run this as a home server, which is my primary use case for an Apple silicon Mac. Most server applications are first class citizens on Linux, like Docker and Kubernetes and caddy/nginx (I know ports exist but there's more documentation and experience on Linux). Furthermore, systemd is a lot more documented than launchd and generally speaking it's easier to do things like upgrading headless, setting up NFS, and the like. I wish Apple offered these machines with official Linux support, but that's antithetical to their philosophy.
Post reply on HN