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M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#41

Post by cguess »

steeleduncan wrote: post #29
rgovostes wrote: post #22

> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom. I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...

Because minis are very commonly racked in bulk, and its both very irritating for that use case, and entirely unnecessary

Minis are rarely racked in bulk unless you're running a server farm, which is not the use case they design for. The MacMini is first and foremost a desktop computer for non-professional people or at least not sysadmins. If people want to rack them, go ahead, but in that case how often are you hard rebooting a machine vs soft reboot anyways? Macs aren't known for freezing up too much.

Either way, it works for the use case its designed for.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#42

Post by SG- »

coconut08 wrote: post #26
riknos314 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific feature gaps would you like to see them address?

Linux support. MacOS is a desktop first gui based operating system. Linux on the other hand is a server first cli/terminal based operating system. Everything server related is designed to on linux first and foremost and may or may not incidentally also run on MacOS.

run it in a VM.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#43

Post by gjsman-1000 »

vetinari wrote: post #35
nextos wrote: post #9

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…

NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT, with no RAM or storage. For the other 250 EUR, surely you can get more RAM than 16 GB and more storage than 256 GB.

> NUC 14th gen with i3 is around 400 EUR with VAT

4 cores instead of 10 cores, 69W TDP instead of 22W, UHD Graphics 730 versus Apple's 10 core GPU (0.5 TFLOPs vs about 4.3), 23% worse single core performance, 45% worse multicore, and much louder cooling.

It's not a fair comparison.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#44

Post by tredre3 »

nextos wrote: post #9

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…

> With education discount

I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#45

Post by 1-6 »

“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).

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#46

Post by darknavi »

rgovostes wrote: post #22

> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom. I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...

If the power button is the main gripe with this model of Mac Mini, then its doing pretty well.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#47

Post by wmf »

ewalk153 wrote: post #5

Given these efficient numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple were racking Minis for serving the new ML models for Siri.

Mac minis probably don't have enough RAM to hold Siri's models. It's more likely that Apple is using (modified) Mac Studios.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#48

Post by thought_alarm »

I wish the same could be said of the Studio Display, which is quite power hungry. If the Mac is running then the display is using minimum 10 Watts of continuous power usage at all times, fan running, with the screen off.

I guess it takes 10 Watts to maintain the Thunderbolt controller, USB hub, A13 processor, and run the fan.

Power usage does drop to <1 Watt when the Mac is actually sleeping, unless anything is plugged into the USB hub. Even an empty iPhone cable will cause the display to draw 5 Watts. It's disappointing.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#49

Post by ghaff »

I may have to break down after the holidays.

I have a 2015 iMac and I've been holding off (and haven't really been using my Apple Silicon MacBook as intended) so it may be time to do the upgrade.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#50

Post by cguess »

echoangle wrote: post #24
cosmotic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If running native ports of server software isn't your cup of tea, you can run Linux containers on macos.

In the full GUI MacOS install? And the Linux container (I’m assuming you mean container like docker or podman?) would run in a Linux VM?

I run full multiple Ubuntu desktop VMs on Parallels on a M1 MacBook Air. You can use Docker for server installs, sure, but QEMU also works great on Macs and with Rosetta you can even get pretty damn close to native x86 execution speeds.
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