Apple's ARM chips have been incredibly effecient for a while now.
My m3 air draws around 3W on avarage and that's with a 14 inch screen running at around 40% brightness.. impressive stuff. Passive cooling too!
M4 Mac mini's efficiency
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Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#412I 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…
Nix support on Darwin is really good in my experience. Though it does happen that some packages are not supported. Next to that I run a NixOS VM on https://getutm.app/ using Virtualization Framework. Performance is great. You're one setting away `virtualisation.rosetta.enable = true;` to also use that VM for x86_64 packages and builds. I have a WIP PR for Rosetta AOT caching on NixOS as well: https://github.com/NixOS…
How is the graphics/desktop performance in VMs, do you get accelerated graphics with NixOS?
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses. That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable
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.)
€23 for 8 MB of RAM sounds a bit too expensive, to be honest.
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#414Worth noting the base model only has 1Gb ethernet, not 10Gb as mentioned in the blog.
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#415Earlier 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.
That may be so in America, but in Germany I had to log in through my university‘s system in order to verify my student status.
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade. I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine wi…
Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.
Compared to Linux that's flat not true. Someone has been blowing marketing up your ...
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#417I 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.
The cheating/fraudulence encouragement in this thread is disgusting. You guys are not stilling a pencil but several hundreds dollars. Paying a part of it or apple being fatty rich doesn’t make it more honest.
I don’t think I ever encounter here such collective encouragement to bypass a law (ok probably for jailbreak which is not a fraud). Not sure if the demography changes, societal culture change or just luck.
Edit: Oh and yeas I never completed college, don’t own a .edu and am maybe just subconsciously jealous.
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Bandwidth doesn't replace size, these are orthogonal parameters.
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends what 'home server' means. MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later. I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you…
The network stack is very different now - BSD doesn't run on cell phones after all. But no syncookies, no. But IMO the real advantage of ARMv8 for a server is that it has better security.
I don't really think ARMv8 has anything useful to provide here?
Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency
#420> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom.
Question for HN: How would you redesign the power button, assuming you work at Apple and the final design should align with Apple's design ethos?