421–430 of 1001 posts
It’s pretty nice that the stats don’t list the CPU’s clock rate. We can finally enter an era of less misleading indicators of performance, in the sense of what the overall experience will be. That’s what really matters.
This press release has the vaguest, most misleading and content-free performance claims that have ever been printed.
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8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..
I had a quad-core Mini with 16GB in 2011. Almost 10 years later we should be much further, especially as the Intel Mini allows up to 64GB. (Which you probably would use only if you upgraded the memory yourself).
The M1's memory is LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500 (depending on the model, I guess?) which is about double the frequency of the memory in the Intel Macs.
Apparently, this alone seems to account for a lot of the M1's perf wins — see e.g. the explanation under "Geekbench, Single-Core" here: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804
Bleeding-edge-clocked DRAM is a lot more costly per GB to produce than middle-of-the-pack-fast DRAM. (Which is weird, given that process shrinks should make things cheaper; but there's a DRAM cartel, so maybe they've been lazy about process shrinks.)
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Any option in Euros is about 30% more expensive than buying the same in the US or Hong Kong (which is pretty crummy, but possibly related to taxes and the cost of doing business in the EU). EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or…
Most of the US priced don't include tax... Eu prices include vat...
I can actually get a round-trip economy flight (pre-COVID and now) to LA just to buy a Mac mini, and save about $400. It's really.. unfortunate.
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8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..
I had a quad-core Mini with 16GB in 2011. Almost 10 years later we should be much further, especially as the Intel Mini allows up to 64GB. (Which you probably would use only if you upgraded the memory yourself).
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I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.
8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..
I thought with the last update they'd finally seen the light and moved to 512/1tb, now we're back with the silly 256gb.
If you factor in having to upgrade ram to 16gb and ssd to 512 it's only £100 shy of the old price. Good, but not as good as it looked to begin with.
Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you? Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processin…
If you have a microservices architecture or are using Kubernetes then you will easily need more than 16GB. I have 128GB on my desktop purely so that I can have my full platform running in the background whilst also doing development.
Also if you're doing data engineering e.g. Spark then you will likely want more than 16GB.
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It was to be expected because they save a lot of money that they were paying to Intel. It was estimated that they could shave something like $100 per computer by switching to an in house chip.
They are saving the money, but they're just keeping it. You save nothing.
Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.
I know use cases are different but I can't imagine 95% of people needing more than 16GB of RAM especially with mac os "unified memory". I have intellij, pycharm, firefox, slack and a mongodb instance running on my windows laptop and its only using 10GB. Who knows how much of that 10GB could be reduced.
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Especially head scratching when you consider that a lot of folks still have 2012 Mac minis with 16GB of RAM. I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it. Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.
It's possible to do development on 8 GB, you just can't use Electron apps.
Total 14G of ram. My combined browser ram use is about 3G. The flutter project is barely 20 lines of code. The PC was started up about 2h ago.
I'd feel much better with 32G on a dev machine (to be fair, my .net projects require much less ram than this).
I did not see it mentioned but I hope an app comes with Big Sur which lets us see which apps will work with Rosetta2 through Finder or some sort of report