471–480 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…
Nix works well on mac, very similar to Nix/Linux for the most part. There are some missing packages, but the common ones tend to be fine. Its worth using the Determinate Systems installer to avoid reinstalling Nix on every macOS update though. Nix-darwin is good, and I use it, but it is nowhere close to NixOS. I think there are some options I've set through it that macOS keeps overriding, so the declarative configura…
I've had Nix installed from the traditional installer since the very first M1 and never had to reinstall nixpkgs across OS updates.
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Just lock the screen and you’re good to go for keyboard cleaning.
With a locked screen, key presses go to the password field. I have twice caused my user account to become disabled due to too many password attempts while cleaning my keyboard .
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Nix works well on mac, very similar to Nix/Linux for the most part. There are some missing packages, but the common ones tend to be fine. Its worth using the Determinate Systems installer to avoid reinstalling Nix on every macOS update though. Nix-darwin is good, and I use it, but it is nowhere close to NixOS. I think there are some options I've set through it that macOS keeps overriding, so the declarative configura…
> I think the only real issue with Nix on macOS is that Nix can eat through storage quite quickly, and storage upgrades are pretty expensive on Macs. This might push the balance back to an fanless ryzen build Only if you want to be able to roll back multiple versions. Otherwise, I think it is fine.
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> 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.
If you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre: > it's around €650, including VAT. Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product. A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about A…
I would never compare prices without VAT.
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Microsoft products are trivial to pirate thanks to Microsoft Activation Scripts [1] which is on GitHub. It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate. [1] https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
> It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate. Or it is one of the reasons why Microsoft is pushing hard to require cloud account for everything, including local Windows.
Microsoft would be breaking their own business model in half if they forced each user to have a "Windows subscription" bound to their personal cloud account, instead of being able to just sign a $10MM/yr contract with Oracle or EY or whomever for a 100K-seat volume license.
Remember also that many large-scale deployments of Windows machines aren't of personal computers at all, but of:
1. workstations with non-cloud Active Directory-managed user accounts, with the accounts and data on the machine being backed up to corporate servers and thus the machine itself able to be drop-in replaced overnight without the user even noticing the change;
2. workstations with roaming user profiles configured, where many different people log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (think: computer labs, internet cafes, etc)
3. shared workstations where many employees log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (may overlap with 1) — think of the computers behind the desks at the customer-service wickets at a bank
4. machines with no logged-in users, only an AD administrator remote-managing them through domain privileges — think e.g. digital signage
If licensing status attaches to the logged-in user, then none of these use-cases work! And together, these use-cases form 80+% of how Microsoft makes money from Windows!
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> 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.
If you continue reading the sentence, it gets even more bizarre: > it's around €650, including VAT. Whatever taxes and discounts apply to the commenter’s own idiosyncratic situation have nothing to do with the price of the product. A couple of years ago, I might have cared what the price of an M2 with Pasadena sales taxes was since I lived there at the time, but I sure wouldn’t have included them when talking about A…
The fact tax was mentioned at all was likely for your benefit, with the knowledge there are a lot of North Americans here…
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> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly. That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too. For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient. The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but t…
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…
It won't help the RAM situation, but storage at least is upgradable like that.
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Maybe they already have, depending on what you need. Settings >> General >> Sharing provides lots of options. "Remote Login" is SSH and SFTP, and last time I used it, "File Sharing" was SMB. "Screen Sharing" and "Remote Management" seem useful, too. I assume that "Media Sharing" is supposed to allow iTunes on your network to see media files, although I've never used it and the information on the dialog is limited.
Can you run it headless? Like, if I have it power on after a reboot, is it possible to log in remotely?
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It's a way of signaling how the product should be used. Plug it in, hit the power button, put it down, and never turn it off again. For many users that's probably the only time they will ever interact with that button (or want to). I actually think it's a really good choice and shows Apple really understands design. And with the relatively low power consumption it makes sense. It's not like it's drawing a ton of powe…
I have a Mac Mini and can't remember the last time I had to manually press the button. IIRC it even reboots on its own after a power outage. I think I shut it down once for an extended vacation just to make sure appliances weren't on while I was gone and when I switched apartments. Otherwise I'd check and post my uptime from the command line. It's a launch M1 mini so I'd wager less times pressing the power button tha…