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

New Mac Mini with M4

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 789 posts

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#541

Post by ericmay »

sangnoir wrote: post #495
LeoPanthera wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference there. Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top. Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies. Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.

> Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top I anticipated this concern, the $509 I gave earlier is the Amazon price that includes the mark-up. The Beelink SER7 costs only $320 on AliExpress. Modern solid-state electronics are very reliable, most reliability issues for electronics are related to screens or…

IF you're ordering them in the context of a larger buying program like a university or other office you'd at least get some sort of account rep and Apple support as well. I'm not sure if you could get that from Beelink, could you? I see some benefit in that use case.

But that's aside from the main topic which was the personal and home use case. On that topic you get a decent set of products as well such as Pages/Numbers/etc. and others along with software support for the Mac Mini. I'm guessing the Beelink runs on Linux? That may be hard for some to work with (which is unfortunate since it's really not), or maybe they have to separately buy a Windows license? Something to consider in the comparison.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#542

Post by celestialcheese »

goosedragons wrote: post #416
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

There's still good deals in mini PC land. Yes, the M4 is faster but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600. I think for a lot of people for basic usage they'll get more value out of the larger and upgradable SSDs than the faster CPU. https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-5700U-Displays-Computers-Emul... https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-Desktop-Computer-Graphic...

From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value.

You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#543

Post by kstrauser »

pdimitar wrote: post #178
diggan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is now in decline I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. At that point it was clear that professional users weren't the focus anymore, and I promptly left the ecosystem. I still have a iPhone (12 mini) that I only keep because it still works, but every time CarPlay tries to murder me in traffic, I get one step closer to just yeeting that phone into the sea.

Oh I agree, I cringed hard back then as well but at least the Mac software and speed was decent so I figured the beginning of their slow downfall will not affect me for a while, and I was right. Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop…

Something's seriously wrong with your system. I just launched nvim on mine and couldn't measurably detect the interval between hitting enter to exec the command and seeing the welcome screen. Even opening and immediately quitting my substantially customized Emacs took 1.7s.

Your setup should not be taking many seconds to do those routine things. Last time I experienced something like that, I had a dying harddrive that was logging a continual series of read timeouts.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#544

Post by srid »

franczesko wrote: post #360

Ryzen mini pcs seem to beat this in most of scenarios. Does anyone see clear advantages?

Is there a particular brand recommended for someone looking to run Linux server (not Windows or Linux desktop)?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#547

Post by kstrauser »

orangecat wrote: post #232
kstrauser wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think these even boot once the SSDs die. All Macs that I know of let you configure the boot drive. I had an older Mac Mini with a spinning HDD. I added an external SSD, set that up as the boot drive, and never touched the slow drive again. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't do the same with this.

M-series Macs require a functioning internal drive in order to boot off external storage: https://tidbits.com/2021/05/27/an-m1-mac-cant-boot-from-an-e...

Well, I guess I'm extremely surprised, then. I don't care for that one bit.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#548

Post by adib »

holycrapwhodat wrote: post #429
HenloFive wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use an USB C power bank, because it seems to be usb-c powered

It is not USB-C powered. It needs 100-240V, 50hz-60hz AC power.

A missed opportunity though. If it’s USB-C powered, it could be even smaller and Apple could simplify its BOM by including a MacBook Pro charger with it.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#549

Post by vondur »

architect64 wrote: post #439
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market). I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini the…

One issue to watch out for: Sub-4K res monitors look surprisingly bad on newer versions of macOS with Apple Silicon Macs. And no, it's not simply a matter of non-Retina obviously not looking as nice as Retina monitors - something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux. This is partly caused by a lack of subpixel rendering for text on macOS, but it doesn't affect just text…

If you have a 1440P 27" monitor, they work great.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#550

Post by alargemoose »

asciimov wrote: post #532
srid wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mini PC is recommended for those looking to run Linux (as a server, not desktop) on them?

Go look into the N100 mini pcs like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYJ9BC15 It's a nice little low wattage machine for running some docker containers.

I would second this! The N100 is super efficient., and can often be found for around $150. I can also recommend looking at used intel “NUC” mini PCs if you’re budget conscience. I have a couple of 5th gen i5 NUCs i got for $60 that that run multiple VMs and LXC containers as part of a Proxmox cluster.
Post reply on HN