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

591–600 of 789 posts

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#591

Post by brundolf »

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…

Genuine question: why do your parents want a desktop?

These days the only reasons I see to get a desktop are

1. You need some combination of power/thermals or expandability

2. Kiosks, public computers, etc

3. Cost? Maybe?

For pretty much any regular person in my life who's open to a mac, I'd point them towards a MacBook Air

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#592

Post by dogcow »

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…

Came here to echo this. Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. Everything was fuzzy and awful looking. Not something that could be tolerated or ignored... Completely unusable. I feel like this fact is not well known enough.

The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?

This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#594

Post by dzhiurgis »

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 use one of these for home assistant, it’s perfect.

Ryzen one I got 2 years ago for my dad outperforms my M1 pro.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#595

Post by apitman »

int_19h wrote: post #521
apitman wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does macOS guarantee no data loss when shutting down normally?

If you need to guarantee that data is, in fact, written permanently, you use fnctl(F_FULLFSYNC). FWIW while fsync() on Linux does request that the drive flushes its hardware cache, it's up to the drive whether to actually honor this request, and many don't do so synchronously (but still report success). So unless you control the whole setup end-to-end - hardware and software both - you don't actually have the guarant…

Thanks for the explanation

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#596

Post by walterbell »

avidphantasm wrote: post #403
crest wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until someone brings out little two or four drive NVMe enclosures that fits exactly under the Mac Mini with a Thunderbolt bridge/plug that doesn't snag cables, because we all know Apple can't resist gauging buyers by refusing to include two easy to access M.2 bays on the underside. I can't imagine anyone but Apple shareholders drooling at the taught of overpriced soldered memory would prefer a smaller Mac Mini case i…

You mean like this [1]? I would shocked if OWC didn’t have a version of this for the new mini form factor in the works. [1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-ministac...

With heat now venting downward, that would work better above the new Mac Mini.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#597

Post by angoragoats »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #489
angoragoats wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory bandwidth on Apple silicon is only sometimes comparable to, and in many cases worse than, that of a GPU. For example, an nVidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB GPU (not a high-end card by any means) has memory bandwidth of 288GiB/sec, which is more than double that of the M4 CPU. On the higher end, building a machine with 6 to 8 24GB GPUs such as RTX 3090s would be comparable in cost (as well as available memory) to a hi…

And yet the GPU costs about as much as the whole Mac Mini and wouldn't even come close to fitting inside one.

You're mostly correct, though a 4060Ti 16GB is 20-30% cheaper than the cheapest Mac Mini. More importantly though, "fits inside a Mac Mini" is not a criterion I'm using to evaluate whether a particular solution is suitable for LLM inference. If it is for you, that's fine, but we have vastly different priorities.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#598

Post by canucker2016 »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #417
setgree wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can reasonably expect 1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface) 2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game co…

With Thunderbolt 5, once external SSD enclosures supporting it exist, there should be zero performance penalty for external vs internal storage speed, finally. Then you can built a 1PB array, if you want.

M4-based mac mini's (256GB storage) have Thunderbolt 4.

If you need/require Thunderbolt 5, you'll have to step up from $599 to $1399+ for the M4 Pro-based mac mini's.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#599

Post by angoragoats »

int_19h wrote: post #481
angoragoats wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry, I realized that as well so I edited my post to add a higher end example with multiple 3090s or similar cards. A single 3090 has just under 1TiB/sec of memory bandwidth. One more edit: I'd also like to point out that memory bandwidth is important, but not sufficient for fast inference. My entire point here is that Apple silicon does have high memory bandwidth for sure, but for inference it's very much hel…

It's still "fast enough" for even 120b models in practice, and you don't need to muck around with building a multi-GPU rig (and figuring out how to e.g. cool it properly). It's definitely not what you'd want for your data center, but for home tinkering it has a very clear niche.

> It's still "fast enough" for even 120b models in practice

Is it? This is very subjective. The Mac Studio would not be "fast enough" for me on even a 70b model, not necessarily because its output is slow, but because the prompt evaluation speed is quite bad. See [0] for example numbers; on Llama 3 70B at Q4_K_M quantization, it takes an M2 Ultra with 192GB about 8.5 seconds just to evaluate a 1024-token prompt. A machine with 6 3090s (which would likely come in cheaper than the Mac Studio) is over 6 times faster at prompt parsing.

A 120b model is likely going to be something like 1.5-2x slower at prompt evaluation, rendering it pretty much unusable (again, for me).

[0] https://github.com/XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inferen...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#600

Post by graeme »

mkagenius wrote: post #568
celestialcheese wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a black market for old macbooks/minis? My macbook pro 15 inch, mid 2017 is valued at $195 by apple trade in. Bought for 2k iirc.

https://www.ebay.ca/b/2017-Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-4-Inch-Lapto...
Post reply on HN