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Apple Mac Mini

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Re: Apple Mac Mini

#61

Post by walshemj »

cjensen wrote: post #48
sauere wrote: post #47

The $699 model + the SSD upgrade sums up to a whooping $899. I like the form-faktor and all, but really, with 900 bucks i am sticking to my custom ITX builds

Yes, that's long been the obvious stupidity in Apple's Mac line: the lack of a mini-tower. Mini-towers let you stick in a full power desktop CPU and as much disk space as you want. Moreover, they dropped the expandable Mac Pro in favor of the new trashcan model which cannot be expanded -- except using thunderbolt which is just not as cheap as a drive bay. That said, they're probably doing the right thing. The people…

as I said else where small mac shops when they get to 10-15 people start to need a mac midi if they want to stay in the mac ecosystem

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#64

Post by happycube »

zanny wrote: post #50
swinglock wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Yesterday a the entry Mac Mini was $599 and had a 2.5GHz dual-core i5 with 4GB of RAM.

I hate the Intel nomenclature break on mobile vs desktop. On desktops, Celeron is dual core, i3 is dual core with hyperthreading, i5 is quad core, and i7 is quad core with hyperthreading. On the other front, they mix random clock values and core counts across skews so you never know if your i7 is a quad core with hyperthreading (4750Q for example) or a low power dual core (4700U) because there the suffixes on the par…

It's very annoying. If it ain't at least quad core, it shouldn't be an i7.

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#65

Post by rm445 »

blhack wrote: post #38
gambiting wrote: post #10

I seriously do not understand how can it ship with a 500GB 5400rpm drive by default. This gives such poor experience to the user that Apple should have opted for all-ssd approach two generations ago. Very disappointed by that.

Maybe a lot of people are using these as media machines? That requires a lot of space, and not much speed.

Then why not the current p/GB sweet spot, a 3TB disk?

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#66

Post by MattSteelblade »

zanny wrote: post #50
swinglock wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Yesterday a the entry Mac Mini was $599 and had a 2.5GHz dual-core i5 with 4GB of RAM.

I hate the Intel nomenclature break on mobile vs desktop. On desktops, Celeron is dual core, i3 is dual core with hyperthreading, i5 is quad core, and i7 is quad core with hyperthreading. On the other front, they mix random clock values and core counts across skews so you never know if your i7 is a quad core with hyperthreading (4750Q for example) or a low power dual core (4700U) because there the suffixes on the par…

At least early on, there were dual core i5's...

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#67

Post by rm445 »

walshemj wrote: post #61
cjensen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's long been the obvious stupidity in Apple's Mac line: the lack of a mini-tower. Mini-towers let you stick in a full power desktop CPU and as much disk space as you want. Moreover, they dropped the expandable Mac Pro in favor of the new trashcan model which cannot be expanded -- except using thunderbolt which is just not as cheap as a drive bay. That said, they're probably doing the right thing. The people…

as I said else where small mac shops when they get to 10-15 people start to need a mac midi if they want to stay in the mac ecosystem

Not sure that's the right number - I worked in a Mac shop (an engineering firm) with 20-30 users with 21" iMacs, served off a single Mac Mini server. If your users are just normal users, iMacs are fine. (Though the Macs did come under fire from the finance folks - taking the line that "equivalent" PCs are "industry standard" and a third of the price. I think this argument won out in the end, and the Macs all disappeared one day. It's a shame).

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#68

Post by ochoseis »

kissickas wrote: post #59
blhack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a lot of people are using these as media machines? That requires a lot of space, and not much speed.

Another popular use case is as a server.

Anyone have experience trying to colo one of these? The $/GB and Ghz aren't bad when you depreciate the upfront cost of the mini over a few years.

I've seen hosting in the $35-50 range and nearly bitten the bullet several times because they'll let you run CentOS/VMware/etc and would thus make for great project boxes. The fact that the newer models lack a quad-core option is making me flirt with the idea again to get that horsepower while I still can. For example, I haven't seen actual specs on the 2014 model's i7, but I would suspect it's similar to the i7-4578U Haswell in recent 13" Macbook Pro's[1] which have a CPU Mark score of 5204 [2]. This seems like a step back compared to the 2012 i7-3615QM's score of 7344 [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specifica...

[2] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4578U+...

[3] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3615QM...

Re: Apple Mac Mini

#70

Post by dorian-graph »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #17

Not a bad price until you see it costs $300 to go from 4GB RAM to 16GB RAM. Do these have user-upgradeable RAM? I can buy RAM a lot cheaper than that.

All previous Minis had user-upgradeable HDD too. I use a Mac mini with 16gb RAM and an SSD I've put in myself.
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