With the iMac yesterday and this now, what are the odds of new MacBooks (Air?) in the coming days?
One more announcement this week. Almost certainly MacBook Pro.
M4 Air should be in the spring.
New Mac Mini with M4
661–670 of 789 posts
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#662Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#663With 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…
It's a proprietary locked-down "computer", closer to an iPhone or iPad or other smartphone than a standard PC.
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mac Studio has always had unified memory
Fun fact: any PC with integrated graphics has also had unified memory (yep, including Intel Macs), for at least the past decade!
True, but PCs are 128 bits wide, apple lets you upgrade to 256 bits wide (M4 pro), 512 bits wide (m3 Max) or 1024 bits wide (M2 Ultra).
Unified memory is much more useful when you can get more bandwidth to it.
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#665With 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…
> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price
Not really. Do a quick googling for cheap miniPCs from brands such as minisforum or Beelink. Years ago they were selling Ryzen5 and Intel i5 with 16BG of RAM for around $300. No "educational software" bullshit either, just straight from Amazon to anyone who bothered to click on a button.
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this with newer Apple Silicon Macs? My 2020 M1 Mac Mini looks unremarkably normal on my 1440p display. I'm also going between that and my 14" M1 Pro Macbook Pro, which of course looks beautiful but doesn't really make the 1440p on the Mini 'bad'. Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.
You may just not be seeing the visual artifacts on your screen because you don't know what they look like, or mentally adjust to what that screen looks like. The same way someone might not notice motion smoothing on a TV, or how bad scaling and text rendering looks on a 1366*768 panel, or different colour casts from different display technologies. All three took me a while before I could tell what was wrong without s…
> You may just not be seeing the visual artifacts on your screen because you don't know what they look like, or mentally adjust to what that screen looks like.
Does any of that matter, though? Who bothers with the existence of hypothetical artifacts in their displays they cannot even see?
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#667With 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…
It's a proprietary locked-down "computer", closer to an iPhone or iPad or other smartphone than a standard PC.
If you can install a third-party OS without exploiting a security bug, then it's not "locked-down".
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value.
This reads like the epitome of Apple's reality distortion field. I mean, you're trying to convince yourself that a product is not overpriced when compared to equivalent products and subjecting customers to price gauging by asserting that you might be able to sell it later. That's quite the logical leap.
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
So wait 6 months and buy the equivalent beelink for $30 instead of wasting $600 on the mac?
I’m curious about your definition of the word waste. If a $600 Mac lasts 5 years and still worth $150 and another machine loses all its value in six months, how is Mac a waste?
> If a $600 Mac lasts 5 years and still worth $150 and another machine loses all its value in six months (...)
Your hypothetical scenario is so absurd you didn't even noticed your catastrophical scenario falls well within any warranty period.
In the meantime, I own cheap miniPCs that I used as daily drivers, and they soldier on for years.
I mean, do you really believe that NUCs from Intel and AMD will simply fall apart if they don't have an Apple sticker on them?
Re: New Mac Mini with M4
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
So wait 6 months and buy the equivalent beelink for $30 instead of wasting $600 on the mac?
I’m curious about your definition of the word waste. If a $600 Mac lasts 5 years and still worth $150 and another machine loses all its value in six months, how is Mac a waste?
600-150 is a bigger number than 30 last time I checked. So even if the $30 machine were to loose all its remaining value instantly, not even scrap metal, you would be far, far ahead.
These are the dollar numbers claimed in the above post.