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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#671

Post by kalleboo »

xenospn wrote: post #409
ksec wrote: post #340

As far as I am aware, there isn't a single competitor from big brand manufacture at $599 price point regardless of size. M4, 16GB RAM, Thunderbolt 4. The SSD is the main failing point but with TB4 you can easily get an external SSD. You can also get 10Gbps for extra $100. With EDU or Staff pricing this thing stars at $499. Which is practically a steal. I am thinking it may be better for cooperate to buy this and run…

I’m always confused as to why people are so paranoid about storage size. I got the base MacBook Air and an external 2TB drive for cheap. Super fast and I never worry about anything - I didn’t even manage to get up to 50% of my 256GB drive.

There are a bunch of large storage needs that macOS does not let you put on an external drive, like your synced Photos library and iMessage history.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#672

Post by kalleboo »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #640
nordsieck wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I wish they'd go with an external USB-C power brick. The only reason they might not is that they want to keep everything across the entire line, and the highest end Mac Studio probably needs more power than USB can offer.

How could you supply enough power on one input USBc to source sufficient power on 3xTB5 + 2xUSBc ?

The Apple tech specs page says "Maximum continuous power: 155W" and USB-C PD supports up to 240 W these days, so technically it's doable, although it would be a nightmare with people trying to run it off the far more common lower power supplies (which it would have to reject because it doesn't have a battery to handle if someone suddenly plugs in some high-draw device)

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#673

Post by kalleboo »

rsync wrote: post #431
ErneX wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website says it supports 3 6K displays, here you go: M4 (Thunderbolt 4): - Up to three displays: Two displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI - Up to two displays: One display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz…

OK, so unnecessary and arbitrary restrictions on screen numbers, once again. There is really no reason you couldn't drive four (or more) lower resolution (4k) screens, given the array of ports. In case anyone is wondering, the use-case here is a triple-monitor configuration at a desk with a much larger "TV" positioned, or hung, elsewhere in the room.

The SoC needs to have a hardware display controller for each display, and Apple only put 3 of them on their chip.

You can add as many extra displays as you want using DisplayLink which runs as a standard USB device and doesn't use the built-in controllers, but has worse performance, probably good enough for a "TV" though.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#674

Post by kalleboo »

reaperducer wrote: post #400
farawayea wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a solution when your main SSD dies. The system no longer boots. The guy from the youtube video explains that as well. Normal computers with NVMe storage will always be more repairable than Apple's hardware with everything soldered on the board.

That's not a solution when your main SSD dies. The system no longer boots. Is that new? I ran an iMac with a dead internal drive off of an external Thunderbolt drive for several years.

Was that an Intel iMac? On the Apple Silicon machines, the internal SSD also contains all the stuff that would be on the firmware flash chip and NVRAM on an Intel machine, so it's required even when you boot from an external drive

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#675

Post by mikae1 »

mr_toad wrote: post #620
architect64 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well Best investment you’ll ever make. They’re not all that expensive. Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions. I feel it’s a travesty that workplaces spend thousands on fancy desks and chairs and cheap out on bargain basement monitors.

> Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions.

That's what they said. I've been using Retina/HiDPI displays at work for close to a decade now. Still can't say I prefer one over the other. I have no problem seeing pixels, especially now that I've switched to Linux (KDE Plasma) at home. In fact I kind of like being able to catch a glimpse of the building blocks of the virtual world.

What actually does matter (for me) is uniformity and color accuracy. And you can't have that for cheap, especially not in 4K.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#676

Post by kalleboo »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #642
kissiel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TB5 is 15GB/s. So gen 5 equivalent. I'm not saying there are tb5 enclosures in the wilds, but it's a matter of time. Also if you're bottlenecked by buffered, linear reads and writes so much that there is a difference between 3GB/s and 7GB/s then I envy you. Most of what I choke my desktops and servers with is random IO that wouldn't saturate gen2 :)

Thunderbolt 5 is very high data transport, but the latency of going through the TB port is still higher than going through PCIe. In a single large transfer, I'd expect TB5 to win, in a millions-of-tiny-transfers scenario, I'm not so sure.

Thunderbolt is PCIe though, just over an external interface. That's why eGPUs worked so well. I can't see a situation where the latency of Thunderbolt has a significant impact on disk usage when eGPUs, where latency is so much more noticeable, worked acceptably?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#677

Post by kalleboo »

astrange wrote: post #472
enaaem wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (I think most) monitors have an audio output port. I think that's good enough for most people. Audiophiles use external DACs anyway.

The built-in DACs are better than most audiophile DACs; audiophile companies are largely scams and either way don't have the budget to actually do much R&D. You may still need an amp for electrically incompatible (high impedance) headphones.

The Mac mini 3.5mm jack advertises "advanced support for high-impedance headphones" so you might not even need an amp unless you have some really crazy cans.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#678

Post by sliken »

mitjam wrote: post #262

The larger M4 Pro with 64g RAM, 1 TB, 10 GBit/s lan is a nice system for content production and local inference at 2499,-

Hard to imagine that being price competitive with the M4 max, hopefully out tomorrow.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#679

Post by sliken »

wpwpwpw wrote: post #85
buildbot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not apply to memory. It’s much harder to maintain signal integrity. 200+ 4GHz signals.

If a CPU is socket-able, so should memory chips be.

Sure, they are. Buy a Epyc or Xeon, burns 200+ watts, has 8 to 12 channels, which requires 8 or 12 dimms, which are barely fitting in 19" racks (next gen are moving to 21").

Or you could get a m3 max, run the memory at twice the speed, still have a 512 bit wide memory bus, and have a 10+ hour battery life. Presumably similar with the m4 max, rumors claim later today (Wednesday).

How much do you want that socket?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#680

Post by sliken »

jsheard wrote: post #79
piva00 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips The memory chip is embedded in the SoC, how do you envision a way to do replacement of memory chips with this design/architecture?

As discussed in the iMac thread yesterday, LPCAMM2 makes it possible. There are LPCAMM2 modules with the same 7500 MT/s spec as the M4s integrated memory, and two of them running in parallel would match the M4 Pro. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra... Even if Apple wanted to support modular memory, which they obviously don't, the ultra-tiny form factor of the new Mini would probably still r…

M4 pro uses LPDDR5X-8533.
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