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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#691

Post by xenospn »

farawayea wrote: post #437
xenospn wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can boot Macs from external drives.

Yes, you can. Can you boot them from external drives when their internal SSD is dead? This isn't about booting them when their OS is wiped out. Having a dead SSD seems to kill these computers. That's expected for something with soldered flash chips.

I’ve owned Macs for decades and never had an internal drive die, SSD or not. And I’ve worked in the HPC storage industry for years. My expert opinion is that you’re making up reasons why this is bad.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#692

Post by Wytwwww »

nextos wrote: post #629
Wytwwww wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cirrus7 It starts €599,00 for 2(!) core Celeron. Seems absurd when you can get a Mini for an extra €100 (you can run Linux/Windows in a VM and still get a magnitude or few better perf). Or even an used old NUC or something, you'd need to go back very far to get a crappier CPU... So the actual starting price seems to be €900-1000 (i.e. if you want an i5..) The Celeron G6900 has a 46W TDP and seems to be around ~20%…

Cirrus7 is expensive because you are paying for a very high quality machined chassis & case that act as a massive fanless heatsink. Those alone are pretty costly. The price cannot be compared with cheap NUC clones and mini PCs, nor with Apple. I am not endorsing any particular brand, but Cirrus7 is not that expensive within the fanless market and the quality of the entire build is very high. They also somtimes offer…

The higher end configs seem fine even if a bit pricy (still, though the Mac Mini seems like great value if you're fine with the OS situation and non upgradable memory).

I still find it weird/confusing why would a reasonably high-end brand be selling configs with such horrible CPUs (especially perf/watt considering the whole fanless thing).

But I suppose they hardly have any options if they want a socketed MB. Laptop chips would probably be a lot better value (both cost and heat wise) but then it's no longer modular and e.g. Lunar Lake doesn't(?) even support non soldered-memory...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#693

Post by pjmlp »

srid wrote: post #520
goosedragons wrote: post #416

Earlier 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...

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

Not sure what the best to recomend, what I can say is to stay away from GIGABYTE .

I got a BRIX, which gave me nothing but trouble. Its UEFI is very picky with SSD brands, wasted money on a couple now being used as external drives, and in the end not even with Windows.

It is now collecting dust waiting for the city hall disposal round.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#694

Post by apetrovic »

kalleboo wrote: post #671
xenospn wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108345

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#695

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

gymbeaux wrote: post #535
goosedragons wrote: post #416

Earlier 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...

I bought one of these once. The specs on paper look good, but the CPUs are weak. They’re like those U series Intel CPUs where you could get say an i7-7700U, with 4 physical cores and 8 total threads, but at 15W TDP you were never really going to benefit from the 4 cores and 8 threads.

I do love those particular boxes for certain workloads. I have a few Lenovo ThinkCenter small form factor boxes in my office. They’ve replaced all my Rapsberry Pis. Unlike the Pi, I was able to purchase these!

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#696

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

chipdart wrote: post #669
malshe wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 apa…

I do think we should at least use the same measure of time to compare. Even if that means one reaches $0 by the time the other reaches $150.

Macs do generally hold their resell value better than PCs, but that doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to usefulness.

I have bought several ThinkCenter small form factor PCs used for about $200 each, and they’ve each been about 5-7 years old. They’re perfectly fine and I can even get new parts from Lenovo, depending on the part and machine. Fantastic deal. They run loads of services in my home.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#697

Post by Refusing23 »

hbn wrote: post #339
etempleton wrote: post #102

What a great little computer at a very reasonable price. A few interesting things with this announcement: 1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup wi…

Apple has shown people gaming with PS5 controllers at events for I believe a few years now. Someone can fact check me on that but it's not the first time I've seen it.

It's a great controller. works flawlessly with the mac

and you can remoteplay to your ps5 (or ps4) which also works great if your internet isnt terrible

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#698

Post by Refusing23 »

shadowmanifold wrote: post #630
leetharris wrote: post #24

Love to see that it still starts at $599. My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value. Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the…

It will make me a mac owner for the first time in 25 years. I was just looking at a mac book air yesterday but I just can't get over the complete ripoff of a memory upgrade from the base model. 16 gig starting at $599. I honestly don't need to know anything else to buy one.

remember a good monitor. scaling is kinda annoying on mac's, with lower resolution (under 4K)

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#699

Post by utf_8x »

kalleboo wrote: post #677
astrange wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My M1 MacBook Pro (the first one in the new chassis) can easily drive my 250 Ohm DT 990 Pro to uncomfortable loudness so it should indeed be fine for 99% of headphones. I've been told it also drives 600 Ohm headphones just fine.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#700

Post by utf_8x »

bilsbie wrote: post #546

Would this make a good gaming computer?

Yes and no, depends on what you play.

I've been semi-lightweight gaming on my M1 MacBook Pro with some level of success...

Games that are optimised to run on Apple Silicon natively mostly run great (No Man's Sky easily pushes 120FPS at "almost-maxed-out" settings at native resolution and looks amazing on the built-in display).

Games running in rosetta also work well. The performance hit of Rosetta is only a couple percent.

Less demanding games such as Minecraft, Factorio, various MMOs, etc. will all run very well.

For Windows-only games, Parallels works shockingly well. I can run Skyrim with 3rd party shaders at 60 FPS without any issues in Parallels.

There is no 1st party support for SteamVR. You can supposedly get it working with some older Vive models. I couldn't get my Quest 2 working, even in Parallels. Some games with aggressive (rootkit) Anti-Cheats will probably also not work.

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