721–730 of 789 posts
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They never released in that order, no? That would mean perfecting the highly integrated M4 Pro and Max before releasing a regular M4 laptop.
There will be a regular M4 MacBook Pro I assume, just like how there’s a regular M3 MacBook Pro now. They did this same release order last year (Pros in the fall and Air this spring)
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
1. can use a smartphone for all mobile tasks
2. see better on a large screen
3. are more comfortable with a mouse than a trackpad
4. don't have to worry about spilling tea on a laptop or dropping it on the floor. A keyboard is cheap to replace if that happens.
16GB still seems tight in 2024
Depends on what you are doing? Our daughter has the original Mac Mini M1 with 8GiB, has a habit to keep everything (PowerPoint, Word, DTP, web browsers, etc.) open and the machine is still lightning-fast. Developer that wants to run IntelliJ, a load of Docker containers, etc.? Sure, that's going to be tight, better get 32 or 64 GiB. Remember that many Mac users are just folks that do web browsing, Office, and a bunch…
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Most professionals use only a handful of software and don't really care about the OS other than what the OS should do (file management, connecting to the internet, launching software,...). Apple and Microsoft insists on doing other stuff that impedes you while not allowing you to do basic stuff you want. The main issue with Linux is hardware support (which no one other than the manufactures can solve properly) and pr…
What stuff is Apple doing that is keeping me from doing what I want? I think it's a good thing for 99% of computer users to not be able to just run any random software they download off of the internet. Gatekeeper, XProtect, and notarization are unfortunately necessary in the hostile computing environment we live in today. Aunt Tilly will happily download "PhotoShop" from that sketchy Russian Warez site and infect he…
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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.
https://www.cio.com/article/236396/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-...
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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...
> Yes, the M4 is faster (...) I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro and they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros. Being RAM-starved might have something to do with it though. > but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600. I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, thes…
The M4 Macbook Pro will be released next week, what did you mean instead ?
> they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros
I don't think I've seen a single other piece of user feedback online that corroborates this.
> I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind
Mac Mini gets its extensibility through Thunderbolt.
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What stuff is Apple doing that is keeping me from doing what I want? I think it's a good thing for 99% of computer users to not be able to just run any random software they download off of the internet. Gatekeeper, XProtect, and notarization are unfortunately necessary in the hostile computing environment we live in today. Aunt Tilly will happily download "PhotoShop" from that sketchy Russian Warez site and infect he…
This is about using the computer in a professional settings. You don't go and download Photoshop randomly (and if you do, that's irresponsible). But you install Windows Pro and there's a slew of random tiles and widgets everywhere. And you can't remove Apple apps (Like TV or Music) from the M series computers.
Regarding the built in Apple apps, I’m not sure what is gained by removing them other than a negligible amount of disk space. If you remove them from the dock they become out of sight out of mind. Same thing with the pre populated widgets and tiles on Windows.
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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…
Mac Minis, and in general most Apple products, tend to offer great value in the lowest configuration. But upgrades are expensive. It is a bit of the opposite situation. I have not used Macs for very long, and I prefer Linux, yet the cheapest Mini looks quite appealing. When Intel Core 2 CPUs entered the laptop market, it was a similar situation. The cheapest MacBooks offered really great value compared to competition.
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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?
Thunderbolt provides a tunneling mechanism for PCIe, DisplayPort, USB etc. It's also a mesh network where packets are source-static routed from node to node in the network - so the source sets up the route-to-the-destination and the data packet is transmitted from controller-node to controller-node until it gets to the destination, then it's unpacked and presented as data to the system.
You could see some of this on the venerable "trashcan" Mac Pro, where one of the TB controllers wasn't directly connected to the port, but came through another TB node. The latencies on the ports connected to this TB controller were slightly higher due to the extra transit-time.
Latencies over PCIe are measured in tens of nanoseconds (say 70-100) depending on chipset and how much you pay. Latencies over TB can be several hundreds of nanoseconds. TB presents as a PCI interface, but that's an adaptor-type design pattern, it's not fundamentally PCIe underneath.
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…
It comes at a large cost now, either more money than reasonable for one of the few compatible displays or accept a much worse experience, that is just not good for devices of this price. This is why a big affordable iMac is so necessary, but TC's Apple likes money too much to care about their legacy customers.
After such a long history of Mac OS having better font rendering and in general better graphic stack (Quartz, everything is basically a continuous PDF rendering) feels like a big letdown.
The problem is going to improve as more high-DPI displays are released for sale but it has taken a lot of time because most customers like to focus on other characteristics that are arguably more important for other use cases. There are plenty of premium display that are just good to great but you really have to think how it will work if you buy a Mac, most likely you'll need to compromise, feels bad considering the price of admition...