New Mac Mini with M4 • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#731

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 8:22 PM UTC

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #638

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…

My 7 year old QHD monitor pair through a M1 Pro MBP still looks fantastic. Then again, I do spend most of my day in apple Terminal, but I'm not really in want of anything more. Some other sibling comments are saying Windows 10/11 looks crappy, and I agree, as I have to occasionally switch between the two, I just don't like working in Windows anymore, mostly because of the poor display.

I use both OS on the same display and Windows looks much better on an "old" no Hi-DPI display, I can tell you that much.

I used to dislike Windows font rendering, but it's still better than what macOS gives you for "regular" displays. You can fix it somewhat with BetterDisplay but still...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#732

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #562

Thomashuet wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to, you can run your favorite flavor of Linux. Unlike with the Mac Mini which can only run macOS.

Apple has never put any technical or legal obstacles in the way of installing other operating systems on Mac hardware. Nor do they assist in any way, it's consistent benign neglect. The old Intel machines made excellent Linux boxes, excepting the TouchBar era because the TouchBar sucked (it was possible to install Linux, it would display the fake function keys, they worked, but not a good experience). I've converted…

Yet they made BootCamp. Do you see how foolish you look trying to defend nonsense?

Apple try to avoid being too heavy handed in the lockdown because they know the outrage it would cause from their legacy customers. Boil the frog slowly.

But they most definitely are trying to make the Mac more like an iPhone and they would rather not you install any other OS on it.

The bootloader not being completely locked is more for legacy reasons and multi-macOS support (dev/debug) but if you have any problem with it, you will need (surprise-surprise), another Mac for a DFU restore, just like an iPhone.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#733

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:15 PM UTC

tmikaeld wrote: post #440

sangnoir wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum. I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten,…

When you factor in memory bandwidth (80GB/s for DDR4) - that's not even close to the M4 (120GB/s base model).

That's such an Apple fanboy trope. The bandwidth is shared with the GPU part that actually uses most of it. You can't starve the CPUs for data in typical PC with the "standard" DDR5 bandwidth and they have much higher bandwidth for GPUs.

You know it's almost like if PC industry hardware designers are not complete morons.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#734

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

NBJack wrote: post #509

setgree wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can reasonably expect 1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface) 2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game co…

Latency is a big problem for cloud gaming, and not likely to be solved any time soon.

Yeah exactly my thoughts. I have been trying all kinds of services since 2010 and it always comes back to that. Even with very fast fiber, there is no realistic way to get the latency into desirable territory. It makes a large amount of games borderline unplayable and a whole lot extremely annoying.

Basically, the only thing half-working are slow paced story games and slow strategy games (mostly turn based), which ironically require little ressource most of the time (so why pay for cloud service ?!).

Like most things "cloud" conceptually it is seductive but in practice extremely compromised.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#735

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:27 PM UTC

_mlbt wrote: post #397

huijzer wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do note only 256 GB of storage. Should be enough for most people, but at the same time can become very annoying once it gets full.

It’s a desktop, so plugging in a USB external hard drive isn’t too painful or expensive.

It's a major hassle and if you are going to get a small box to plug in all kinds of other small box around it with a web of cables, you might as well get a bigger box and put it all inside...

mini-ITX case start around 3L nowadays...

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#736

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:52 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #335

yunohn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own almost every Apple ecosystem device, but I definitely wouldn’t call their mobile device RAM capacity as sufficient. It physically hurts me when my iPad Pro M2 and iPhone 16 Pro Max (earlier 15,14,13,12,11) start to swap out live apps - sure some apps retain state, but the majority still don’t. Even Safari randomly reloads tabs for me, while I’m just researching purchases across <10 live tabs.

That's fair, it sounds like you've got a real problem. I'd be surprised of the majority of users experience that problem though.

No, they do. They just don't understand enough about technology/computing to know what's going on or they don't care (or at least pretend to, because they don't have any other experience).

It's really crazy that some android phones at half the price give a better browsing experience than many iPhones, especially the non "Pro" ones.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#737

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 10:57 PM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #193

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…

> This seems small, but it would have been almost blasphemy under the jobs era. I feel like Jobs was a lot more pragmatic than we give him credit for. I mean we had the HP iPods, iTunes on Windows etc. And the iMac's catch copy was "BYODKM" at the very start, fully putting the spotlight on third parties and composability.

Jobs was extremely pragmatic, which is why for all his fault Apple would always come up with a desirable technological solution. Most things said about Jobs are pop culture caricature derived from peoples talking shit about him (mostly because of success jaleousy).

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#738

Post by wcallahan » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 11:25 PM UTC

Flux159 wrote: post #617

srid wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a particular brand recommended for someone looking to run Linux server (not Windows or Linux desktop)?

I have a Minisforum UM690S, it's about the same size (5x5x2.25 inches) and works well as a small machine. They just announced the EliteMini AI370 today that has the latest AMD laptop chip with 12 cores/24 threads - I assume that would also be a decent linux server (note that ram is soldered on that one).

Just ordered one the UM690S after this comment - I had been looking for another machine like it and saw the sale. Thanks for sharing!

I just deployed another System76 machine that I’m using for the same purpose — using both for redundant containerized web servers I’m self hosting. I got it with 64GB RAM.

Has the machine been a solid performer?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#739

Post by Duxon » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 11:26 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #667

userbinator wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It is if the hardware is proprietary and drivers nonexistent.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#740

Post by seec » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 11:40 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #116

madeofpalk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't see the "1.7x more Excel productivity" chart from yesterday's new iMac? https://youtu.be/eaB7nCdId0Y?t=364 https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/28/24281965/honestly-this-i...

It's funny that they advertise this because a Mac comes with a spreadsheet application that is hard to use and unbelievably slow. If they sent some engineers to work on that program they could get a 10x-100x improvement on the software side instead of grinding it out on the hardware side.

Yeah Numbers is nice for making cool layouts and convenient for its multi-table functionality in one page but it's also very lackluster in so many ways (no pivot for stater).

But the worst thing is by far its abysmal performance. Even simple accounting sheets get absurdly slow in the low hundreds of rows, no matter how powerful your machine is.

So, you might as well use a web app, like Google sheets that has other advantages.

To be honest it feels like they still offer their office suite just to say they have something else than Microsoft offerings, they have stopped caring about any of it a long time ago (with the redesign IMO).