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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#751

Post by syndicatedjelly »

brundolf wrote: post #591
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #330

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

I’m a mid 30s developer and I use a mac mini for all my hobby development. I’m planning to get a m4 mini to replace my current m1 mini. I like hooking up my own monitor and peripherals - I don’t like working hunched over a small screen and crunched keyboard. Plus, a m4 mac mini with 32GB RAM is only $999 - the most closely spec’d Macbook Air (on an M3, with 24GB RAM) is $1299. and then the m4 Macbook Pro with 32 GB RAM is $1999. So your last point about cost - why should I throw away an extra $1000 for no reason?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#752

Post by fulafel »

sliken wrote: post #717
fulafel wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, there's no performance x86 CPUs on the market with ambitious GPUs, only laptop chips. Games are optimized for discrete GPUs, Apple didn't have that software inertia to deal with.

Sort of, obviously quite a few games are optimized for the PS5 and Xbox series X. GPU cores are generally identical between the iGPUs and the discrete GPUs. Adding a PCIe bus (high latency and low bandwidth) and having a separate memory pool doesn't create new opportunities for optimization. On the other hand having unified memory creates optimization opportunities, but even just making memcpy a noop can be useful as…

GPUs are all about (compute & memory) bandwidth. Using the same building blocks of compute units doesn't yet it go fast. You need a lot of compute units and a lot of bandwidth to feed them.

The performance dependency on DGPUs doesn't come from the existance of a PCIe bus and partitioned memory, but from the fact that the software running on the DGPU is written for a system with high bandwidth memory like GDDR6X or HBM. It creates opportunities for optimization the same way as hardware properties and machine balances tend to, the software gets written, benchmarked and optimized against hardware with certain kinds of performance properties and constraints (like here compute/bandwidth balance and memory capacity, and whether CPU & GPU have shared memory).

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#753

Post by XajniN »

barfingclouds wrote: post #645
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…

If I’m someone who does not super high intensity photo and video work, is a usb 3.2 gen 2 aka ~1 GB/s speeds fine in a hard drive?

Totally fine. I attached a 4TB SSD at 700-800 MiB/s for non-work files, never noticed anything slower unless it’s copying a huge file for 20 seconds instead of 5.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#754

Post by Y-bar »

reissbaker wrote: post #741
Y-bar wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest 4090 is EUR 110 less than a complete 32GB RAM M2 max Mac Studio where I live. Speccing out a full Intel 14700K computer (avoiding the expensive 14900) with 32 GB RAM, NVMe storage, case, power supply, motherboard, 10G Ethernet … and we are approaching the cost of the 64GB M2 ultra which has a more comparable memory bandwidth to the Nvidia card, but with more than twice the RAM available to the GPU.

Apple will let you buy more RAM for cheaper than Nvidia, but it won't be the same speed — it'll be ~20% slower than a 4090.

That's my point. I would absolutely be willing to suffer a 20% memory bandwidth penalty if it means I can put 200% more data in the memory buffer to begin with. Not having to page in and out of disk storage quickly make those 20% irrelevant.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#755

Post by whywhywhywhy »

tempoponet wrote: post #391
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder how many consumers fall into this sunk cost fallacy scenario that Apple has designed. Almost all of them, and the lowest tiers of the entire lineup are essentially ewaste in a box just there to push a few hundred $ on you.

I have to disagree - the baseline models satisfy the needs of many casual consumers and the price point puts it within their reach. For $600, most of us could give this to our parents and it would be great for 7-10 years. For those who need more performance, better value is found at higher rungs of the product lineup, and this has been Apple's strategy for decades.

Think you should try some of the machines they ship in that range, for a long time the lowest rung was 8gb memory and 128gb storage, meaning you had a machine that booted with around 30-40 gb free for the end user which would then rapidly get eaten into as swap space when browsing then you'd hit the "Out of memory, close applications" freeze up.

It was e-waste through and through.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#756

Post by tijtij »

seec wrote: post #731
theideaofcoffee wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Modern versions of macOS don't support subpixel rendering, what Windows calls ClearType, so that is why macOS will always look worse on low resolution displays.

Using BetterDisplay to force a "2x" resolution will give you better rendering but at the cost of lower usable/effective resolution.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#757

Post by spectre3d »

aterp wrote: post #682
Flux159 wrote: post #15

Time to update all the Mac Mini server racks for the new design

People have Mac mini server racks? What for?

One example is Mac mini Colo (which I believe has been in business since 2010)

http://www.macminicolo.net/

Also, Amazon

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#758

Post by ethagknight »

etempleton wrote: post #277
ethagknight wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed Apple all my life and never heard of HP iPods!

It was a weird win-win for Apple if I remember correctly. They were able to sell more iPods, get iTunes installed on all HP machines, and block HP from creating a rival music player. I honestly am not sure what HP got beyond the logo on the back of some iPods and the ability to try and associate themselves with a popular and cool product.

Would that have been pre-apple store, an effort to use HP's distribution/sales channels to get iPod into, like CompUSA or CircuitCity?

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#759

Post by c0nsumer »

seec wrote: post #748
c0nsumer wrote: post #474

I'm finding this monitor: https://press.asus.com/news/press-releases/asus-proart-5k-pa... ...to be looking really appealing to pair with one of these new Mac Minis. $899 MSRP in the US, 5120 x 2880, same dimensions as an Apple Studio Display but a lot cheaper... And B&H just got them in stock. Just ordered one myself, now I need to pick which variant of the Mac Mini M4 to pair it with. (My goal here is replacing a 27…

Ah that's cool, it seems to be better than the one Samsung released. And the price is not too bad. Is Asus going to make "cheap" Macs better with their display offering, that would be kind of hilarious. But yes, if that display is half decent, it makes entry level Mac Mini pretty good, at least you can get a sub 2k setup.

I ordered one, still went for a $2K+ Mac mini, but yeah. My goal is to replace an aged 27" iMac and because of doing DTP type work, I wanted a nice high DPI screen.

Really seriously considered a new iMac, but the mini and a non-Apple-specific monitor wins.

It's too bad target display mode is no longer a thing.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#760

Post by fennecbutt »

asciimov wrote: post #532
srid wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Go look into the N100 mini pcs like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYJ9BC15 It's a nice little low wattage machine for running some docker containers.

Another valid option is a synology nas, not only can you build the storage you probably want (I have 12TB 1 redundancy with one slot spare, read backed by ssd) but can also run containers on em as well.
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