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New Mac Mini with M4

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Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#771

Post by fennecbutt »

buildbot wrote: post #103
wpwpwpw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It won’t ever be able run as fast as a soldered system. Have you installed a server CPU? It’s really easy to fuckup and lose a few channels of memory due to the contact being bad. Right now I’ve got a 3647 Xeon phi cpu that’s refusing to train dimm a1 for _reasons_ That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have. Here’s an example BGA socket: https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/bga-so…

Give definitive evidence that soldered is faster, in my experience with decent contact this is not true at all. I think the general confusion is around typical ram sticks with a controller onboard and much fewer io broke out compared to the raw ram without controller which is often what you get soldered, with more io broken out.

The bga socket you chose is more for test or industrial hardware, versus desktop cpu sockets which are much slimmer and consumer friendly.

Really disingenuous, imo. It's absolutely possible for Apple to make these chips replaceable, using the heat spreader as the retaining plate.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#772

Post by fennecbutt »

microtonal wrote: post #264
gjvc wrote: post #181

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…

Why defend? So many of you do it. Why not say "Well I'll probably only use 8gb most of the time but good thing my mac came with 16!"

I don't understand it. Sure if they were making a loss on ram then whatever.

They changed to 16gb base. Why not 32gb? Why don't y'all demand it from em? I don't get this at all.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#773

Post by seec »

c0nsumer wrote: post #759
seec wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes that is exactly the kind of use case the previous iMac shined at. Which is why I think it's bonkers they want people to put so much money into their standalone display, it's way too steep for the use case and you don't need that much performance making the lack of all-in-one annoying.

Isn't the 2K Mac Mini a bit lackluster though? It's Mac Studio price territory, you get a lot more for 2K. Then again, they need to refresh it, so if you need something now, sure...

You can convert your old iMac into a display with a controller board if you want to keep it. It would cost about 300 but you get a great display, and those old iMacs don't sell for much anyway.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#774

Post by seec »

fennecbutt wrote: post #766
seec wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Did you know him?

Are you idiotic? I can play the game too.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#775

Post by seec »

tijtij wrote: post #756
seec wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah sure I know that, which is why I relate my experience to that is the result of those engineering choices.

It's pretty funny that you need special hardware to keep nice macOS font rendering to stand in comparison to Windows.

Microsoft has a lot of problems but they are way more pragmatic in their choices giving a "good enough" experience on most hardware. But if you don't follow Apple's choice, your experience can go from great to barely passable in an instant.

Very different approaches, but as I'm getting older, I understand why the one from Microsoft is popular and why they deliver more value.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#776

Post by seec »

johnnyyyy wrote: post #742
seec wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest issue with Mac hardware at the moment. All because of a decision to make it easier for their developers (and 3rd party too I guess) to be able to claim they figured out high-DPI before everyone else. 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…

Wait about what kind of people are you talking about and how niche is that target group? You are saying Mac are expensive but at the same time the potential buyers cant afford even a cheap 4K monitor? They go by like 200$? now. and even is that group exists.. its not like 2560p is torture on a Mac especially with that BetterDisplay HiDPI, I would bet many would not even notice the difference.

Unless you want to use your cheap 4k monitor as an equivalent 1080P display (which is not a lot of space for today's standard) it's not at all viable. 2560 is actually 1440p and no, it's not very good, even with BetterDisplay without even talking about the performance and rendering implications.

The fact is that if you buy an expensive Mac desktop, you need to also buy one of the few expensive displays that can work properly with it, otherwise you get degraded experience or compromise, which is unacceptable for hardware this price. We are in this situation only because of both engineering and commercial decisions from Apple.

Considering that they sold an entry level 27" iMac for a lower price than what the Studio sells for, well into 2021, the position is indefensible. Even if they wanted to make an external display, they didn't have to make it that overbuilt/expensive without any other choice. It is purely profit motivated move, because they want to extract 50% margin on everything, the old iMac was a low margin device and it's really the only reason it doesn't exist anymore. Conveniently all of that is supported by an unnecessary engineering decision (they didn't have to remove subpixel rendering).

Why do you feel the need to defend a mega corp terrible choices, only made to milk you as much as possible.

As for the niche thing, having installed/managed quite a few of those old 27" iMacs, I can tell you they were extremely popular, precisely because they were cost effective. I think you largely underestimate how large the customer base for the 27" iMac was. As far as I'm concerned, it's way less niche than a 650$ headphone, but the difference is that they can milk 50% margin on those while a big iMac at that margin target would put it in a price territory where most wouldn't even consider.

So yes, you can get a cheap display to have a price contained setup, but it's really not a great experience and doesn't make a lot of sense to comprise if you are going to get an expensive computer in the first place. At this rate you can get All-in-one 27" PC for not much more than a standalone display, it's not going to be great but at least it's cheap. If we are going to compromise, at least do it right.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#777

Post by seec »

fennecbutt wrote: post #763
seec wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah on my S24U rn I have 8 or so apps open, 100 or so tabs in ff (enough that it just shows an infinity symbol rather than number of tabs). That's with 12GB memory. Tbf it seems to be browsers that kill memory on any platform. The Web is now just mobile breakpoints that load needlessly high res images.

Well that's not a cheap phone but yes if you are going high-end, it's probably a better experience than a comparatively priced iPhone.

Of course, the browsers are problematic for memory but that's not new and hilariously the first iPhone was supposed to work only with web apps. It's not like if they couldn't spend a few dollars more on their expensive premium hardware to guarantee a good experience for all use cases.

This is the big problem with Apple today, the milking at every single step, the stupid pricing ladder and scrooge attitude is extremely distasteful and completely unreasonable for the price asked.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#778

Post by chihuahua »

birdgoose wrote: post #468
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.

I agree with your sentiment but I feel like many people just don't like the idea of carrying around dongles/cables/hdds/etc with their laptops.

Especially if you value the Apple aesthetic, where there can be only 1 button, 1 port, and everything has to be as thin as possible.

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#779

Post by gymbeaux »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #695
gymbeaux wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah the Pi is way too expensive. NUCs are a better deal (and roughly the same price), and x86 is obviously going to smoke ARM in certain workloads (e.g. running a VPN server that has to encrypt/decrypt all traffic).

The concept of the Raspberry Pi is great, but the price point was never where it needed to be. Even when you could get one for around MSRP, doing anything with it was so much added cost. Yeah $35 for a little computer is great, but you needed a power supply, case, microSD card, and whatever hats (the hats have always been overpriced IMO).

Re: New Mac Mini with M4

#780

Post by gymbeaux »

mmcnl wrote: post #625
gymbeaux wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you can’t do any sort of scaling with sub-4K displays. This is “since M1”. Intel Macs, even on the latest macOS, can do scaling eg 1.5x at say 1440p, which last time I bothered with an Intel Mac required a workaround via Terminal to re-enable. But that workaround is “patched” on Apple Silicon and won’t work. So yes if you have an Apple Silicon Mac plugged into a 1440p display, it will look bad with…

BetterDisplay does this. It adds HiDPI resolutions which render at 2x and then downscales.

Yeah I was never able to get that to work on M1/M2 Macs. Intel, sure, but none of the workarounds (including BetterDisplay) worked on the ARM Macs. Do they now? I last tried in 2022.
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