Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M4 Mac mini's efficiency

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 632 posts

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#81

Post by edude03 »

talldayo wrote: post #39
nextos wrote: post #9

I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…

> Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver? Not positive ones, even on x86 Darwin. Homebrew feels a lot more stable, which is a decidedly concerning thing for the average Nix enjoyer.

What kind of issues are you having?

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#82

Post by foobarian »

nextos wrote: post #9

I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…

At this point maybe the main benefit of an x86 machine is it has a spot to plug in an Nvidia GPU :-)

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#83

Post by favorited »

ewalk153 wrote: post #5

Given these efficient numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple were racking Minis for serving the new ML models for Siri.

They've publicly disclosed that they built custom Apple Silicon servers to power Private Cloud Compute.

"The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot."

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/>

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#84

Post by telgareith »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #17
nordsieck wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an m1 as well. And while I'm broadly satisfied with its performance, I do think that the SSD is probably carrying some of that load. And for a machine that often gets used far longer than a PC, I can't see that being great for longevity.

> And while I'm broadly satisfied with its performance, I do think that the SSD is probably carrying some of that load. And for a machine that often gets used far longer than a PC, I can't see that being great for longevity. This isn't the early 2010s anymore - SSDs last "long enough" for most people, to the point they are no more consumable than your motherboard or your RAM. (I've actually experienced more RAM failu…

people really don't grasp that the slowest SSDs are still 3-5x faster than the fastest HDDs (including SAS drives. Yes, the dualport kind).

And, Looking at the anandtech review of a vertex 3 way back in 2011...

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#85

Post by edude03 »

nextos wrote: post #9

I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…

Daily nix user across Mac and Linux, though I use Mac for actual development. No problems here moving between the two with my dev env defined on GitHub [0]

[0]: https://github.com/edude03/dotfiles

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#86

Post by nicce »

no_wizard wrote: post #62
tredre3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

all you need is a .edu address If I recall correctly. you can buy them on alumni addresses. That said, a far chunk of HNs never completed college, like myself and lost access to any email accounts of this sort, which only further supports your argument directly, as the EDU discount isn't universally attainable

Regardless, if people start to abuse this by getting discount while not actually being student or teacher, we can say goodbye to that discount and real students and teachers will suffer from it.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#87

Post by soheil »

kranke155 wrote: post #27
rgovostes wrote: post #22

> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom. I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...

It’s not a burden. I consider it a typical Tim Cook decision, in that the man led the company that made one of the fastest CPUs in the world, makes it draw as much as a Raspberry Pi. Absolutely crazy feats of engineering, design, manufacturing… and - There is that ONE detail that would’ve made it perfected but it’s botched! I don’t mind it too much, since it’s still 99% close to perfect. But, but…

1. Given millions of things that are perfect it takes one of them for HN to lose its mind, power button happened to be it this time, Cook didn't decide that.

2. How often do people exactly have to turn off and on a mac that consumes less than a pi for them to constantly be reaching out to that power button?

3. Standby, hibernate exist.

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#88

Post by brailsafe »

tredre3 wrote: post #44
nextos wrote: post #9

I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options? A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore…

> With education discount I don't understand why so many people use the discounted price as reference. Surely very few of us on HN are still in college? So let's use the actual price when making comparisons.

Shush ;)

But also a ton of people are absolutely in college, at any age, new people are coming to HN every day; I'd think HN is an easier place to discuss and explore vaguely tech/startup related topics than in school

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#89

Post by [deleted] »

ewhanley wrote: post #25
rgovostes wrote: post #22

> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom. I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...

I also wonder how often people are actually turning them off. It's generally a rare event to push the power button on a mac in my experience

[deleted]

Re: M4 Mac mini's efficiency

#90

Post by toast0 »

bryancoxwell wrote: post #15
LordKeren wrote: post #6

I can’t help but wish that Apple would provide the handful of features needed to make a Mac mini into a competent home server.

I’ve never tried turning a Mac into a home server. What features do you need that it’s missing?

Depends what 'home server' means.

MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later.

I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets.

Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).

Post reply on HN