M4 pro comes with Thunderbolt 5, which means one cable to run 2x 2160p120. And in case of macbooks equipped with TB5, one cable to do 2x high res, high refresh displays + power + plenty of bandwdith for data accessories. Omnomnom.
I'm seeing 3200 points for iPhone 16 Pro single core and 3800 for an M4 Mac. That's only about a 18% difference. I don’t think a cabled desktop computer is the right choice for this endeavor anyway.
16GB base RAM across the board, following the iMac. AI is certainly good for pushing up the baseline RAM that manufacturers can get away with shipping if nothing else.
It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.
That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency
I just checked some Dell prices: $730 to upgrade an XPS desktop from 512GB to 4TB (Apple charges $1200), or $508 to upgrade an Optiplex tower from 256GB to 2TB QLC, or $654 to upgrade it from 256GB to 2TB TLC (Apple charges $800). Scalping on upgrade pricing is something all the PC OEMs do.
Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.
I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.
The Mac Studio technically still has socketed SSDs, which presumably cuts costs by not having to manage a separate motherboard SKU for every SSD capacity, but they went out of their way to design a proprietary SSD module format rather than just using the standard...
Kind of, they were socketed NAND cards and the controller lived on the mainboard, so as far as getting out of the problem of Apple entirely setting the prices for everything it's not relevant. As far as I'm finding no one managed to find a way to create a compatible card to create an avenue for DIY upgrades. I've found a few upgrades but they consist of buying an entire second Mac Studio to harvest the drive from.
Giles from Polysoft is manufacturing 3rd party mac studio nand cards. There is still a problem sourcing nand because apple doesn't let the owm sell to anyone but them.
I thought I had seen something about that but couldn't find the actual boards mentioned for sale. Sounds even worse though because it should be possible but Apple being Apple has ensured there's no source for Giles or other companies to perform repairs.
Yes, though that relies on the product being fairly popular and for the chip to be stable for a while for it to be a useful source. Mac Studio NAND chips aren't going to be readily available from them unless they happen to be a shared part from a more popular device.
Apples segmentation takes place in the nand firmware. The firmware contains the location in the storage configuration. And this may or may not be rewriteable. Iboffrc has done a video explaining how some of it works. It's all from reverse engineering though.
I think repairable or not, the pricing to upgrade to the max config just isn't something a price-sensitive consumer should take seriously. Beyond one or two upgrades, you might as well pretend it says "call for quote" and just not consider 4+ TB as a realistic option to get from the OEM, because those prices are trying to cause sticker shock. And that goes for any PC OEM—the price-gouged upgrades are so far beyond reasonable that it really doesn't matter whose prices are the most silly or by exactly how many hundreds of dollars. What does matter is whether aftermarket upgrades and repairs are possible.
It matters that there are no after market options for Apple because it means the inflated OEM upgrade price is the ONLY price available for every given upgrade. It matters less with Dell/Asus/Lenovo etc. because that's not the only price available.
The top of the line is also not where Apple is gouging the worst. It's in the middle tiers that are actually relevant to many more people. Most don't have a need for 4+ TB main drives but 1-2 TB is a size that's pretty easy to justify for a lot of people and Apple's price is the only option for them and they're absolutely lining their pockets with cash at the expense of anyone not going for the bargain bin basic tier that can't hold 2 modern games.
By all means, complain about the cost to get a 1TB config, and put that price in proper context. But it still doesn't make much sense to focus on the $1200 upgrades, or any of the other upgrades whose price rounds up to "lol, no".
The gouging is bad at all levels as well as the design effects on repairability and the issues with obsolescence. If you'll look way back though I acknowledged the $1200 is at least vaguely in line with the top of the line Sabrent 8tb NVMe of the same size.
"Repairability" is a red-herring when the discussion is about user-upgrades and the ability to purchase components from 3rd-party suppliers (who compete against each other and the OEM)
Apple's silicon is good but I don't see what's so special about all the other stuff. Looks like they just solder components to the motherboard instead of using industry standard interfaces.
> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive
It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.
I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was.
I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
Very much so. When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.
Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).
I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.
Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.
It's USD2,400 to upgrade the M4 Pro model from 512GB to 8TB, which feels a bit steep, but it's an option.
Alternatively, you can get one of these[1] external Other World Computing NVME SSDs for USD1,190 right now. And then you can easily move all your files from your laptop to your desktop when you get home.
You can get some decent size external usb SSDs. I have the Samsung T5 2TB. I think they have larger models now. Works pretty well. And with USB-C speeds are very usable. You can probably get faster/bigger stuff via thunderbolt.
I'm considering getting one and a nice big monitor or TV. It needs to run x-plane 12 at decent speeds and maybe support a bit of light gaming. My macbook M1 pro is actually pretty decent for this but the screen is too small for me to easily read the instruments. I expect this will do better even in the base setup.
Otherwise my needs are pretty modest. I'd love to see steam add some emulation support for these things as I have some older games that I enjoy playing. I currently play those on a crappy old intel laptop running linux. I've also been eyeing a new AMD mini PC with the latest amd stuff (Beelink's SER9).
Seems pretty nice as well and seems like it is more performance for the money. Apple is doing its usual thing of charging you hundreds of euros for 50 euro upgrades. Get the base mac studio instead. It probably makes more sense if you are going down that path.
It kind of undermines the sleek form factor if you need to have a clunky NVMe enclosure dangling off the back though. Even with this tiny new design I bet they could fit a hatch on the bottom with space for a 2230 M.2 drive, but they don't want to because that would let you upgrade to 2TB of fast internal storage for $200 instead of $800.
There are a number of companies that specialize in making hubs/NVMe enclosures that match the aesthetics of the Mac Mini and sit directly underneath it.
It’s not the size of the NVMe enclosure that makes it clunky. It’s that you now have an extra dongle hanging off the back of your Mac and cluttering up the desk.
There is a reason for the popularity of those enclosure/hub combos that have the same footprint and color as the Mini.
Until someone brings out little two or four drive NVMe enclosures that fits exactly under the Mac Mini with a Thunderbolt bridge/plug that doesn't snag cables, because we all know Apple can't resist gauging buyers by refusing to include two easy to access M.2 bays on the underside.
I can't imagine anyone but Apple shareholders drooling at the taught of overpriced soldered memory would prefer a smaller Mac Mini case if ~0.5" more height would get you M.2 bays for storage.
There are no slots, it's all soldered directly to the motherboard. Even in the Mac Studio, which does use modular SSDs, they're proprietary modules rather than anything you can easily swap out yourself.
Fortunately I don't really see the point of using a mac mini, so this doesn't bother me too much, but... it's poor taste. You're holding it wrong was not cool the first time.
You do have the option of a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, so you can build out a linux box for local shared storage with components as cheap as you're willing to trust.
As someone who just made a 16tb SSD array over Thunderbolt 3 (Best I could find) at 40gbps and the interface is still the bottleneck (disks are fast now!), 10gbps is going to feel really really slow vs the internal stuff.
It's possible to build a faster non-shared array if you aren't price sensitive (Thunderbolt 5 is 80 gigabits a secind), but someone with multiple computers and devices gets much better bang for the buck from shared local network storage.
As a bonus, you can back up your computers and iDevices to the shared local storage instead of paying for (probably much slower to access) cloud storage.
This is huge for AI / ML at least for inference. Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing, the only downside is the lack of cuda
> Apple chips are among the most efficient out there for that sort of thing
Not really? Apple is efficient because they ship moderately large GPUs manufactured on TSMC hardware. Their NPU hardware is more or less entirely ignored and their GPUs are using the same shader-based compute that Intel and AMD rely on. It's not efficient because Apple does anything different with their hardware like Nvidia does, it's efficient because they're simply using denser silicon than most opponents.
Apple does make efficient chips, but AI is so much of an afterthought that I wouldn't consider them any more efficient than Intel or AMD.
For inference, Apple chips are great due to a high memory bandwidth. Mac Studio is a popular choice in the local Llama community for this particular reason. It's a cost effective option if you need a lot of memory plus a high bandwidth. The downside is poor training performance and Metal being a less polished software stack compared to CUDA.
I wonder if a little cluster of Mac Minis is a good option for running concurrent LLM agents, or a single Mac Studio is still preferable?
The memory bandwidth on Apple silicon is only sometimes comparable to, and in many cases worse than, that of a GPU. For example, an nVidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB GPU (not a high-end card by any means) has memory bandwidth of 288GiB/sec, which is more than double that of the M4 CPU.
On the higher end, building a machine with 6 to 8 24GB GPUs such as RTX 3090s would be comparable in cost (as well as available memory) to a high-end Mac Studio, and would be at least an order of magnitude faster at inference. Yes, it's going to use an order of magnitude more power as well, but what you probably should care about here is W/token which is in the same ballpark.
Apple silicon is a reasonable solution for inference only if you need the most amount of memory possible, you don't care about absolute performance, and you're unwilling to deal with a multi-GPU setup.
Edit: since my reply you have edited your comment to mention the Studio, but the fact remains that the M2 Max has at least ~40% greater bandwidth than the number you quoted as an example.
Yeah, sorry, I realized that as well so I edited my post to add a higher end example with multiple 3090s or similar cards. A single 3090 has just under 1TiB/sec of memory bandwidth.
One more edit: I'd also like to point out that memory bandwidth is important, but not sufficient for fast inference. My entire point here is that Apple silicon does have high memory bandwidth for sure, but for inference it's very much held back by the relative slowness of the GPU compared with dedicated nVidia/AMD cards.
It's still "fast enough" for even 120b models in practice, and you don't need to muck around with building a multi-GPU rig (and figuring out how to e.g. cool it properly).
It's definitely not what you'd want for your data center, but for home tinkering it has a very clear niche.
> It's still "fast enough" for even 120b models in practice
Is it? This is very subjective. The Mac Studio would not be "fast enough" for me on even a 70b model, not necessarily because its output is slow, but because the prompt evaluation speed is quite bad. See [0] for example numbers; on Llama 3 70B at Q4_K_M quantization, it takes an M2 Ultra with 192GB about 8.5 seconds just to evaluate a 1024-token prompt. A machine with 6 3090s (which would likely come in cheaper than the Mac Studio) is over 6 times faster at prompt parsing.
A 120b model is likely going to be something like 1.5-2x slower at prompt evaluation, rendering it pretty much unusable (again, for me).
Exactly, the M2 Ultra is competitive for local inference use cases given the 800 GB/s bandwith and a relatively low cost and energy efficiency.
The M4 Pro in the Mini has a bandwidth of 273 GB/s, which is probably less appealing. But I wonder how it'd compare cost-wise and performance-wise, with several Minis in a little cluster, each running a small LLM and exchanging messages. This could be interesting for a local agent architecture.
See my sibling reply below, but I disagree with your main point here. M2 Ultra is only competitive for very specific use cases, it does not really cost less than a much higher-performing setup, and if what you care about is true efficiency (meaning, W/token, or how much energy does the computer use to produce a given response), a multi-GPU setup and Mac Studios are on about equal footing.
For reference comparing to what the big companies use, an H100 has over 3TB/s bandwidth. A nice home lab might be built around 4090s — two years old at this point — which have about 1TB/s.
Apple's chips have the advantage of being able to be specced out with tons of RAM, but performance isn't going to be in the same ballpark of even fairly old Nvidia chips.
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.
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.
If you have enough 4090s, you don't need to page in and out of disk: everything stays in VRAM and is fast. But it's true that if you just want it to work, and you don't need the fastest perf, Apple is cheaper!
You're mostly correct, though a 4060Ti 16GB is 20-30% cheaper than the cheapest Mac Mini. More importantly though, "fits inside a Mac Mini" is not a criterion I'm using to evaluate whether a particular solution is suitable for LLM inference. If it is for you, that's fine, but we have vastly different priorities.
I'm not sure what you mean. RTX 4060 Ti/4070 Ti Super/3090/4090 cards can be easily purchased at any major electronics store in person or online and have 16GB or 24GB depending on model. Once you get up to 32GB, your point would stand, but 16-24GB GPUs are common.
Lack of Cuda is not a problem if for most ML frameworks. For example, in PyTorch you just tell it to use the “mps” (metal performance shaders) device instead of the “cuda” device.
I tried training some models using tensorflow-metal a year ago and I was quite disappointed. Using a relu activation function led to very poor accuracy [0] and training time was an order of magnitude slower than just using the free tier of Google Colab
That simply isn't true in practice. Maybe for inference, but even then you're running up against common CUDA kernels such as FlashAttention which will be far from plug and play with PyTorch.
To be totally honest, there's enough money in the ML / AI / LLM space now that I fully expect some companies to put forward alternative cards specifically for that purpose. Why google does not sell their TPU to consumer and datacenter instead of just letting you rent is beyond me.
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 well.
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).
> I know ancient iGPUs had that thing for setting the GPU memory size in the BIOS, but that's aaaaaancient and completely obsolete. If you still have that, just set it to the minimum value. The rest of memory will be unified.
I hadn’t used a PC in so long, I still thought that bios setting decided the division. TIL.
It's Unified RAM. So that memory is also used for the GPU & Neural Cores (which is for Apple Intelligence).
This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.
It'll be interesting to see as AI continues to advance, if Apple is forced to depart from their unified memory architecture due to growing GPU memory needs.
At this point it feels like (correct me if I'm am wrong) that Apple's AI is often performed "in the cloud". I suspect though that if Apple moves increasingly to on-device AI (as I suspect they will — if not for bandwidth and backend resource reasons then for privacy ones) Apple's Silicon will have adopted more and more specialized AI components — perhaps diminishing the need for use of off-board memory.
Last I checked, Apple was pretty much the only major player who does everything that they can do on device on device, that is their whole ethos behind it, no?
I mean, there is no need to speculate about any of this, they've put out a number of articles that outline their whole approach. I'm not really sure where the ambiguity lies?
>This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.
I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.
The usual reasoning that people give for it being bad is: you share memory bandwidth between CPU and GPU, and many things are starved for memory access.
Apple’s approach is to stack the memory dies on top of the processor dies and connect them with a stupid-wide bus so that everything has enough bandwidth.
If it's the shift I think you're referring to, I find it strange that you compare computing decisions from the 50s and 60s to today. You're correct, but that was over half a century ago. The reasons for those decisions, such as bus speeds, high latency, and low bandwidth, no longer apply.
Today, the industry is moving toward unified memory. This trend includes not only Apple but also Intel, AMD with their APUs, and Qualcomm. Pretty much everyone.
To me, the benefits are clear:
- Reduced copying of large amounts of data between memory pools.
Depart? They just got there, didn't they? And on purpose. There's more memory bandwidth, and also no need to copy from main memory to VRAM. Why would they bail on it?
I think they moved away because system memory was lagging behind in speed to the memory being used on video cards?
And besides, what Apple is doing is placing the RAM really close to the SoC, I think they are on the same package even, that was not the case on the PC either AFAIK?
Apple has an arm license but they still buy memory from Samsung (and others), it's not on the m chip die but it's provided by Samsung and then packaged above the m die.
I learned yesterday that all M-chip Macs with enough RAM are getting Apple Intelligence?
This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! Heck, even the Neural Engine has turned out to be basically useless despite all their grandstanding.
So alas, their prior greed has resulted in their most popular consumer iDevices being the least AI compatible devices in their lineup. They could’ve leapfrogged every other manufacturer with the largest AI compatible device userbase.
I think it's great that Apple was able to ship devices that millions of people made happy use of without needing to put additional hardware resources into them. That's efficiency, not greed.
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.
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.
> This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long!
What they shot was us. My 14 Pro won’t do AI despite having a better NPU than an M1, all because Apple chose - intentionally - to ship it with too little RAM. They knew AI was coming and they did this anyway.
Although having played with it on my MBP it’s clear I’m not missing much. But still.
Well given they're leaning on concepts like loras etc so much with apple "intelligence" I don't imagine they've been planning this for as long as you think they have.
And their npus weren't added in anticipation of LLMs, imo. You give em too much credit.
The RAM is expandable as well… however I am curious how well the extra RAM performs. Part of the M-series performance gain is from having the RAM dies very close to the processor.
This is good news for me because I usually buy the base machine and accept its performance as a constraint on what I'm doing. I'm not sure it is all about AI though, Apple has been getting a lot of criticism for selling machines with just 8GB of RAM.
How much faster is the M4 vs the M2 for Swift development?
I’d probably get 32GB. I started buying 16GB Macs in 2013. The extra RAM will keep any Mac useful for a few extra years. In fact, my 2013 Intel MB Pro would be still be great if I could upgrade the OS
I think I’d miss my USB-A ports if I switched my Mac Studio for this. Apart from that, it looks pretty good. Not really sure if it’s worth saving a couple of hundred when you spec it up to par with an M4 Max Mac Studio when that comes out though. It’s the same price as the base M2 Max Mac Studio when you upgrade the memory and SoC.
I have lots of USB-A devices, so I get what you're saying. But converters are pretty cheap and seem reliable.
And Apple has a long history of making this change ahead of the rest of the market. It's been years since they've move to all USB-C in their laptops, so IMO, it was only a matter of time.
And yeah - upgrades are awful price wise. From what I can tell, it's basically only worth it to buy base models unless the machine is making you money. Hopefully they upgrade the Mac Studio to M4 down the line.
I actually recently discovered that my USB DAC was skipping a lot because I had it connected to a hub. Threw it directly onto the Mac Studio and now everything's peachy, so there are definitely downsides to trying to get a bunch of USB-A devices attached to one of these.
Sadly it's been common for USB hubs to be dodgy ever since the advent of USB 3. I rarely had trouble out of 1.x and 2.x hubs, but 3.x+ hubs are consistently trouble. The only ones that haven't been problematic are those integrated into Thunderbolt docks, probably because those undergo more stringent certifications.
That is correct[0], as known from the iPad M4 analysis.
I will say SVT-AV1 has had some significant ARM64 performance improvements lately (~300% YoY, with bitrate savings at a given preset[1][2], so call it a 400% increase), so for many use-cases software AV1 encoding (rather than hardware encoding) is likely the preferred modality.
The exceptions, IMO, are concurrant gaming with streaming (niche on MacOS?) and video server transcoding. However, even these exceptions are tenuous: Because Apple Silicon doesn't play x86's logical core / boost clock games, and considering the huge multi-threaded performance of M4, I think streaming with SW encoding of AV1 is quite feasible (for single streams) for both streaming and transcoding. x86 needs a dedicated AV1 encoder more-so due to the single-threaded perf hit from running a multi-threaded background workload. And the bit-rate efficiency will be much better from SW encoding.
That said, latency will suffer and I would still appreciate a HW AV1 encoder.
Almost certainly. Asahi linux is getting pretty useable on M1 and M2. They don't support M3 yet, let alone M4, but support will surely come eventually.
I would be shocked if they weren't using a test suite, especially given all the platforms and devices Linux supports. POSIX has a test suite, and there are several Linux test suites [1], [2]. Although, I would think that an architecture port is fairly straightforward. It's reverse-engineering and writing all the device drivers, but devices generally have a well-known interface (and, therefore, presumably tests). The OpenGL drivers are being tested against the official OpenGL test suite.
Of course, there are no guarantees that it runs correctly. Probably doesn't, given that even Apple and Microsoft's software don't run correctly, either. But saying software doesn't run perfectly in all cases is almost tautological.
I wouldn't be so sure - if marcan loses interest (already looks like it), who is going to keep up with supporting the latest Apple chips?
When the M series chips were the hot new thing, there sure was developer interest - but now that a new chip is released every year, it becomes boring drudgery.
Look at support for T2 Macs - it took a decade to get them supported, not because the hardware was so different, but mainly because the hardware was 'boring'.
Fair enough, I suppose I could be overly optimistic. I just figure it's garnered enough interest that even if there's turnover in the team somebody will carry the torch. Especially since Apple seems to be actively tolerant if not even supportive of the project.
The other comments talk about Asahi Linux, which doesn't support the M3 yet. You can also run Linux in a VM on MacOS, and it runs very well.
For some uses you won't get the best performance compared to native Linux. But for a Plex/Kodi server a VM should be great.
(On an x86 Apple laptop I found the power consumption better with a Linux VM on MacOS than with native Linux, so VMs can be quite efficient for some uses. Software builds sometimes run much faster in a Linux VM inside MacOS than natively in MacOS. On the other hand, I found Qemu inside a Linux VM for Android development was extremely slow.)
One of the reasons Asahi doesn't support M3, is that Apple never released a Mac Mini, so they can't do continuous integration. [1] That being said, it seems Apple does re use a lot of the parts on the SoC in each generation, so it's not too different.
There's currently plenty of 3rd party VESA mounts for Mac Mini, I'm sure they'll have some for this new Mac Mini as well. They slide down into a "clamp" style bracket. They run about $15 on Amazon.
You can get 'sandwich' enclosures that put the mini between the monitor arm and the monitor itself, or off to the side. That's what I do with an M1 Mac Mini sitting next to me. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise since you can get these cheaper than what Apple would sell them for :)
Honestly, I wish they'd go with an external USB-C power brick.
The only reason they might not is that they want to keep everything across the entire line, and the highest end Mac Studio probably needs more power than USB can offer.
I bought a portable AC battery for my Mac mini for $65. Hard agree though that it would be a lot cooler if the conversion was in the cable so I could just do dc in.
The thing is, M chips run so efficiently that even with the power loss from conversion, it’s still pulling less power than a lot of PCs.
But yeah it running on a sleek dc battery would be a lot cooler
The Apple tech specs page says "Maximum continuous power: 155W" and USB-C PD supports up to 240 W these days, so technically it's doable, although it would be a nightmare with people trying to run it off the far more common lower power supplies (which it would have to reject because it doesn't have a battery to handle if someone suddenly plugs in some high-draw device)
As usual, no upgradability. There's evidence that it's possible with SSDs with no loss of performance. Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips and a simple switch. More future landfill material.
Bandwidth vs latency is like a pickup vs lambo I guess. And what the tb limits is the bandwidth, if you catch my drift (although lambos are awd and poor at drifting). So the actual performance that matters (the snappiness) is still there.
TB5 is 15GB/s. So gen 5 equivalent. I'm not saying there are tb5 enclosures in the wilds, but it's a matter of time. Also if you're bottlenecked by buffered, linear reads and writes so much that there is a difference between 3GB/s and 7GB/s then I envy you. Most of what I choke my desktops and servers with is random IO that wouldn't saturate gen2 :)
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.
Apple knows how to make money, I can buy a quality 4TB Nvme for 300$( you can definitely go lower if you want to risk it ). The upgrade to 4TB on the M4 Pro Mini is 1200$(it's not supported on the base model) , on top of 1400$ for the actual computer.
It I had to guess, most of Apple's margin is on users riding the pricing ladder up into the stratosphere.
I had an experience a few years ago at an Apple store, where this clerk refuse to sell me the cheapest m1 MacBook Air. There's probably some direction from up top which is trying convince people they need the more expensive Macs.
> I don't think these even boot once the SSDs die.
All Macs that I know of let you configure the boot drive. I had an older Mac Mini with a spinning HDD. I added an external SSD, set that up as the boot drive, and never touched the slow drive again. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't do the same with this.
I doubt the internal SSD is going to die before the power supply gets cooked.
If it does, you can get the SSD chips replaced. That is well proven now. Granted it needs a specialist with rework kit but they are starting to become more common now that it's an issue.
As discussed in the iMac thread yesterday, LPCAMM2 makes it possible. There are LPCAMM2 modules with the same 7500 MT/s spec as the M4s integrated memory, and two of them running in parallel would match the M4 Pro.
Even if Apple wanted to support modular memory, which they obviously don't, the ultra-tiny form factor of the new Mini would probably still rule it out though. Soldering the memory down is still more compact.
No way the new Mini is too small to allow upgradability. You can buy a Windows mini PC that is not only smaller than the new Mini but also allows upgrading both RAM and SSD. And that's without using LPCAMM2 - just normal SO-DIMMs. (Example: https://trigkey.com/products/trigkey-green-g4-16g-500g-n100)
That system you linked to is an extremely poor example. It relies on an external power brick, is incredibly underpowered, only gives one PCIe lane to the M.2 slot limiting it to ~800MB/s according to their specs (meaning it's only PCIe gen3), and has only one SODIMM slot (meaning it's operating with just a 64-bit memory bus, half the bandwidth of mainstream consumer PCs).
It's basically a 12 year old PC shrunk into a tiny box and low power budget.
Sure, it's not on the same performance level but this isn't the only option. There is a wide range of options available in the same form factor. Here's something higher end: https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-mini-pc-p3-amd-ry... Probably still uses an external power brick but I imagine that's just to reduce costs.
My point is that this size of device is already available with upgradability so the form factor isn't the issue. Apple is significantly better at engineering products than these random companies and they could surely have made this new Mac Mini upgradeable. I do understand why they wouldn't want to though!
I am not talking about DIMMs. Talking about the chips themselves. I am pretty sure they don't make different APUs for different memory sizes, it's just a fuse or something like that. If CPUs can use sockets, so do memory chips.
The pin density on a bga memory is like, 0.3mm for the type typically used by apple. That’s 200 0.3mm pins that have to line up and work at 4GHz and survive you dropping it 5 feet.
Are we going to hear this for every product release ad nauseam forever? Not sure about you but at least for myself, I always trade-in/recycle my products with Apple which I hope closes the loop as close as possible.
The days where this actually matters is going away. Your opinion is but a tiny minority, for the vast majority it does not matter. $200-800 for a tool that generates an enormous amount of value is incredible, no desire to upgrade it myself. I think about how rarely a PC gaming computer needs to be upgraded these days, by the time it happens its usually a complete overhaul because there is a CPU, Mobo upgrade required.
More pointlessly defending multi trillion dollar companies for their penny pinching. Sure it's useful, but it could be cheaper without so much anti consumer markup. And y'all should be in favour of this yet you've been taught by apple's cult atmosphere to be "happy with what master gives us"
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.
People running a single desktop machine are way better served by being able to upgrade RAM modules than worrying about single contacts being bad between the RAM stick and motherboard.
Yes? I wasn’t making a claim that it was better to solder everything for everyone. I’m saying the overlap between most Apple users and those people is low.
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.
And many desktops do that today, but like everything it has tradeoffs, such as peak bandwidth and power usage. DDR sockets inherently make this sacrifice, integrated designs will always have wider buses, higher bandwidth, etc. That's also why you don't get sockets for your GPU memory, either. It's a design tradeoff.
-> It won’t ever be able run as fast as a soldered system.
Yeah, just take a look at PCIe 5 and it's 512GB/s of bandwidth.
-> Have you installed a server CPU?
Yeah, and none of the problems you mentioned.
-> That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have.
Yeah, just look at the older macs with upgradable components and the easyness you had replacing them... So, instead of making it easier, let's just remove it altogether.
PCIe is a serial interface, not parallel like modern DRAM interfaces. They're completely different at a hardware level, the electrical design constraints are completely different, the latency characteristics are completely different. I think you are just throwing words and numbers out and don't really know what they mean at all.
Apple puts the memory, CPU, and GPU all on the same chip. This generates less waste as you only need a single package and socket, and uses less energy during operation.
Sure, they are. Buy a Epyc or Xeon, burns 200+ watts, has 8 to 12 channels, which requires 8 or 12 dimms, which are barely fitting in 19" racks (next gen are moving to 21").
Or you could get a m3 max, run the memory at twice the speed, still have a 512 bit wide memory bus, and have a 10+ hour battery life. Presumably similar with the m4 max, rumors claim later today (Wednesday).
I wish Apple devices were more upgradable (and cheaper and more fixable), but I would speculate that Apple devices are the last devices to end up in a landfill (or more aptly, recycled). If you outgrow a device there is a very robust resale market and that machine will happily fill someone else's needs.
Apple devices seem to stay in use for an eternity.
Wow, are you still using your original 386DX board, with minor upgrades along the way? /s
I actually think Apple's way of managing upgrades isn't as harsh as many people think.
The first thing to get to sustainability is to use less. If you don't need the hardware to make hardware easily upgradable, you simplify the hardware and use less of it. This is one of the reasons Apple do it.
Secondly, they're using a lot of recycled material in this thing. Their lede line on it is that its carbon neutral. Show me another desktop PC like this that can make that claim.
Thirdly, the "half-life" of a Mac is kind of insane. When I was buying Thinkpads, Dells, and the like, I'd get 2-3 years down the line and I'd "need" to upgrade the whole thing. I've got a 2017 Mac Mini, and an 2015 MBP in regular use. I have a G4 iBook that was in active use by my parents from 2004 until _this Spring_ - they only gave it up because they couldn't upgrade Chrome on it any more, so it's about to become a retro Linux term for me, because the hardware is still sound (albeit too under-powered for anything modern).
And lastly, they take old hardware in and recycle it back into the new stuff in the first step. They give relatively decent trade-in prices, and are one of the few consumer brands doing that.
Given that they're shipping it with 16GB of RAM, which is fine for my needs, I think I'm confident in saying I could buy one, use it for 5-8 years, and then get it recycled when I upgrade at that point, while most PCs with upgradable RAM being sold today are going to landfill within 4 years, perhaps.
I think you’re giving PCs way too little credit compared to Macs. AM4 motherboards from 2017 can have 5800x3d or 5700x3d CPU installed, the former of which is still #2 in the majority of gaming benchmarks beating anything Intel can offer for a fraction of price and power consumed.
A 2004 G4 iBook has been unsupported for any software for decades, let alone Chrome who was first released in 2008. I don't know if they actually ever made an official PPC version of Chrome but I doubt it.
You are a liar but a bad one.
You can like Macs, you can prefer it, you can rationalise the added cost any way you want.
But the fact is, Macs do not have any more useful life than PCs if your price matches them.
You play the role of the typical Apple fanboy who compares a 1.5k MacBook to a random crappy Lenovo that was on sale for less than 500.
The Mac is better/longer lasting. It's almost as if price convey some sort of information on quality...
Enclosure is: Acasis M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure 40Gbps
The disk I put in there is a SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB, I am not getting its full speed with this enclosure so you can probably get a slower one and get the same results.
I've been using external drives for years and would love to get rid of them now internal ones of a decent size are available
It's always been a slightly clunky experience - having to eject them before I can undock my laptop, or the way they never go to sleep (some issue with CalDigit TB dock...?)
I used to think of them as a backup, but since moving house a couple of years ago my internet is fast enough to make Backblaze viable
Next time I upgrade I'm just going to have less boxes on the desk, less power-drawing crap plugged in all the time
I hate the price of 8TB storage on these though :(
Dunno, seems the opposite. Dyson are plastic, don't last long, and generally aren't serviceable.
Apples have been improving repairability, their laptops have many replaceable parts, and generally last longer than PCs.
Compare new price / used for 4 years old price on apple vs any PC. In my experience used apples age well, are reliable, still get years of OS updates, and general age better than PCs.
My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value.
Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the Pro model.
I have a Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, M2 Mac Mini, M1 Pro laptop, M2 Max laptop (work). All of this runs on either an LG C3 42" OLED or a 34" 1440p ultrawide.
Linux GeForce Now can only do 720p or 1080p, can't remember which. Also, it's just kind of laggy in desktop mode. The Macs run so much smoother.
My current "main" desktop is actually my Asus ROG Ally. I use one USB C hub that is capable of 4k120hz, and I can move it between my Mac laptops and Asus ROG Ally very seamlessly.
The problem for me is Windows. Yesterday my start menu stopped loading for some reason and required a full reboot. Sometimes it refuses to go to sleep. Sometimes it refuses to come out of sleep. Sometimes a Windows update kicks off in the middle of a game and it slows everything to a crawl. Windows drives me crazy these days!
Get rid of Windows on it! Digital Foundry put out a great video on this exact process the other day, weighing the pros and cons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwWRCrGoXV0
Neither MacOS nor Windows are very good console OSes - you're really better off using Linux where anticheat isn't concerned. Even on the Ally.
> Neither MacOS nor Windows are very good console OSes
They're great OSes for consumers who don't really work on their computers, and just want something that caters to the lowest common denominator.
For professionals who use computers for work, Linux is really the only option that doesn't eventually get in your way. You can set it up and leave it as-is, with only security updates, and everything keeps working the same way, basically forever.
I've tried to set up an experience like that on both macOS and Windows, but eventually, the company will find a way of forcing an update on your, intentionally or not.
Thank you so much for telling me that I am actually not managing my non-profit on my Mac. I was convinced I was working every day on a Mac in a business setting, but I guess I was mistaken.
> For professionals who use computers for work, Linux is really the only option that doesn't eventually get in your way.
I really hope you're not expecting anyone to take you seriously with this. On principle I get what you're saying but in practice no one who works as a professional in any field has the time (or expertise) to be worried about configuring their operating system.
As a Linux evangelist who begrudgingly daily drives a Mac, this kind of attitude is what does us in. It's the cocksure "akshually Linux is best" even when it materially, experientially, just isn't.
I'll take him seriously on it. MacOS and Windows are terrible for professional purposes, for a number of reasons:
1. Requires Windows Pro or Apple Developer license to unlock full featureset
2. Cannot reasonably disable targeted advertising or ad data collection from either OS
3. Neither come with package managers and do not respect third-party packaging either
4. Can be "managed" insofar as your buggy CPM software allows, often glitched by the OS itself
5. The experience is always getting worse since Apple and Microsoft share a united front of making people spend as much money on useless shit as humanly possible
Now, that's not to say nobody should use these OSes - certainly people are locked into them for some purposes. But as a programmer it's genuinely hard for me to be productive on these OSes because I end up fighting them just for everyday, non-programming purposes.
I think it's entirely possible that MacOS and Windows can be inherently terrible experiences while also being mandatory for certain workflows.
I consider my usage of my Macs to be "professional."
1. An Apple Developer license is only required for distributing software in App Stores and notarizing.
2. I'm not sure what ads you're talking about in macOS. I've only ever seen them in the completely optional App Store.
3. Installing Homebrew is literally a one liner. I've never used it, but Macports appears to be similarly easy as an alternative.
4. I can't speak to this point, so I'll take your word for it.
5. I only started using macOS since the Apple Silicon era, but as far as I'm concerned the experience just keeps getting better and better. Every release of macOS has added features I enjoy and use constantly. Just the seamless integration between all of the Apple products in my house was worth switching from my previous mix of Windows, Linux, and Android.
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 professional development (The distributions are great, but monolithic development like FreeBSD would have been better).
Linux is best because it lets you use your computer for whatever workflow you need.
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 her machine if these protections didn't exist.
For power users that know what they're doing it is trivial to just use something like Homebrew or to bypass these protections on a case by case basis as needed. I can also run software in a Linux VM quite easily as well for open source software that isn't well maintained on macOS.
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.
I’d argue those protections are even more important in professional settings. You probably know how to properly obtain third party software in a safe manner, but Tina in graphic design probably doesn’t.
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.
I'm a professional who is often forced to suffer Windows nonsense. At work Windows routinely wastes my time with absolute bullshit I couldn't care less about and which makes me negative dollars, even though it is basically a glorified Chrome launcher.
Professionals should absolutely take it seriously because time spent updating Windows or even just waiting around while it gets its shit together is time you could have spent doing your job and making money. In fact, Windows and its spontaneous updates with obnoxious focus stealing prompts are major risks to the integrity of your work and might cause you to have to redo it from scratch, lowering the value of your time even further.
Linux boots in less than ten seconds and is already ready to use. There are distributions for all levels of expertise, and if there's an IT department it should be managing those boxes anyway. All that's missing is the Microsoft Office suite and in the end that's what the Windows vs Linux battle always boils down to. People put up with it because they just need muh Excel.
This isn't really the case anymore, Linux (specifically SteamOS and its kin) serve the console-like market very well. Arguably better than Windows.
Even for non-Gaming use cases this idea is a bit dated. Printing is by far the best experience on Linux. The "tweaking" that you need to do, that every Windows/MacOS user claims, isn't really a thing these days - sans NVIDIA (I'm not sure what the current status is, but it was bjorked somewhat recently). Sure, if you want to go beyond what Windows/MacOS can offer then tweaking my be required, but the current UIs are extremely comprehensive.
I had a 80yr old lady up and running in one day with PopOS. If that's not lowest common denominator, I don't know what is.
Professional work can be hit and miss. Depends on how draconian your workplace software is.
I purchase a Surface Pro 8 a year ago or something, thinking Windows would surely work better than usual when it is Microsoft's own hardware too.
But no, yesterday it got stuck in a boot loop, after a Windows update broke the audio drivers somehow. The Windows logs/reliability report can just tell me it "shut down abnormally" without any technical details what so ever.
I still have to use Windows on my desktop because of Ableton, but I'll never purchase any Microsoft hardware again, and as soon as I can, I'll run Ableton on Linux like the rest of my software.
Are these games available on OSX? Or are you somehow booting Windows?
(Apologies if this seems like a stupid question. I've not played games for a very long time, mainly because most stuff doesn't seem to be available on Macs).
In my experience with gaming on Macs, even when there is a native Mac port of a particular game, the experience is inferior to Windows more often than not. Many of them don't do 4K properly, for example (you get everything rendered at half-res in fullscreen). Things like Cmd+Tab don't work reliably, either.
Yes — World of Warcraft, League of Legends and DotA 2 all have native macOS ports. WoW got an Apple Silicon port relatively recently IIRC (last expansion).
It's not a dumb question. I actually used to use an iMac 27" with an Nvidia 680 that I would boot into Bootcamp / Windows for my primary gaming computer. I covered it in "built, not bought" stickers at Quakecon one year.
You can't do x86/x64 Windows on M-series Macs without emulation and it is generally a poor experience. There's a few things like Crossover, Parallels, etc that can help you run Windows games.
But I have found that most of the games I care about are either Mac native or on GeForce Now at this point. There's a surprisingly large game catalog on Mac now.
So the short answer is that some of them run on some sort of Windows compatibility layer, some are Mac native, some I stream. But most of my favorites run native on Mac.
To be honest, there are so many games to play these days that I don't mind missing out on a few titles. Valorant is a good example of a game that I can't play on Mac, GFN, or Crossover. But it's OK, I still have CS2.
I'm wondering if it might actually be easier to install Asahi Linux (or some other distro) on Apple Silicon for gaming via Proton, until Game Porting Toolkit is adopted more.
My Intel Mac Mini is still my "tv content" machine. Since it has no problem driving my Samsung OLED TV and keeping up with typical video framerates I suspect I will be holding on to it for many more years to come.
> Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet.
Can you elaborate? Thinking of setting up a MacMini for my kids but worried about lack of gaming options for them (I haven't gamed on a Mac in a dozen years and the state of gaming on MacOS was sad back then).
There's a lot of Mac games on Steam, Apple Arcade, and Battle.net these days. Anything that isn't supported there, I generally use Xbox streaming or GeForce Now streaming.
Here's a list of my most played games on my Mac in the last couple of years:
WoW, Hearthstone, Dota 2, League of Legends, Thronefall, Vampire Survivors, Baldur's Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Balatro, Death Must Die, Terraria, Dave the Diver, Mechabellum, Space Haven, Hades 2, Peglin, Stellaris, RimWorld, Dead Cells, Total War: Warhammer 2, Valheim, Civilization 6, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve Together, Cities: Skylines, Oxygen Not Included, SUPERHOT.
The point of such an annoying long comment is to demonstrate that there is a very substantial Mac gaming library. The problem is that a new shiny game comes out that doesn't support Mac and you don't want to be the ONE guy in your group who can't play it because you're on Mac. The latest one for me is Deadlock. Not on GeForce Now, not on console, not on Mac... so I needed to get a Windows PC.
But if you're a kid and just looking for a general gaming machine, it plays a ton of cool stuff.
Thanks for all the info! Great to hear about the availability.
I noticed the other comments mentioned GeForceNow over _ethernet_. What connection speeds do you typically need to play these games over GeforceNow or similar.
My Mac mini M1 is still such a great computer and I really don't need to upgrade, but with the spec bump up to 16GB of RAM, $230 trade in value that Apple is telling me they'll give me, and the $499 education pricing (I'm currently doing a Masters degree) it's too tempting to pass up.
My first thought was similar, though followed quickly by "...but it's Apple, so what's the catch?" The relevant extra things to know are that the SSD is soldered, there are no slots for extra SSDs, and choosing a sensible (1TB) drive is >4X the price of buying similar storage at retail. Still a no from me, then.
(The only thing I do often that's CPU-limited is compiling, being faster at that saves me maybe a few minutes in a full working day; I don't care. I am frequently limited by RAM and I really hate shuffling things around to make space on drives.)
Putting the audio jack on the front is a strange design choice to me if you plan on hooking it up to wired speakers all the time. Did they run out of space to keep it in the back?
Probably for public computers and classroom settings (think libraries, schools, etc) for people to plug their wired headphone in.
Would have been nice to have audio both in the front and rear, with front audio overriding rear audio (like in most desktops), but I guess that would have been too much maximalism for apple
On the front is far more practical for wired headphones. Plus you can always do something with USB-C pretty easily if you want to run it out of the back; if I had to choose a dongle for either fixed speakers or headphones, I’d pick them for the speakers.
It's definitely more practical for headphones. I'm curious as to why Apple decided to make this change now. Previous Mac Minis and the Mac Studios have always had them in the back. It seems uncharacteristic of them to go out of their way for wired headphone users after they removed the port entirely from the iPhone, so I wonder if it was a hardware/industrial design thing where it was simply more convenient to move it to the front for the new form factor.
Edit: also I noticed they moved the power button to the bottom corner of the Mac Mini! (It used to be on the back as well.) This makes me think even more that they didn't want to crowd up the back too much.
Yeah, good point about the HDMI carrying the audio from the back already. I think I’m out of touch since I use an old receiver that doesn’t have HDMI. It’s funny that this is the one place Apple considered the convenience to its wired headphone users.
There are a lot of options out there now for USB PC speakers that have the DAC/amp built in, eg these are $50 and natively USB-C: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08F57GSJ7
But yeah, anyone "serious" would go discrete for all that stuff regardless. I guess this also lets Apple sidestep a bunch of fuss around non-stereo use-cases, for people who want quadraphonic or 5.1 at their workstation.
The built-in DACs are better than most audiophile DACs; audiophile companies are largely scams and either way don't have the budget to actually do much R&D.
You may still need an amp for electrically incompatible (high impedance) headphones.
The Mac mini 3.5mm jack advertises "advanced support for high-impedance headphones" so you might not even need an amp unless you have some really crazy cans.
My M1 MacBook Pro (the first one in the new chassis) can easily drive my 250 Ohm DT 990 Pro to uncomfortable loudness so it should indeed be fine for 99% of headphones. I've been told it also drives 600 Ohm headphones just fine.
Presumably servicing wired headphones, but agree it's an odd choice to not also include one in the back— particularly when unlike a laptop there's no built in speakers, and Apple has been pushing hard on bluetooth audio since the iPhone 8 in 2017.
Oh that's right yeah— 6/7/8 all had the same form factor as that was the time that the off-year S versions were also dropped, so I always get confused.
And to further muddy the waters, the space in the 7 chassis for the jack was mostly still available, which led to that one madlad bodging in his own headphone jack, for a one of a kind iPhone 7:
The 6 actually had an S release, as well as the X.
But yeah the headphone jack dropping was obviously just to get more people onboard with AirPods that launched at the same time. And you can't say it didn't work! I remember when the first images of people wearing AirPods came out and it was the laughing stock of the internet. People said it looked like you had Q-tips hanging out of your ears, or the tips of an electric toothbrush.
A few years later and they're pulling in tens of billions of dollars per year, just on AirPods sales alone. AirPods could be pulled out into its own business and it would be seen as a wildly successful tech company.
> Mac mini is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, including 100 percent recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards, and 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. The electricity used to manufacture Mac mini is sourced from 100 percent renewable electricity. And, to address 100 percent of the electricity customers use to power Mac mini, Apple has invested in clean energy projects around the world. Apple has also prioritized lower-carbon modes of shipping, like ocean freight, to further reduce emissions from transportation. Together, these actions have reduced the carbon footprint of Mac mini by over 80 percent.
I’m inclined to trust Apple with this information but the skeptical side of me is questioning, how can we fact check this data? If it’s true it is very cool.
Third party auditors that come in to verify it. "We" probably can't verify it, but Apple more than likely has these claims audited so they are prepared when they get sued over them.
What does it mean for the gold to be "recycled"? I get that the aluminum probably came for a pile of cans, but does this mean that the gold definitely came from a pile of electronics? Or could it be that they melted down a few old $20 coins from the US? It's not like a lot of gold ends up in landfills.
"According to the World Gold Council, recycled gold accounted for 28 percent of the total global gold supply of 4,633 metric tons in 2020; 90 percent of that recycled gold comes from discarded jewelry and the rest from a growing mountain of electronic waste such as cellphones and laptops."
If we truly want to achieve zero emissions globally we need to take seriously all sources of CO2 emissions, the full carbon footprint of companies. Not just energy use.
It's not entirely unreasonable to ask companies to be responsible for carbon capture or in the short term an offset for their employees breathing on the clock, as funny as that sounds.
We need to take all sources of carbon emissions seriously. This shouldn't be downvoted.
>> "ask companies to be responsible for carbon capture or in the short term an offset for their employees breathing on the clock"
Unless you think their employees breathe more when they are on the clock than off it, I'm not sure this makes sense. When they're off the clock, they might be exercising or playing with their kids, so perhaps they actually breathe less when sitting at their desks on the clock.
Yikes, I hope folks don't think I was referring to CO2 caused by human respiration! I was referring to the CO2 emitted for example in growing the employee's food and getting it to him, his shelter (cement production being particularly high in CO2 emissions), transportation, home heating, the CO2 emitted by the people who educated him and provided his medical care.
Like someone else said, spending is a very good proxy for CO2 emissions, and about 68% of all spending is "consumer spending", which basically means keeping people alive, somewhat happy and somewhat productive.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think it's a fair question.
The fine print says:
> Carbon reductions are calculated against a business-as-usual baseline scenario: No use of clean electricity for manufacturing or product use, beyond what is already available on the latest modeled grid; Apple’s carbon intensity of key materials as of 2015; and Apple’s average mix of transportation modes by product line across three years. Learn more at apple.com/2030.
https://www.apple.com/2030 which mostly seems to focus on the goal of being 100% carbon neutral in energy use.
It sounds like they're generally only looking at carbon emissions from _energy_ use in transportation and manufacturing, and they're probably using some sort of carbon offset to achieve that "net zero". They're probably also not counting carbon emissions from building construction and they're probably not counting carbon emissions from meat served at corporate events, etc.
Update: I found a breakdown for the Mac Mini (linked from the apple.com/2030 page).
But we offer base models with paltry memory and solder our ssds and ram modules (look at the ram/ssd chips next to the m chip itself under the heat spreader, they could make em low profile socketed for sure).
Apart from the huge price jump from M4 to M4 Pro, I really like this product line-up.
Last time I bought a Mac Mini was before the 2018 model got introduced, and I almost took it back in to get it exchanged (I was within 30 days of purchase when the 2018 model dropped), but it's been plugging away doing everything I have asked of it for 6 years, and it's still going strong. All the upgrades since have left me a little cool, but this genuinely looks like a contender for an upgrade. Only thing stopping me from getting the credit card ready is waiting to see what the M4 MacBook Air - which is inevitably going to be announced in the next 72 hours - looks like in comparison.
The release cycle is the same every year, aside from occasional refresh omissions and delays. It would be weird if they actually did release the M4 Air tomorrow.
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)
People made rack mount kits for the previous generations. Not sure if the dimensions changed, if they did I'm sure products will be updated and you will be able to 3d print your own or buy a professional version from Amazon shortly
Up to three displays: Two displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or 4K resolution at 60Hz over HDMI
Up to two displays: One display with up to 5K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI
Are these set in stone? Would it be enough to run say, two external 2560 x 1440 at 144hz?
I can't say it from first hand experience, but usually that are just example stats. The limit usually is pixels/sec for the bandwidth, so any configuration which requires less bandwidth should work too.
>Delivers up to 13.3x faster gaming performance in World of Warcraft: The War Within
This is such an Apple stat especially for a game. What does "faster gaming performance" even mean? Every zone and city hub loads 13.3x faster so loading screens are quicker? They don't say anything about FPS and no one would use "faster" as a synonym for higher FPS.
An MMO is really not the best benchmark tbh
Edit: notes has the compared spec "Results are compared to previous-generation 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7-based Mac mini systems with Intel Iris UHD Graphics 630, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD."
So they compared the 2024 M4 to a 2018 8th gen Intel i7 (i7-8700B). Take that as you will
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).
While that sounds pretty funny I know people who actually burn the CPU on Excel so that might be significant. Granted they should not be using Excel for what they do but you know, it's easier than learning something new!
Once people learn Goal Seek and the matrix extensions to Excel’s macro language, it’s game over for corporate standard-issue Dell 11” laptops, that’s for sure.
787 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadUpdated with known P and E amounts.
Thanks HN for posting below.
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apples-new-mac-mini-i...
Maybe Apples CDN cache is stale but I only see M2 specs on that page.
M4 Pro 12-core = 8P, 4E
M4 Pro 14-core = 10P, 4E
I don't see it stated with the specific P vs E cores are for the 14-core version on:
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
> With up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores
They've backtracked from the M3 Pro P:E ratio downgrade, which is a welcome surprise.
i think maybe in the future, maybe they'll only have 1 chip line - but thats just a wild guess.
The base model is 256 gb. You can see it here:
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Apples segmentation takes place in the nand firmware. The firmware contains the location in the storage configuration. And this may or may not be rewriteable. Iboffrc has done a video explaining how some of it works. It's all from reverse engineering though.
The top of the line is also not where Apple is gouging the worst. It's in the middle tiers that are actually relevant to many more people. Most don't have a need for 4+ TB main drives but 1-2 TB is a size that's pretty easy to justify for a lot of people and Apple's price is the only option for them and they're absolutely lining their pockets with cash at the expense of anyone not going for the bargain bin basic tier that can't hold 2 modern games.
It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.
I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).
I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.
Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.
Alternatively, you can get one of these[1] external Other World Computing NVME SSDs for USD1,190 right now. And then you can easily move all your files from your laptop to your desktop when you get home.
[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4EXP1MT08/ (15% off list price as of writing)
I'm considering getting one and a nice big monitor or TV. It needs to run x-plane 12 at decent speeds and maybe support a bit of light gaming. My macbook M1 pro is actually pretty decent for this but the screen is too small for me to easily read the instruments. I expect this will do better even in the base setup.
Otherwise my needs are pretty modest. I'd love to see steam add some emulation support for these things as I have some older games that I enjoy playing. I currently play those on a crappy old intel laptop running linux. I've also been eyeing a new AMD mini PC with the latest amd stuff (Beelink's SER9).
Seems pretty nice as well and seems like it is more performance for the money. Apple is doing its usual thing of charging you hundreds of euros for 50 euro upgrades. Get the base mac studio instead. It probably makes more sense if you are going down that path.
For example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S47KBMC/
We really are living in the future if people are using these words in combination.
Though compared to this new mini a lot will feel clunky. Any HDD enclosure is certainly larger.
There is a reason for the popularity of those enclosure/hub combos that have the same footprint and color as the Mini.
I can't imagine anyone but Apple shareholders drooling at the taught of overpriced soldered memory would prefer a smaller Mac Mini case if ~0.5" more height would get you M.2 bays for storage.
[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-ministac...
Upgrade your memory and connect it externally over USB-C. It works brilliantly
Fortunately I don't really see the point of using a mac mini, so this doesn't bother me too much, but... it's poor taste. You're holding it wrong was not cool the first time.
The issue is that Apple moved the storage controllers into their SOC. So they use raw nand chips, and you need to use ones that the SOC supports.
How do you love your internet speed compared to the internal stuff?
As a bonus, you can back up your computers and iDevices to the shared local storage instead of paying for (probably much slower to access) cloud storage.
Hell if I'm dumping cards from my camera or moving models across the network that's like 64-128GB max.
Not really? Apple is efficient because they ship moderately large GPUs manufactured on TSMC hardware. Their NPU hardware is more or less entirely ignored and their GPUs are using the same shader-based compute that Intel and AMD rely on. It's not efficient because Apple does anything different with their hardware like Nvidia does, it's efficient because they're simply using denser silicon than most opponents.
Apple does make efficient chips, but AI is so much of an afterthought that I wouldn't consider them any more efficient than Intel or AMD.
I wonder if a little cluster of Mac Minis is a good option for running concurrent LLM agents, or a single Mac Studio is still preferable?
On the higher end, building a machine with 6 to 8 24GB GPUs such as RTX 3090s would be comparable in cost (as well as available memory) to a high-end Mac Studio, and would be at least an order of magnitude faster at inference. Yes, it's going to use an order of magnitude more power as well, but what you probably should care about here is W/token which is in the same ballpark.
Apple silicon is a reasonable solution for inference only if you need the most amount of memory possible, you don't care about absolute performance, and you're unwilling to deal with a multi-GPU setup.
https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/
Edit: since my reply you have edited your comment to mention the Studio, but the fact remains that the M2 Max has at least ~40% greater bandwidth than the number you quoted as an example.
One more edit: I'd also like to point out that memory bandwidth is important, but not sufficient for fast inference. My entire point here is that Apple silicon does have high memory bandwidth for sure, but for inference it's very much held back by the relative slowness of the GPU compared with dedicated nVidia/AMD cards.
It's definitely not what you'd want for your data center, but for home tinkering it has a very clear niche.
Is it? This is very subjective. The Mac Studio would not be "fast enough" for me on even a 70b model, not necessarily because its output is slow, but because the prompt evaluation speed is quite bad. See [0] for example numbers; on Llama 3 70B at Q4_K_M quantization, it takes an M2 Ultra with 192GB about 8.5 seconds just to evaluate a 1024-token prompt. A machine with 6 3090s (which would likely come in cheaper than the Mac Studio) is over 6 times faster at prompt parsing.
A 120b model is likely going to be something like 1.5-2x slower at prompt evaluation, rendering it pretty much unusable (again, for me).
[0] https://github.com/XiongjieDai/GPU-Benchmarks-on-LLM-Inferen...
The M4 Pro in the Mini has a bandwidth of 273 GB/s, which is probably less appealing. But I wonder how it'd compare cost-wise and performance-wise, with several Minis in a little cluster, each running a small LLM and exchanging messages. This could be interesting for a local agent architecture.
Apple's chips have the advantage of being able to be specced out with tons of RAM, but performance isn't going to be in the same ballpark of even fairly old Nvidia chips.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
[0] https://github.com/keras-team/tf-keras/issues/140
Until Apple can bang something out as good as an h100, it's no competition.
Cuda thrives bc of the hardware offering too.
Is the whole "unified" RAM a reason that the iMac and Mini are capped at 32G?
Unified memory is much more useful when you can get more bandwidth to it.
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 well.
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).
https://x.com/LinaAsahi/status/1820947147312820497
I hadn’t used a PC in so long, I still thought that bios setting decided the division. TIL.
Lucky we have Asahi Lina to clarify the details.
e.g. My Ryzen iGPU reserves 2GB/32GB for itself (which Windows can't see) via BIOS and use 9 more as shared "unified" memory.
It's Unified RAM. So that memory is also used for the GPU & Neural Cores (which is for Apple Intelligence).
This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.
It'll be interesting to see as AI continues to advance, if Apple is forced to depart from their unified memory architecture due to growing GPU memory needs.
I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.
The usual reasoning that people give for it being bad is: you share memory bandwidth between CPU and GPU, and many things are starved for memory access.
Apple’s approach is to stack the memory dies on top of the processor dies and connect them with a stupid-wide bus so that everything has enough bandwidth.
Today, the industry is moving toward unified memory. This trend includes not only Apple but also Intel, AMD with their APUs, and Qualcomm. Pretty much everyone.
To me, the benefits are clear:
- Reduced copying of large amounts of data between memory pools.
- Improved memory usage.
- Generally lower power consumption.
And besides, what Apple is doing is placing the RAM really close to the SoC, I think they are on the same package even, that was not the case on the PC either AFAIK?
This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long! Heck, even the Neural Engine has turned out to be basically useless despite all their grandstanding.
So alas, their prior greed has resulted in their most popular consumer iDevices being the least AI compatible devices in their lineup. They could’ve leapfrogged every other manufacturer with the largest AI compatible device userbase.
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.
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.
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.
What they shot was us. My 14 Pro won’t do AI despite having a better NPU than an M1, all because Apple chose - intentionally - to ship it with too little RAM. They knew AI was coming and they did this anyway.
Although having played with it on my MBP it’s clear I’m not missing much. But still.
And their npus weren't added in anticipation of LLMs, imo. You give em too much credit.
* Kept HDMI
* New, much smaller form factor
* Front facing USB-C
* Base model has 16 gb of ram
I’d probably get 32GB. I started buying 16GB Macs in 2013. The extra RAM will keep any Mac useful for a few extra years. In fact, my 2013 Intel MB Pro would be still be great if I could upgrade the OS
M4: 21k lines / (core-second) https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8495624
M2: 16k lines / (core-second) https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8546977
And Apple has a long history of making this change ahead of the rest of the market. It's been years since they've move to all USB-C in their laptops, so IMO, it was only a matter of time.
And yeah - upgrades are awful price wise. From what I can tell, it's basically only worth it to buy base models unless the machine is making you money. Hopefully they upgrade the Mac Studio to M4 down the line.
I agree. My wife has a MacBook that is USB-C only, and it turns ten years old in a couple of months.
I will say SVT-AV1 has had some significant ARM64 performance improvements lately (~300% YoY, with bitrate savings at a given preset[1][2], so call it a 400% increase), so for many use-cases software AV1 encoding (rather than hardware encoding) is likely the preferred modality.
The exceptions, IMO, are concurrant gaming with streaming (niche on MacOS?) and video server transcoding. However, even these exceptions are tenuous: Because Apple Silicon doesn't play x86's logical core / boost clock games, and considering the huge multi-threaded performance of M4, I think streaming with SW encoding of AV1 is quite feasible (for single streams) for both streaming and transcoding. x86 needs a dedicated AV1 encoder more-so due to the single-threaded perf hit from running a multi-threaded background workload. And the bit-rate efficiency will be much better from SW encoding.
That said, latency will suffer and I would still appreciate a HW AV1 encoder.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4 [1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-1.8-Released [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SVT-AV1-2.0
http://www.macminicolo.net/
Also, Amazon
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/
Of course, there are no guarantees that it runs correctly. Probably doesn't, given that even Apple and Microsoft's software don't run correctly, either. But saying software doesn't run perfectly in all cases is almost tautological.
[1] https://github.com/phoronix-test-suite/phoronix-test-suite
[2] https://github.com/linux-test-project/ltp
I wouldn't be so sure - if marcan loses interest (already looks like it), who is going to keep up with supporting the latest Apple chips?
When the M series chips were the hot new thing, there sure was developer interest - but now that a new chip is released every year, it becomes boring drudgery.
Look at support for T2 Macs - it took a decade to get them supported, not because the hardware was so different, but mainly because the hardware was 'boring'.
For some uses you won't get the best performance compared to native Linux. But for a Plex/Kodi server a VM should be great.
(On an x86 Apple laptop I found the power consumption better with a Linux VM on MacOS than with native Linux, so VMs can be quite efficient for some uses. Software builds sometimes run much faster in a Linux VM inside MacOS than natively in MacOS. On the other hand, I found Qemu inside a Linux VM for Android development was extremely slow.)
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/112277289414246878
https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
maybe m4 will come soon.
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Mount-Under-Black-BK-MABM/dp/...
apple wanna 'show it off'
The only reason they might not is that they want to keep everything across the entire line, and the highest end Mac Studio probably needs more power than USB can offer.
The internal power supplies in Mac minis have been extremely reliable and the fewer cables the better, in my opinion.
That gives a lot more options IMHO on how to handle power for this machine, including portability, even if it's supposed to be a desktop machine.
I thought the same for the minisforum machines which would be competitive to this, they have a 19V input that really should be USB-C at this point.
The thing is, M chips run so efficiently that even with the power loss from conversion, it’s still pulling less power than a lot of PCs.
But yeah it running on a sleek dc battery would be a lot cooler
https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/6/b/csm_...
Also just connecting the mini pc to a monitor with PD and not using any extra power brick at all seems like the much more relevant comparison.
The vast majority of people who will buy this will be just fine with that level of performance for many years to come.
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.
Apple knows how to make money, I can buy a quality 4TB Nvme for 300$( you can definitely go lower if you want to risk it ). The upgrade to 4TB on the M4 Pro Mini is 1200$(it's not supported on the base model) , on top of 1400$ for the actual computer.
It I had to guess, most of Apple's margin is on users riding the pricing ladder up into the stratosphere.
I had an experience a few years ago at an Apple store, where this clerk refuse to sell me the cheapest m1 MacBook Air. There's probably some direction from up top which is trying convince people they need the more expensive Macs.
All Macs that I know of let you configure the boot drive. I had an older Mac Mini with a spinning HDD. I added an external SSD, set that up as the boot drive, and never touched the slow drive again. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't do the same with this.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...
If it does, you can get the SSD chips replaced. That is well proven now. Granted it needs a specialist with rework kit but they are starting to become more common now that it's an issue.
The memory chip is embedded in the SoC, how do you envision a way to do replacement of memory chips with this design/architecture?
0: https://www.chongdiantou.com/archives/73084.html
https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra...
Even if Apple wanted to support modular memory, which they obviously don't, the ultra-tiny form factor of the new Mini would probably still rule it out though. Soldering the memory down is still more compact.
It's basically a 12 year old PC shrunk into a tiny box and low power budget.
My point is that this size of device is already available with upgradability so the form factor isn't the issue. Apple is significantly better at engineering products than these random companies and they could surely have made this new Mac Mini upgradeable. I do understand why they wouldn't want to though!
That N100 is an Intel Atom, quite a bit of a downgrade from the M4 with the fastest CPU cores out there.
The pin density on a bga memory is like, 0.3mm for the type typically used by apple. That’s 200 0.3mm pins that have to line up and work at 4GHz and survive you dropping it 5 feet.
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-sockets/
Not something that’s going in a tiny laptop chassis.
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.
Yeah, just take a look at PCIe 5 and it's 512GB/s of bandwidth.
-> Have you installed a server CPU?
Yeah, and none of the problems you mentioned.
-> That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have.
Yeah, just look at the older macs with upgradable components and the easyness you had replacing them... So, instead of making it easier, let's just remove it altogether.
Or you could get a m3 max, run the memory at twice the speed, still have a 512 bit wide memory bus, and have a 10+ hour battery life. Presumably similar with the m4 max, rumors claim later today (Wednesday).
How much do you want that socket?
I wish Apple devices were more upgradable (and cheaper and more fixable), but I would speculate that Apple devices are the last devices to end up in a landfill (or more aptly, recycled). If you outgrow a device there is a very robust resale market and that machine will happily fill someone else's needs.
Apple devices seem to stay in use for an eternity.
I actually think Apple's way of managing upgrades isn't as harsh as many people think.
The first thing to get to sustainability is to use less. If you don't need the hardware to make hardware easily upgradable, you simplify the hardware and use less of it. This is one of the reasons Apple do it.
Secondly, they're using a lot of recycled material in this thing. Their lede line on it is that its carbon neutral. Show me another desktop PC like this that can make that claim.
Thirdly, the "half-life" of a Mac is kind of insane. When I was buying Thinkpads, Dells, and the like, I'd get 2-3 years down the line and I'd "need" to upgrade the whole thing. I've got a 2017 Mac Mini, and an 2015 MBP in regular use. I have a G4 iBook that was in active use by my parents from 2004 until _this Spring_ - they only gave it up because they couldn't upgrade Chrome on it any more, so it's about to become a retro Linux term for me, because the hardware is still sound (albeit too under-powered for anything modern).
And lastly, they take old hardware in and recycle it back into the new stuff in the first step. They give relatively decent trade-in prices, and are one of the few consumer brands doing that.
Given that they're shipping it with 16GB of RAM, which is fine for my needs, I think I'm confident in saying I could buy one, use it for 5-8 years, and then get it recycled when I upgrade at that point, while most PCs with upgradable RAM being sold today are going to landfill within 4 years, perhaps.
You are a liar but a bad one.
You can like Macs, you can prefer it, you can rationalise the added cost any way you want. But the fact is, Macs do not have any more useful life than PCs if your price matches them. You play the role of the typical Apple fanboy who compares a 1.5k MacBook to a random crappy Lenovo that was on sale for less than 500. The Mac is better/longer lasting. It's almost as if price convey some sort of information on quality...
[1] enclosure: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BB74BQVN/
[2] drive: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B7CQ2CHH/
https://www.unitek-products.com/products/solidforce-reefer-p...
The SSD:
https://www.crucial.com/ssd/t500/CT2000T500SSD5?_gl=1*1g4r3l...
[1] enclosure: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BB74BQVN/
[2] drive: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B7CQ2CHH/
The disk I put in there is a SK Hynix Gold P31 2TB, I am not getting its full speed with this enclosure so you can probably get a slower one and get the same results.
It's always been a slightly clunky experience - having to eject them before I can undock my laptop, or the way they never go to sleep (some issue with CalDigit TB dock...?)
I used to think of them as a backup, but since moving house a couple of years ago my internet is fast enough to make Backblaze viable
Next time I upgrade I'm just going to have less boxes on the desk, less power-drawing crap plugged in all the time
I hate the price of 8TB storage on these though :(
Apples have been improving repairability, their laptops have many replaceable parts, and generally last longer than PCs.
Compare new price / used for 4 years old price on apple vs any PC. In my experience used apples age well, are reliable, still get years of OS updates, and general age better than PCs.
and it even got the newest apple intelligence update for MacOS, which is nice
My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value.
Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the Pro model.
Linux GeForce Now can only do 720p or 1080p, can't remember which. Also, it's just kind of laggy in desktop mode. The Macs run so much smoother.
My current "main" desktop is actually my Asus ROG Ally. I use one USB C hub that is capable of 4k120hz, and I can move it between my Mac laptops and Asus ROG Ally very seamlessly.
The problem for me is Windows. Yesterday my start menu stopped loading for some reason and required a full reboot. Sometimes it refuses to go to sleep. Sometimes it refuses to come out of sleep. Sometimes a Windows update kicks off in the middle of a game and it slows everything to a crawl. Windows drives me crazy these days!
Neither MacOS nor Windows are very good console OSes - you're really better off using Linux where anticheat isn't concerned. Even on the Ally.
They're great OSes for consumers who don't really work on their computers, and just want something that caters to the lowest common denominator.
For professionals who use computers for work, Linux is really the only option that doesn't eventually get in your way. You can set it up and leave it as-is, with only security updates, and everything keeps working the same way, basically forever.
I've tried to set up an experience like that on both macOS and Windows, but eventually, the company will find a way of forcing an update on your, intentionally or not.
I really hope you're not expecting anyone to take you seriously with this. On principle I get what you're saying but in practice no one who works as a professional in any field has the time (or expertise) to be worried about configuring their operating system.
As a Linux evangelist who begrudgingly daily drives a Mac, this kind of attitude is what does us in. It's the cocksure "akshually Linux is best" even when it materially, experientially, just isn't.
Denial is not a design ethos.
1. Requires Windows Pro or Apple Developer license to unlock full featureset
2. Cannot reasonably disable targeted advertising or ad data collection from either OS
3. Neither come with package managers and do not respect third-party packaging either
4. Can be "managed" insofar as your buggy CPM software allows, often glitched by the OS itself
5. The experience is always getting worse since Apple and Microsoft share a united front of making people spend as much money on useless shit as humanly possible
Now, that's not to say nobody should use these OSes - certainly people are locked into them for some purposes. But as a programmer it's genuinely hard for me to be productive on these OSes because I end up fighting them just for everyday, non-programming purposes.
I think it's entirely possible that MacOS and Windows can be inherently terrible experiences while also being mandatory for certain workflows.
1. An Apple Developer license is only required for distributing software in App Stores and notarizing.
2. I'm not sure what ads you're talking about in macOS. I've only ever seen them in the completely optional App Store.
3. Installing Homebrew is literally a one liner. I've never used it, but Macports appears to be similarly easy as an alternative.
4. I can't speak to this point, so I'll take your word for it.
5. I only started using macOS since the Apple Silicon era, but as far as I'm concerned the experience just keeps getting better and better. Every release of macOS has added features I enjoy and use constantly. Just the seamless integration between all of the Apple products in my house was worth switching from my previous mix of Windows, Linux, and Android.
Linux is best because it lets you use your computer for whatever workflow you need.
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 her machine if these protections didn't exist.
For power users that know what they're doing it is trivial to just use something like Homebrew or to bypass these protections on a case by case basis as needed. I can also run software in a Linux VM quite easily as well for open source software that isn't well maintained on macOS.
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.
Professionals should absolutely take it seriously because time spent updating Windows or even just waiting around while it gets its shit together is time you could have spent doing your job and making money. In fact, Windows and its spontaneous updates with obnoxious focus stealing prompts are major risks to the integrity of your work and might cause you to have to redo it from scratch, lowering the value of your time even further.
Linux boots in less than ten seconds and is already ready to use. There are distributions for all levels of expertise, and if there's an IT department it should be managing those boxes anyway. All that's missing is the Microsoft Office suite and in the end that's what the Windows vs Linux battle always boils down to. People put up with it because they just need muh Excel.
Even for non-Gaming use cases this idea is a bit dated. Printing is by far the best experience on Linux. The "tweaking" that you need to do, that every Windows/MacOS user claims, isn't really a thing these days - sans NVIDIA (I'm not sure what the current status is, but it was bjorked somewhat recently). Sure, if you want to go beyond what Windows/MacOS can offer then tweaking my be required, but the current UIs are extremely comprehensive.
I had a 80yr old lady up and running in one day with PopOS. If that's not lowest common denominator, I don't know what is.
Professional work can be hit and miss. Depends on how draconian your workplace software is.
At least it boots.
I purchase a Surface Pro 8 a year ago or something, thinking Windows would surely work better than usual when it is Microsoft's own hardware too.
But no, yesterday it got stuck in a boot loop, after a Windows update broke the audio drivers somehow. The Windows logs/reliability report can just tell me it "shut down abnormally" without any technical details what so ever.
I still have to use Windows on my desktop because of Ableton, but I'll never purchase any Microsoft hardware again, and as soon as I can, I'll run Ableton on Linux like the rest of my software.
As a developer really I can work on Linux or Windows or macos. Long as I'm getting paid. Tools in the toolbox.
Here's the exact model I have: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Ethernet-Delivery-Charg...
These Cable Matters ones work well, but need their firmware flashed. Luckily, it was extremely easy and worked great for me. Here's an Apple forum thread about it: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/dp-usb-c-thunderbolt-3-...
Here's the exact model I have: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Ethernet-Delivery-Charg...
Perennial truth since XP
Vista was okay after hardware caught up and it got a few patches.
10 was a huge improvement over 8.x, but 11 has had a lot of bugginess for me, particularly related to the new Start menu.
Edit: I am silly. Of course, people mean hooking it up to a bigger screen.
(Apologies if this seems like a stupid question. I've not played games for a very long time, mainly because most stuff doesn't seem to be available on Macs).
You can't do x86/x64 Windows on M-series Macs without emulation and it is generally a poor experience. There's a few things like Crossover, Parallels, etc that can help you run Windows games.
But I have found that most of the games I care about are either Mac native or on GeForce Now at this point. There's a surprisingly large game catalog on Mac now.
So the short answer is that some of them run on some sort of Windows compatibility layer, some are Mac native, some I stream. But most of my favorites run native on Mac.
To be honest, there are so many games to play these days that I don't mind missing out on a few titles. Valorant is a good example of a game that I can't play on Mac, GFN, or Crossover. But it's OK, I still have CS2.
Can you elaborate? Thinking of setting up a MacMini for my kids but worried about lack of gaming options for them (I haven't gamed on a Mac in a dozen years and the state of gaming on MacOS was sad back then).
nvidias cloud gaming offering. it works pretty well
The free tier is mostly crap (you only get to play if no paid users are using the capacity pretty much), but the paid tiers go from good to excellent.
Its main selling point is that you don't need to buy games for it separately, you can use your existing Steam catalog for example.
Here's a list of my most played games on my Mac in the last couple of years:
WoW, Hearthstone, Dota 2, League of Legends, Thronefall, Vampire Survivors, Baldur's Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Balatro, Death Must Die, Terraria, Dave the Diver, Mechabellum, Space Haven, Hades 2, Peglin, Stellaris, RimWorld, Dead Cells, Total War: Warhammer 2, Valheim, Civilization 6, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve Together, Cities: Skylines, Oxygen Not Included, SUPERHOT.
Games I play through GeForce Now:
Fortnite, Diablo 4, WoW, Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077
The point of such an annoying long comment is to demonstrate that there is a very substantial Mac gaming library. The problem is that a new shiny game comes out that doesn't support Mac and you don't want to be the ONE guy in your group who can't play it because you're on Mac. The latest one for me is Deadlock. Not on GeForce Now, not on console, not on Mac... so I needed to get a Windows PC.
But if you're a kid and just looking for a general gaming machine, it plays a ton of cool stuff.
I noticed the other comments mentioned GeForceNow over _ethernet_. What connection speeds do you typically need to play these games over GeforceNow or similar.
I was just looking at a mac book air yesterday but I just can't get over the complete ripoff of a memory upgrade from the base model.
16 gig starting at $599. I honestly don't need to know anything else to buy one.
(The only thing I do often that's CPU-limited is compiling, being faster at that saves me maybe a few minutes in a full working day; I don't care. I am frequently limited by RAM and I really hate shuffling things around to make space on drives.)
Would have been nice to have audio both in the front and rear, with front audio overriding rear audio (like in most desktops), but I guess that would have been too much maximalism for apple
Edit: also I noticed they moved the power button to the bottom corner of the Mac Mini! (It used to be on the back as well.) This makes me think even more that they didn't want to crowd up the back too much.
But yeah, anyone "serious" would go discrete for all that stuff regardless. I guess this also lets Apple sidestep a bunch of fuss around non-stereo use-cases, for people who want quadraphonic or 5.1 at their workstation.
You may still need an amp for electrically incompatible (high impedance) headphones.
And to further muddy the waters, the space in the 7 chassis for the jack was mostly still available, which led to that one madlad bodging in his own headphone jack, for a one of a kind iPhone 7:
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/07/bringing-back-the-iphone7-he...
But yeah the headphone jack dropping was obviously just to get more people onboard with AirPods that launched at the same time. And you can't say it didn't work! I remember when the first images of people wearing AirPods came out and it was the laughing stock of the internet. People said it looked like you had Q-tips hanging out of your ears, or the tips of an electric toothbrush.
A few years later and they're pulling in tens of billions of dollars per year, just on AirPods sales alone. AirPods could be pulled out into its own business and it would be seen as a wildly successful tech company.
i'd guess.
if you use headphones all the time, you'd plug them into the back, or the monitor etc.
I’m inclined to trust Apple with this information but the skeptical side of me is questioning, how can we fact check this data? If it’s true it is very cool.
But ultimately its down to the third-party auditors they hire.
"According to the World Gold Council, recycled gold accounted for 28 percent of the total global gold supply of 4,633 metric tons in 2020; 90 percent of that recycled gold comes from discarded jewelry and the rest from a growing mountain of electronic waste such as cellphones and laptops."
It's not entirely unreasonable to ask companies to be responsible for carbon capture or in the short term an offset for their employees breathing on the clock, as funny as that sounds.
We need to take all sources of carbon emissions seriously. This shouldn't be downvoted.
Unless you think their employees breathe more when they are on the clock than off it, I'm not sure this makes sense. When they're off the clock, they might be exercising or playing with their kids, so perhaps they actually breathe less when sitting at their desks on the clock.
Like someone else said, spending is a very good proxy for CO2 emissions, and about 68% of all spending is "consumer spending", which basically means keeping people alive, somewhat happy and somewhat productive.
The fine print says:
> Carbon reductions are calculated against a business-as-usual baseline scenario: No use of clean electricity for manufacturing or product use, beyond what is already available on the latest modeled grid; Apple’s carbon intensity of key materials as of 2015; and Apple’s average mix of transportation modes by product line across three years. Learn more at apple.com/2030.
https://www.apple.com/2030 which mostly seems to focus on the goal of being 100% carbon neutral in energy use.
It sounds like they're generally only looking at carbon emissions from _energy_ use in transportation and manufacturing, and they're probably using some sort of carbon offset to achieve that "net zero". They're probably also not counting carbon emissions from building construction and they're probably not counting carbon emissions from meat served at corporate events, etc.
Update: I found a breakdown for the Mac Mini (linked from the apple.com/2030 page).
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_...
> 100 percent of manufacturing electricity is sourced from renewable energy
> For Mac mini, we are matching 100 percent of expected customer product use electricity with electricity from low-carbon sources.
They are counting transportation in the "100 percent", but are offsetting it with carbon credits.
Last time I bought a Mac Mini was before the 2018 model got introduced, and I almost took it back in to get it exchanged (I was within 30 days of purchase when the 2018 model dropped), but it's been plugging away doing everything I have asked of it for 6 years, and it's still going strong. All the upgrades since have left me a little cool, but this genuinely looks like a contender for an upgrade. Only thing stopping me from getting the credit card ready is waiting to see what the M4 MacBook Air - which is inevitably going to be announced in the next 72 hours - looks like in comparison.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/28/apple-promises-two-more...
Back ports: 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports (Thunderbolt 5 on the top $1399 tier), HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet
RAM can be upgraded to 32GB on M4, to 64GB on M4 Pro
10 GbE looks selectable on any of these, +$100
This is such an Apple stat especially for a game. What does "faster gaming performance" even mean? Every zone and city hub loads 13.3x faster so loading screens are quicker? They don't say anything about FPS and no one would use "faster" as a synonym for higher FPS.
An MMO is really not the best benchmark tbh
Edit: notes has the compared spec "Results are compared to previous-generation 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7-based Mac mini systems with Intel Iris UHD Graphics 630, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD."
So they compared the 2024 M4 to a 2018 8th gen Intel i7 (i7-8700B). Take that as you will
https://youtu.be/eaB7nCdId0Y?t=364
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/28/24281965/honestly-this-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
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).
For example: https://support.benchmarks.ul.com/support/solutions/articles...
The mini seems like the perfect thing to have a mini version and a ... creative design, bring back the trash can!