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I really REALLY wish they'd do something with the Mac Mini. Give it a massive spec bump and drive the price down like they do (sort of) with the iPad and it'd
by PuffinBlue 8y ago
I really REALLY wish they'd do something with the Mac Mini.
Give it a massive spec bump and drive the price down like they do (sort of) with the iPad and it'd be a great device to pick up.
Such a small form factor with good specs - it's like a NUC but with MacOS. It'd be great.
- maxsilver 8y agoIt's doubly frustrating, because Intel does basically all the work for them (even designing some of their NUCs to match a Mac Mini size and power/thermal limits). Apple could just ride the Intel product roadmap each year, with very little effort, and people would be happy enough. But Apple can't be bothered to do even that. --- In comparison, Intel basically made a "Mac Mini Pro" called the Hades Canyon NUC. Which is roughly the same price as a high-end Mac Mini, but has 2x-6x the compute power (depending on how you'd like to measure it). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/kits/nuc8i7hvk.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
- PuffinBlue 8y agoThe Skull Canyon NUC is exactly what I'm thinking of. A MacOS version of that would be really great and like you say, seems fairly 'easy' for Apple to do seeing as Intel is doing so much with the form factor anyway.
- slantyyz 8y agoFWIW, the refresh of the Skull Canyon, aka "Hades Canyon" is even more impressive than its predecessor.
- maxsilver 8y agoThanks, that is the unit I intended to mention above (the one with the integrated AMD GPU), but I mixed up the name. Corrected it above.
- PuffinBlue 8y agoDidn't realise that there was a refresh, I'll take a look.
- anthonybullard 8y agoI just recently bought a Hades Canyon specifically because Apple doesn't upgrade the Mac mini, won't drop the price, and made it less user-serviceable. I would have dropped the cash on a Mac mini if it had the Kaby Lake G and could at least be upgraded to 32GB of ram. But instead Intel got my $1k. It's a shame, since now I'm back on Ubuntu and probably won't look back. I can use my wife's MBA to compile and distribute my iOS apps when I need to.
- yborg 8y agoIt sounds like a dremel tool when the fans are spun up, which will be often. Where Apple excels is at system design, the Mini has a good balance between cooling capacity and noise. One of the reasons I bought the Mini was it's near-silence during typical desktop loads. Even when it's doing a build, the fan noise is lower-frequency and less annoying than the whine of the tiny fans in most of these NUCs.
- anthonybullard 8y agoI've never really heard the fan at all, a light wooshing occasionally during compilation. I often have 20-30 tabs open on chrome, vs code, Android studio, gimp, an Android emulator, four or five terminals, a BEAM VM, a redis instance, postgres, and sometimes a node server. This is with Ubuntu 18.04 with Gnome. Only thing I could think is driver support for the Vega M graphics hasn't landed yet so I only have a basic graphics driver - I guess I'll see when kernel 4.18 comes out.
- acqq 8y agoDraws 100 W, not comparable to any Mac Mini. More to a “Midi.” But it is ugly.
- maxsilver 8y agoIntel NUCs comparable to the Mac Mini only draw 15W to 30W (depending on the model), similar to a Mac Mini. See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits... for examples. The super high end NUC, the "Mac Mini Pro" comparable model mentioned above is a specialty unit with its 100W draw.
- vel0city 8y agoA regular Mac Mini draws 85 watts. What's 15W between friends? https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
- petecox 8y ago> But it is ugly Isn't that just the case? Intel sell the NUC in a couple of variants, the "kit", with an 'ugly' case or the "board". With the latter they could design a beautiful Apple-looking case around it.
- Theodores 8y agoThe jaggies on the product page image hurt my eyes. Excellent computer though, can also be VESA mounted to the back of a monitor, something that you would never be able to do with an Apple product. Also very easy to open the box to put your RAM + M2 + SSD in, again something Apple would never make easy for you. Apart from the special Mac OS I don't see how Apple could really improve on this type of product in a functionally useful way. Making it fiddly to upgrade and slapping an Apple logo on it would please the devoted but isn't really improving it.
- major505 8y agoI used to think the mac mini was a better alternative when you could upgrade its memory. Now I think is better wait for the next generation. I'm really thinking in buying an mac for home use, and remote compiling with xamarin in the next year or so. But it will depend of this next generation.
- oldcynic 8y agoA Mini would be useful here right now. No way I'm buying effectively a 5 year old machine with soldered RAM. Especially when I see what Intel are offering. Which means they're way overpriced second hand on eBay too. There's something too ironic about Intel being the value for money option. A refresh of Mini will no doubt have soldered RAM and SSD making it even less appealing. So for now I stick with my '15 Mac Book Pro, not giving Apple money I'd otherwise be happy to spend.
- nicolaslem 8y agoI still use my late-2012 mac mini for Lightroom. I upgraded it with a fast SSD and bumped the RAM to 16 GB which makes it a great 2018 machine. I believe the latest revisions of the mac mini are not as serviceable though.