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I can't understand why Apple doesn't make a fanless Mini. There's a respectable market for fanless NUCs, and the original Mini was a great machine. Plus, it's a
by nextos 8y ago
I can't understand why Apple doesn't make a fanless Mini. There's a respectable market for fanless NUCs, and the original Mini was a great machine. Plus, it's a cheap entry level to the Apple ecosystem.
- jimmies 8y agoRecently I have been contemplating getting an Apple machine at home just for Keynote, Pages, iMovie, Counter-Strike, iMessage/Facetime (and Photoshop, perhaps?), which I don't get on my low-powered Linux laptop. I've been using a Hackintosh-on-KVM kinda solution and it works OK for the most part even with my dedicated GPU, but not ideal and I'd be happy to convert to the light side to enjoy seamless upgrades and stuff. I don't want to shell out like $1200 for a dumb macbook that I don't use, but I would be happy to shell out $500 for a Keynote machine. For me, Keynote/Pages are the killer apps that only macOS has. iMessage/FT is the killer app that the Apple ecosystem has. Having a cheap entry to them is a great idea.
- mathnmusic 8y agoJust today, I quickly created a slideshow by writing markdown using Marp and loved the experience. I'm guessing this will become my new workflow for making slides. https://yhatt.github.io/marp/ https://yhatt.github.io/marp/
- jimmies 8y agoI've been a LaTEX/Markdown person for years before converting to Powerpoint/Keynote. If you want your slides to be minimal and clean and you don't have a lot of time to do, then Markdown works. To me, over time I am convinced that having the ability to do animations to explain technical ideas is great. While it's not impossible to do fly in/out/moving animations in LaTEX, presentation software makes it ten times easier to maintain. I think that not everything is best explained in code. Sometimes you need pictures/animations to convey the ideas.
- mathnmusic 8y ago> animations to explain highly technical ideas Do you have an example slide? Just trying to understand what you mean.
- jimmies 8y agoYeah, this illustration is what can be done in PPT in 5 minutes to explain how adding more layers/data can filter noise from signal, when I don't think it will take 5 minutes for me to write a LaTEX code that does the same. That's not counting Powerpoint does allow me to draw lines and stuff easily on a canvas. If I want to do it in LaTEX, I probably will need to draw that diagram on a separate program and import it back. https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen Sorry, the slide is clipped for some reason, but that's because I don't know how to configure OBS. It's not the best illustration ever, but you probably get the idea. Here is an animation that isn't mine and I think it's really well done to explain a hard idea (not necessarily in PPT): https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?t=123 https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?t=123
- blt 8y agoI agree. I've given talks on pretty math-heavy ideas but they can still usually be explained visually in a way that is significantly easier to understand without losing fidelity. I love LaTeX and Beamer for pure text/math, but once you want animated slides, or even including videos/gifs, PDF gets flaky fast. Keynote and PPT are pretty powerful tools. (also, the 8-bit guy is great!)
- sorenjan 8y agoSteven Wittens have written about this and his MathBox^2. I've never used it, and from the examples it looks like it might be too much work for most presentations to be worth it, but the examples are pretty impressive. http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/ http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/ https://gitgud.io/unconed/mathbox https://gitgud.io/unconed/mathbox
- 8y ago
- walshemj 8y agoGet a second hand mac mini and maybe upgrade it with a ssd
- cJ0th 8y ago> and maybe upgrade it with a ssd ... which can be quite an adventure if you get the latest generation & don't do this kind of stuff on a regular basis. You basically have to disassemble the whole machine!
- greglindahl 8y ago... and it's laptop parts inside. Fun times for those of us who are used to desktop / server parts.
- duggan 8y agoIf you can dismantle and replace desktop and server components, a few size and configuration differences shouldn’t pose a challenge. Not much more than an expensive LEGO project, but with significantly fewer parts and usually more available documentation!
- greglindahl 8y agoI found it to be a challenge, which is why I made the comment. Great that you had no problem.
- duggan 8y agoIn retrospect, that sounded sassier than I intended, mea culpa.
- walshemj 8y agoah I was thinking about the older gen ones which are more upgradeable
- randomsearch 8y agoJust my 2c, as someone who went Windows - Linux - OS X - but: completely agree on Keynote. It has the best UI of any software I’ve ever used. No kidding. Pages is good, useable, nice, but not worth buying a Mac for.
- extra88 8y agoMaybe an iPad with a keyboard would work for you, all those Apple apps exist on it too.
- jimmies 8y agoThey exist but they are quite limited. Even installing fonts on iOS seems like a hack, so I can't imagine doing advanced stuff such as inserting videos into a presentation being easy on it.
- extra88 8y agoI would expect inserting videos to be much easier than fonts because they live in the camera roll which has one of the most used APIs.
- saagarjha 8y agoThere's Keynote on iCloud, if that satisfies your needs…
- modzu 8y agoyes i do think that is imminent; we were still chasing Ghz until pretty recently, but now power requirements are dropping enough that we can get, for example, 24h 4k decoding passively
- ovao 8y ago"Cheap" and "entry-level" are two terms Apple is particularly unfond of, however. The reason why the Mac mini is no longer being updated may be because it's simply too cheap.
- scarface74 8y agoThe $329 iPad is pretty nice. It’s cheap and fairly powerful.
- Retric 8y agoThat's still 4x the price of many tablets. Which gives Apple room for high quality and a healthy profit margins.
- awat 8y agoTruth and the fact that Apple seems to be one of the diminishing number of manufactures still making/upgrading new tablet models.
- moolcool 8y ago4x the price of some vastly inferior tablets. Don't get me wrong, the margin is still high, but the entry level iPad is well above the specs and build of the Kindle Fire
- Baeocystin 8y agoThe screen is also a regression from the iPad Air 2. The 10" Pro wasn't enough better, so they instead chose to weaken their non-pro line. Modern Apple in a nutshell, really.
- npunt 8y agoPlease. They lowered the price from $499 for iPad Air 2 w/16gb to $329 for iPad w/32gb. The change in 2017 was to bifurcate the line, targeting general market use and schools with the regular iPad, and creative professionals and higher end market with the pro line. The iPad Air 2 didn't fit that strategy, and schools couldn't afford the $499 entry point of iPads and were going with Chromebooks. Re: screens, students are really rough on equipment, and laminated screens like those in iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro are quite expensive to replace. The iPad has the glass/digitizer separated from the screen which lowers repair costs significantly.
- sgillen 8y agoMy guess is that the profit margin was too small to justify, and that furthermore they didn't want to cannibalize their own MacBook/iMac/whatever sales, since I am assuming all those have a much higher margin for apple compared to the mac mini.
- scarface74 8y agoI’m sure the $329 iPad cannibalizes the iPad Pro. I don’t think Apple cares enough about the Mac to worry about cannibalization.
- gowld 8y agoMac Mini is extremely expensive for the hardware you get. It's comparable in price and specs to a MacBook laptop minus display.
- bluedino 8y agoPeople would gladly pay a $100 premium for a NUC that officially supports OS X
- e12e 8y agoAnd legally supports os x. I'd probably have bought an os x license for testing/fun/development if I was allowed to run it directly or in a VM on any hardware I have access to. Sadly I can't, because I don't have any Apple computers.
- lbotos 8y agoI mean apple is primed right now to deliver the "phone dock to dumb terminal" dream. Get people to by the phones, pay for the cloud storage, and sell them a $900 "Smart Monitor" with bluetooth KB and trackpad.