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>Number one — and this is a big one these days, especially for this product — is that it’s not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, includin
by dTal 8y ago
>Number one — and this is a big one these days, especially for this product — is that it’s not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports. If the previous one served a role for you, the new one can probably do it just as well, and probably better and faster, with minimal donglage.
Wow. This is what it's come to. "It hasn't gotten worse! Yayy!"
- lucideer 8y ago> "Unless you used optical audio, audio input, or the SD-card reader" Craftily hidden in a footnote for that paragraph.
- someguydave 8y agoI use optical audio in a mac mini as a home theater TV driver. No thanks.
- someguydave 8y agoNow that I think about it, axing the optical audio ports was probably a deliberate move by Apple to nudge home TV users of mac minis into using Apple TVs, where they have way more control over the interface and content. edit: apparently Apple TV doesn't have optical audio either.
- nsnick 8y agoThe AppleTV doesn't have optical audio either.
- someguydave 8y agoOk well I guess that's even dumber than I thought. I hope apple takes that $2 per device savings in optical audio parts laughing to the bank.
- bluegreyred 8y agoDon't judge, maybe the next version of the mac mini will be waterproof!
- someguydave 8y agolol
- berberous 8y agoI doubt it -- the number of users who use a Mac Mini as an entertainment center is probably so small Apple barely thinks about them. More likely is that HDMI has superseded the optical audio port for most users, so they save money by removing a port few use these days.
- saxonww 8y agoIt's still a little weird. I think a lot of people would have a separate A/V receiver and speakers; maybe this is changing as old equipment gets replaced, but I suspect there are still far more homes with optical-capable A/V receivers than HDMI-capable ones. This is just a standard annoying thing with Apple though. Their designs are very 'forward looking' in that they don't consider what potential customers already have so much as they do what their own future peripherals are going to need.
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoAt this point HDMI is not a particularly new thing; my Marantz receiver from ~2007 had HDMI connections on it. Audio-only digital connections aren't necessarily going the way of the dodo yet, but they're becoming progressively more niche. So are home theater PCs, of course. Anecdotally: I do have a Mac mini with my receiver, which I replaced this year. But the new receiver not only has USB input, it has wifi and built-in clients for Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, TuneIn, Roon, whatever protocol Windows uses for media sharing whose name I'm utterly blanking on right now, and a dozen or so other services, with Apple Airplay 2 theoretically coming in an update.
- throwaway9d0291 8y agoThese days optical audio is dying when it comes to home theater systems, primarily due to its lack of codec support. You can't passthrough DTS-HD over optical, you can over HDMI.
- kalleboo 8y agoI used to use optical audio but it was superseded by HDMI for home theater and USB for hifi. edit: I'd be curious to see what people are using optical for today (I'm under the impression audio pros mainly use USB interfaces as well)
- silversmith 8y agoI bought a soundbar for my TV a couple months ago. Recent Samsung model. Has optical. I beleive the only other option was 3.5mm jack.
- kalleboo 8y agoInteresting. I bought a pretty cheap soundbar this year (from Yamaha) and I think it had optical as an option (along with 3.5mm and Bluetooth) but the main interface was HDMI-ARC. And it works great over ARC! The TV remote's volume buttons get passed through automatically, and it turns itself off and on along with the TV. I don't even know where the soundbar's own remote is anymore.
- mikestew 8y agoShockingly, I need optical for a $300 set of gaming headphones I purchased within the last year (Astro A50). Maybe it’s the only way they can do pass through, dunno.
- kalleboo 8y agoNever would have guessed that for headphones! I guess they have some kind of a dock?
- rsync 8y agoIsn't that little headphone port a combo optical/electrical port that you can plug either headphones or mini-toslink-whatever into ? Isn't that what it was before ? I swear I had previous mac minis with a combo port like that ... why would they not continue that ?
- someguydave 8y agoYes that is precisely the thing that used to be in all macs that they discontinued
- dTal 8y agoI missed that! So not only is 'not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports' a shockingly low bar, it's also what might charitably be termed 'rather a bit of a fib'.
- artursapek 8y agoMarco gotta keep those free gifts from Apple coming in
- scarface74 8y agoYou obviously haven’t seen Marco complain about the MacBook, Apple Watch, the existing Mac Pro, the 2014 Mac Mini upgrade, etc. Marco made a few million when Tumblr was sold, has a profitable podcast app and is on either the most popular or second most popular Apple related podcast. I doubt that he’s hurting so much for money that he has to lie to get a loaner Mac Mini.
- djsumdog 8y agoIt also doesn't look like it has a DisplayPort. If I wanted to hook it into my KVM, I'd need a USB-C to display port dongle.
- jdboyd 8y agoWith the old one, you would probably need a mini DP to DP dongle anyway (I did for my displayport KVM on my 2012 Mini), so this isn't really worse, but it might mean you now need a different dongle.
- pkamb 8y agoI'm really hoping there's a good/reliable solution for 30" Apple Cinema Display > Dual Link DVI > Mini Display Port > [INSERT PRODUCT HERE] > USB-C
- dwaite 8y agoFrom what I've heard, you'll want a USB-C to DisplayPort+USB-A adapter, and an Active DVI (with dual link) to DisplayPort adapter.
- stinky613 8y agoIt has four Thunderbolt 3 connectors. Thunderbolt 3 features DisplayPort 1.2
- asveikau 8y agoThey probably figured that people who want these are acceptably served by USB.
- jdboyd 8y agoYeah. For SD cards in particular, having the reader slot on the back has always made it useless for me.
- skykooler 8y agoThe SD card reader was the first thing to break as well. And the cost of replacing it was way more than a SD > USB dongle.
- hahamrfunnyguy 8y agoHa. I completely forgot about the SD card reader. Probably because I plugged it in and never looked at the back again. Having an SD card reader on the back of a device just isn't practical. I've just been using a USB hub with an external reader.
- asveikau 8y agoExternal card readers are more flexible. You can get more options with multiple slots, or card sizes, or whatever. Similarly with audio... I don't know if this is true with Macs too, but on PC laptops I've often found the mic quality sucks or has interference, and I started using USB inputs.
- realradicalwash 8y agoThe quote is a bit out of context. The sentence right above it: >It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age. So, no, it's not "yayy" because it "hasn't gotten worse", it's "yayy", because "[it makes] almost everything better".
- drcongo 8y agoAnyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these.
- wlesieutre 8y agoI don't dislike the touchbar, I'm just annoyed at having to pay so much for something I'm ambivalent about.
- sigzero 8y agoExactly!
- rorykoehler 8y agoI don't understand why it isn't just an option. If you want it give you can pay for it.
- bunderbunder 8y agoProbably because it can't be made to be "just an option". Having seen teardowns of a MacBook, I'm pretty sure that one without a touchbar would be more-or-less a completely different computer - different keyboard, yes. To accomplish that, though, you'd need to also make a different housing to accommodate it, and a different motherboard, too, because this stuff's all soldered together as a single unit these days. And for all that, people would still be griping about the keyboard and the monoport.
- 8y ago
- Mindwipe 8y agoAnd it has got a bit worse. Just not as worse as we'd expect from Apple.
- ap3 8y agoWorse how? There are a couple of directions you can go in, just curious (price/storage)?
- TomVDB 8y agoProbably price. $800 is pretty steep for the entry version, when you can buy a better equipped Lenonvo ThinkCentre for $200 less.
- briandear 8y agoDoes that Lenovo have Mac OS?
- TomVDB 8y agoObviously it does not. And that's a pity. Whether or not that justifies a more than $200 difference is up to whoever wants to use it.
- reaperducer 8y agoA Lenovo ThinkCentre is like 10x bigger than a Mac Mini. I wouldn't want one of those sitting in my living room. And my wife would absolutely forbid it. The only real competition I see for the Mac Mini is the little computers from System76. But they're about the same price.
- TomVDB 8y agoMy Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q is almost identical in size to my old (very) Mac Mini.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- giarc 8y agoI believe there was speculation they would stop the Mac Mini line altogether, so perhaps it's more of a comment on the fact that they built a new one.
- tcfunk 8y agoI would phrase it more like "Yay it has made improvements without compromises"
- oarsinsync 8y agoAlternatively, lower down the article: > I Can’t Believe The Mac Mini Is This Awesome, I Can’t Even Say “Again” Because It Never Was Sounds like his conclusion is that it's better than it used to be.
- chvid 8y agoThe MacMini is a near perfect computer in its category; only thing was it wasn't updated for years. Now it is.
- sintaxi 8y agoThe combination of price and absence of user upgradable M.2 SSD drives make this product un-viable in my opinion. The current price is fine if I could upgrade the drive later. Non-upgrade-able SSD would be acceptable if the price for larger drives was more reasonable. If SSD could be upgraded buying a i5/i7 would have offered amazing upgrade paths down the road. This machine misses the mark IMHO but not by much.
- Joeri 8y agoYou can upgrade the drive, externally through tb3. There will be tb3 enclosures that exactly match the mini’s size (historically there always have been) and it won’t even look weird. I did that on a previous mini (firewire). Having said that, I’m still going to get one with 512gb ssd, because I just want everything neatly in one box.
- exabrial 8y agoThat's a reasonable expectation from Apple these days. Their "War on Ports" and "War on Repairability" has gotten to groan inducing levels.
- hindsightbias 8y agoThis is going to best outcome as Moore's Law ends.
- yesenadam 8y agoI was doing some research a year ago or so on which Mac Mini to buy - currently using one from 2006 or so, which can't handle https sites mostly, but otherwise is great. Everything I read said to get the 2012 model, not the 2014 one, which was slower, less memory, less everything - way worse. So the last one before this new one definitely did get a lot worse.
- scarface74 8y agoI have a 2006 Mac Mini that refuses to die. I ended up putting Windows 7 on it and giving it to my mom. She still uses it as a secondary computer when she is tutoring.