3 ms·

What are your needs? Because the current Mini serves a lot of Pro needs with the crazy powerful I/O it has. With eGPUs in a fairly mature state, the Mac Mini

What are your needs? Because the current Mini serves a lot of Pro needs with the crazy powerful I/O it has. With eGPUs in a fairly mature state, the Mac Mini can serve pretty powerful video/graphics workloads.

whalesalad 7y ago
I have a slightly upgraded 2018 Macbook Pro right now that does most of my work really well. It has 32gb of RAM, an upgraded GPU and the i7-8750H chip. I want more cores, faster cores, and more thermal headroom. A Mac Mini would be a slight performance bump from where I am right now, but the ROI isn't really there. My workload varies, but I am a freelancer with 3-4 contracts at any given time which vary from wordpress sites or rails apps, vue apps, python apps, up to 'big data' processing pipelines. I usually have a handful of services running for any client, redis, es, postgres, mysql, etc... and the Docker/mac story needs work. I essentially don't want to ever wait on IO ever again. That is another reason I would like a full desktop chassis: I want PCIe slots so that I can outfit them with something like an Optane SSD. Attemping to spec out something that would perform better than my current MBP: 3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz) 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 Intel UHD Graphics 630 1TB SSD storage 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ‑45 connector) Same generation chip that I have now. Same core count. Higher boost clock. $2600 is the final price and that is certainly not worth it.
- askafriend 7y ago
  One thing you can consider -> the RAM costs are very high if you upgrade through Apple. You can spec out a Mac Mini with the lowest possible RAM and then do the RAM upgrade yourself to save $600. The whole process takes about 20mins and there's professional YouTube videos that take you every step of the way. This is exactly what I did and it was a breeze (I didn't have much prior experience messing with computer internals). It might look complicated, but it's really not. If you do go this route, I'd recommend OWC RAM since they're guaranteed to work with Mac and they also tell a little $7 toolkit that has the TORX screwdrivers you need to do the RAM upgrade -> https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMM18/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMM18/ Here's a video of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKyv0QP4XPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKyv0QP4XPQ

whalesalad 7y ago

I have a slightly upgraded 2018 Macbook Pro right now that does most of my work really well. It has 32gb of RAM, an upgraded GPU and the i7-8750H chip. I want more cores, faster cores, and more thermal headroom. A Mac Mini would be a slight performance bump from where I am right now, but the ROI isn't really there. My workload varies, but I am a freelancer with 3-4 contracts at any given time which vary from wordpress sites or rails apps, vue apps, python apps, up to 'big data' processing pipelines. I usually have a handful of services running for any client, redis, es, postgres, mysql, etc... and the Docker/mac story needs work. I essentially don't want to ever wait on IO ever again. That is another reason I would like a full desktop chassis: I want PCIe slots so that I can outfit them with something like an Optane SSD. Attemping to spec out something that would perform better than my current MBP: 3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz) 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 Intel UHD Graphics 630 1TB SSD storage 10 Gigabit Ethernet (Nbase-T Ethernet with support for 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb Ethernet using RJ‑45 connector) Same generation chip that I have now. Same core count. Higher boost clock. $2600 is the final price and that is certainly not worth it.

askafriend 7y ago
One thing you can consider -> the RAM costs are very high if you upgrade through Apple. You can spec out a Mac Mini with the lowest possible RAM and then do the RAM upgrade yourself to save $600. The whole process takes about 20mins and there's professional YouTube videos that take you every step of the way. This is exactly what I did and it was a breeze (I didn't have much prior experience messing with computer internals). It might look complicated, but it's really not. If you do go this route, I'd recommend OWC RAM since they're guaranteed to work with Mac and they also tell a little $7 toolkit that has the TORX screwdrivers you need to do the RAM upgrade -> https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMM18/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMM18/ Here's a video of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKyv0QP4XPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKyv0QP4XPQ