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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 nothin
by jsheard 2y ago
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.
- mentos 2y agoNo mention of the SSD size that was the reason I returned my Mac mini 256Gb last year was just a pain juggling files
- nordsieck 2y ago> No mention of the SSD size The base model is 256 gb. You can see it here: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
- wongarsu 2y agoBase model is 256GB configurable up to 2TB, all others start at 512GB, the M4 Pro model can go up to 8TB
- rtkwe 2y agoIt'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.
- wongarsu 2y agoThat'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
- angoragoats 2y agoAt least on the storage side, Apple's parts are neither more performant nor all that much more power-efficient than a standard, replaceable SSD.
- Y_Y 2y agoin the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency
- pantulis 2y agoEdit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.
- wtallis 2y agoI 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.
- jsheard 2y agoYeah, 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.
- wtallis 2y agoRight. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.
- rtkwe 2y agoI 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.
- angoragoats 2y ago> 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.
- rtkwe 2y agoI 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.
- FireBeyond 2y agoVery 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.
- sib 2y agoIt'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. [1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4EXP1MT08/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4EXP1MT08/ (15% off list price as of writing)
- jillesvangurp 2y agoYou 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.
- msh 2y agoThe big problem is that there are lots of stuff that macOS won’t let you move to a external drive, like iCloud Drive.
- avidphantasm 2y agoIt's a desktop. Use an external disk. Much cheaper.
- jsheard 2y agoIt 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.
- nordsieck 2y agoThere 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. For example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S47KBMC/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08S47KBMC/
- matthewrobertso 2y agoIt looks like the power button was moved to the bottom of the new Mac mini, maybe to make this experience worse.
- awiesenhofer 2y ago> clunky NVMe enclosure 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.
- burnerthrow008 2y agoIt’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.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoYou might be interested in this then - https://satechi.net/collections/ssd-enclosures https://satechi.net/collections/ssd-enclosures Upgrade your memory and connect it externally over USB-C. It works brilliantly
- mitjam 2y agoYes I have a Samsung T7 works like a charm.
- magnio 2y agoCouldn't we just add extra drives into the extra internal SSD slots? Or does Mac Mini not have those?
- jsheard 2y agoThere 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.
- mathnmusic 2y agoAFAIK, Apple took away those slots when Mac minis transitioned to Apple silicon. Attempts to replace SSD with re-soldering have not been successful.
- baq 2y agoSo not even milling off the ssd works now? 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.
- dagmx 2y agoYou can mill them off and replace them with supported nands. People have videos on YouTube but it’s not very accessible to do. 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.
- GeekyBear 2y agoYou 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.
- mmaunder 2y agoThat’s useful. The TB3 external 10 gig interfaces I’ve been using for my Mac get crazy hot.
- kridsdale3 2y agoAs 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.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> ... 10gbps is going to feel really really slow vs the internal stuff How do you love your internet speed compared to the internal stuff?
- GeekyBear 2y agoIt'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.
- fennecbutt 2y agoIdk idt over a GB/s transfer speed is bad, like 15m for 1TB? How often are we chucking a TB back and forth? Almost never. Hell if I'm dumping cards from my camera or moving models across the network that's like 64-128GB max.
- lawlessone 2y agoUnified memory too. It's your GPU and your ram.
- wing-_-nuts 2y agoThis 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
- talldayo 2y ago> 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.
- nextos 2y agoFor 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?
- angoragoats 2y agoThe 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.
- o_m 2y agoAlso the base ram for the pro chip is 24gb. I hope it will be the same for the MacBook Pro.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 2y agoI have a feeling this could simply be an outcome of samsung not offering anything smaller.
- jsheard 2y agoThe M4 iPad Pro still starts at 8GB though, so Samsung is supplying them with lower capacity modules.
- alberth 2y agoIt's not just RAM. 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.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoAt 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.
- Etheryte 2y agoLast 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?
- aldarisbm 2y agoYeah they have literature about this, they do as much as they can on device
- bee_rider 2y agoIt is possible that they do everything they can on the decide, but still have to do lots in the cloud, right? For some definition of lots, at least…
- Etheryte 2y agoI 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?
- yunohn 2y agoI 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.
- mostlysimilar 2y agoI 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.
- yunohn 2y agoI 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.
- mostlysimilar 2y agoThat's fair, it sounds like you've got a real problem. I'd be surprised of the majority of users experience that problem though.
- seec 2y agoNo, 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.
- superjan 2y agoThe 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.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIt performs the same. You don't get any extra ram channels for upgrading the capacity.
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoThis 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.