Implying Mac Minis haven’t looked like Apple TVs from the beginning?
Mac Mini (2005-2009):
Apple TV (1st gen, 2007):
Mac Mini (2010, first redesign after Apple TV came out):
With the 10G NIC upgrade, I would see some use in this if it ran Linux
You can get cheaper options with 10G nics in the same form factor
Would it be so hard to get dual power supplies and a rack mount?
It exists for the outgoing Mac mini. We ran two minis in a 1u, colocated in a DC, for years. They ran Ubuntu server.
Rack mini: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html
Mac Mini’s are cool, and I appreciate that Apple has some of the most experienced and talented designers in the world… But they put the power switch on the bottom. You have to lift it up and turn it over to turn it on and off.
The previous model has it in the back, you can’t even feel it properly because it’s not recessed.
On the other hand the last time I turned off my M1 mini was when we moved. It’s 100% silent and takes less power than a lightbulb when it sleeps, so why would I bother powering it off.
I’d just get two toothpicks and make a seesaw to press it, although I pretty much never turn off my computers so I still wouldn’t mind too much
Don’t worry, there will be suitable USB accessories, for just 99$.
The side with the power button is now the top. There is no ports or io on the bottom.
Is it meant to stay on forever once you set it up?
Remember these are the same engineers who put the Magic Mouse charging port on the bottom, making the mouse unusable while you charge it
People treat it like a mistake but not be able to use the mouse while it’s plugged in is the entire point of the design. Right or wrong the Apple designers thought a cord drag was a bad experience and designed to prevent it.
They probably looked at their target audience and realized there was a certain percentage of folks that would just leave the mouse on the cord 24/7 and wanted to prevent that.
They also know their target audience has plenty of people who gobble up every bad design decision and even defend it online years later.
People treat it like a mistake, but the Emperor has no clothes and people are catching on.
I don’t understand why this is so hard to understand. You’re supposed to stop using the mouse while it is charging, and use the mouse unplugged. That’s the purpose. It’s not a stupid decision, it just prevents some user’s preferred operation of using the mouse while it is charging
“it prevents some users’ preferred operation of using the mouse while its charging”
…
“It’s not a stupid decision”
It’s not a stupid decision, but a stubborn one.
I’m 100% OK with that; Apple is heavy on design aesthetics. If a user doesn’t like that, they can just use their own preferred mouse - wired or otherwise.
I used to buy Macs when I was a teenager and young adult, but finally grew tired of the “my way or the highway” approach to design.
Windows is guilty of this too, but it’s more subtle, but getting worse all the time with w11.
Linux has more of a “you break it, you buy it” approach to design lol
I’m the reverse. As I get older, all the things I used to consider deal breakers just don’t matter as much. I don’t really care about how upgradable or repairable the device is, I’m just gonna pay Apple for the upgrade and pay them again to fix it. Whenever I have to solve an issue on my gaming PC I get an inch closer to just throwing it out and buying whatever overpriced gaming laptop comes working out of the box.
whatever overpriced gaming laptop comes working out of the box.
Not an Apple one, for sure.
Honestly, the mouse charger screams marketing or management. Apple’s brand is partially form over function.
It was very likely a designers decision. It forces the use the use case they wanted; wireless mice should be used wirelessly. I would bet they fought marketing and management to get this on the final product.
Marketing would want the mouse they can advertise as being useable with and wireless. Female ports are easier to mount and manufacture with they have depth to set the socket. So a plug on the front is much cheaper and easier to manufacture.
The fact the charging cable doesn’t get used in motion means it will last longer and you wouldn’t have people useing fraying cables on the front of their mouse.
What marketing genius uses a mouse upside down.
It’s better for display
Users aren’t trying before they buy so the display is the most important aspect
Users aren’t trying before they buy so the display is the most important aspect
Trying before you buy is literally the entire point of the apple store
Yeah and I hear they might bring that back lol. Why haven’t there been any wireless mice that use wireless charging? They could include a super thin coil that you could place under any mouse pad. It doesn’t even need to charge fast so heat shouldn’t be an issue. Just trickle charge when it’s not being used.
Edit: guess I should have searched first. Of course it was Logitech
What.
The fuck.
You’ll be able to fit a finger under it I bet.
In case it wasn’t a joke, I imagine it would be high enough for your finger to just poke under it to push the button, like you would a monitor with buttons on the bottom of the screen.
Doesn’t look like it is.
You’re using it wrong: Just place the whole computer upside down on your desk.
The new design seems more lifted, I think it should be fine to fit your finger below there without having to lift it up yourself. At least for most people.
But once its on why would you ever turn it off? /s
I bought my iMac in March 2020… since then it’s been powered down maybe half a dozen times (a couple of those were power cuts) and rebooted (outside of macOS updates) maybe ten times.
It just sits there reliably doing its thing and sucks little juice in power saving so 🤷🏻♂️
We used to have racks of these things for automated testing …. And eventually they stop responding, so someone needs to power cycle them. In the computer room. In a rack
This but non-sarcastically. I have a Mac mini and I don’t think I’ve ever touched the power button (except after plugging in of course, but then you’re already fiddling)
Assuming the desktop takes the same power saving techniques from their laptops, there is no real reason to turn it off.
The next 900$ monitor stand will attach the monitor at the bottom with the screen facing the desk.
You need to buy the ar/vr set to see what the screen is displaying.
At the very least, the keyboard functions for power.
There is plenty of room on the front for a power button. Should have removed the headphone jack.
Lol, lmao.
Why didn’t they put the headphone port on the back…
Or on the keyboard?
That’s horrible. I want you on my design team.
Perhaps, but for the price of those flat non-rgb or mechanical things they should either shine my shoes or provide some kind of utility, such as a headphone jack.
Or sold as a separate device that costs only a bit less that this whole pc.
It doesn’t come with one last I checked.
Well, it would be
- more confusing if they shaped it like an iPhone,
- more unstable if they shaped it like the magic mouse with the power port at the bottom,
- super cute if they kept the exact mac pro tower design but super smol,
- actually useful as a vase of they used that cylinder mac pro design from 10 years ago
That cilinder Mac Pro was a fever dream but I still love the design
Smol Mac Pro would have been the best possible reality here.
Imagine a lil tiny ornamental CD drive that just pops out!
more unstable if they shaped it like the magic mouse with the power port at the bottom
Sounds like someone didn’t wear their Brave pants today
- way sexier if they shaped it so it could wear tight little brave pants
(and the ‘turn on’ button would have been covered by pants in this case as well, which sounds proper)
- way sexier if they shaped it so it could wear tight little brave pants
The price of the storage upgrades. Jesus.
Why care when we talk about desktops? Take the 512 GB model and attach a super fast and big external TB SSD.
Because we shouldn’t have to pay such prices to upgrade to a normal storage amount without dongles and external storage.
Why care when we talk about desktops?
Because it’s $600 and velcroing an external HDD to a nice new sleek piece of hardware makes it look ugly. Typical Apple bullshit, I’m surprised they didn’t develop another proprietary connector.
I think you’re confusing desktops with laptops.
Most, if not all, Apple devices look almost exactly the same as their sibling devices.
It’s kinda cute
I mean… It looks like the other Mac minis so… Okay.
That doesn’t seem very good for the price.
I think the issue is - I would buy something positioned as a very long-living and good machine for that price.
Like Sun workstations were. The design and experience of everything.
The issue with Apple is that these things look expensive, temporary and inconvenient (that feeling of concept nice to look at … for a day or so). And what’s worse, they are.
I hope Larry Ellison gets geriatric demented sooner, maybe then he’ll try to resurrect Sun as a separate entity. Just joking, even to Larry Ellison I only wish good health.
When… have their products ever been competitive on price? Not even shitting on them, but there’s always been an Apple tax.
Honestly, now that they put in a reasonable amount of RAM, with a processor that strong and some external storage, 600USD isn’t that terrible of a price.
The SSD size is silly though.
I will agree with you there, wholeheartedly.
I’d need to see what comparable x86 processors and graphics are to the M4, but yeah, this seems like it could be one of the first Macs in a while to be really competitive on price. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Fifteen years ago, a couple years after Macintosh went to Intel, I bought a Mac Pro. I had a hard time comparing prices at first, but once I finally realized I needed to be looking at workstations instead of desktops the Mac Pro actually came out to be about $300 less than identically spec’d workstations from Dell and HP. That was about the price of a full retail license on Windows Vista Ultimate (or later Windows 7 Ultimate). With Boot Camp and feeling like I could find Windows on sale for less it actually seemed to make the most sense with the added benefit of access to both Windows and OS X. It was frankly the best Windows machine I’ve ever used. No bloat, and all the drivers worked.
16 GB of RAM are kinda meh, but I can’t think of many $600 devices that can run three 6K monitors simultaneously at 60 Hz, plus then one at a lower res but still 60 Hz.
They’ve often been on par with competitors tbh.
The X1 Carbon isn’t much cheaper than a Macbook Air and ditto for Dell XPS vs Macbook Pro. The Macs have better build quality usually, but the PCs would get better specs. RAM, at least.
The Galaxy S series stars in the same range as iPhones do, though you get a better screen. But in the Ultra and Pro Max versions the screens trade blows and the iPhone is apparently cheaper.
Back in 2009-2010 I bought an entry level 13" MacBook Pro because it was fairly competitively priced compared to other options with similar specs, but the MBP had by far the better battery life, display quality, touchpad, and probably keyboard. It was easily worth the upcharge for those factors, so no real Apple Tax.
Mac Mini M1 when it was released was a good deal compared to same form factor machines at similar prices. Same for the M1 MacBook Air, despite the base RAM.
That advantage lasted a while, too, considering battery life and build quality.
Still running an m1 Mac mini right now, it’s a damn good machine, but the performance gains over the years on the m series chips haven’t really forced me to upgrade yet. As for gaming, I just use GeForce now to play my steam library and it’s awesome, it’s a really great combo. The 8GB of ram is lacking, but I’m using GFN and not pushing it too hard, so I don’t notice any meaningful performance problems. I’m also not editing photos or videos, so that probably helps.
There‘s nothing comparable on the market at this size and price when it comes to sheer power and energy efficiency.
$600 gets you 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You can get better hardware for less.
Have you factored in the processing power and the cost of an equivalent processor?
Is there even a better ARM SoC? All I know of is the Snapdragon X Elites, which are either on par or slightly below the M4. And you can only get them in a laptop form factor at this point, cuz they cancelled the mini-PC dev kit.
M4 reportedly outperforms Intel’s Core i9-14900KS by 16%. That CPU alone is over $600.
I don’t think anything with the word “intel” can be taken seriously in value comparisons…
When I got my last laptop I ended up with a MBP because there were no high end options for Linux laptops with AMD. Now the options are better, but back then, the only realistic alternative to a MacBook Pro would have had a third of the real-world battery life if not less, even if I decided to spend £3k. That didn’t seem like an acceptable compromise so there were virtually no laptops in existence that could compete with an M2 MBP.
True. It was just the first comparison I saw when I searched for M4 benchmarks.
Really, AMD isn’t even a fair comparison because we’re talking about an ARM SoC here. So maybe the Snapdragon dev kit that ultimately got cancelled?
It was supposed to be $900, for a special Snapdragon X Elite, 32GB RAM, and 512GB SSD.
cpubenchmark.net has comparisons to other X Elite chips, putting them pretty much on-par with the M4 or maybe just below it.
With the same amount of RAM and storage in a Mac Mini, you’re talkin $1200. So, $300 premium for a device that’s maybe 2-8% better, has retail support instead of being a dev kit, and… well, actually exists. It’s not a slam dunk for the Mini, but it’s clearly not a rip-off either.
Aside from the pitiful SSD it seems good.
Its not, you can build your own mini pc with a ryzen 9700X, more ram, more storage, and it would probrally cost less. In addition you wouldn’t be locked into the Apple ecosystem and you would be able to upgrade it.
Some people like the Apple ecosystem.
Same, I loved building my own PC but I also have a Mac mini because Macs just ✨fucking work✨ always
Sure. And you can buy a dirt bike cheaper than an ATV. Yet people still buy ATVs.
I’m not gonna do iOS dev or ML on a GMKtec no matter how cost-effective it is, just like I’m not gonna play x86 Windows games on a Mac even if I win a maxed-out unit in a giveaway.
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Meanwhile… Apple TV stuck in stone age and still can’t do bitstream.
