New Mac Mini

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/

by antr • 4 years ago

305 398 4 years ago

blakesterz2• 4 years ago

I'd still like a few more ol' fashion USB-A ports on there. I have so many things I need to plugin to USB-A ports still. My Mini only has 2 and it's just not enough.

duxup2• 4 years ago

I feel like now it is just a given that I’ll hook up a hub to everything.

Even my thunderbolt 4 hub / dock … has another hubs for “lesser” devices.

blakesterz2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I bought one of those fancy hub/stand thing that was built for the Mini, I'd still rather have then ports built it. I got greenscreen crashes for a while any time I had it plugged in, which meant I was stuck with the built in ports.

samcat1162• 4 years ago

Can I ask what they are? And are they devices with removable cables where you could move some to a native USB-C cable instead of adapting?

bilal4hmed2• 4 years ago

can this run dual monitors?

endisneigh• 4 years ago

It has hdmi and thunderbolt so you could connect to both at a minimum most likely.

rwalle• 4 years ago

Yes, in tech specs:

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

And up to three monitors for certain models.

wilsonnb32• 4 years ago

All of the Mac minis can do 2 monitors, the new M2 Pro one can do 3

rsync• 4 years ago

Wait, what ?

I am looking at the rear ports of the M2 pro and I see 4x TB4 ports and 1x HDMI ... can't this drive 5x displays ?

If not, why not ?

cmatthias12• 4 years ago

Almost certainly. The Thunderbolt spec requires any port labeled "Thunderbolt 4" to support dual 4k/60hz displays.

You'll note that, for example, on the Macbook Air (both M1 and M2 versions), Apple labels the ports "Thunderbolt / USB 4," which is confusing and IMHO downright misleading. Either way, the reason they do that is that those ports don't support dual displays, so they only meet the Thunderbolt 3 spec, which doesn't mandate dual displays.

A better label for the Macbook Air might be just "USB 4," or "USB 4 with Thunderbolt 3 support" (though TB3 is part of the USB 4 spec, so that's technically redundant).

USB/Thunderbolt standards are fun.

seanw4442• 4 years ago

USB standards are a giant clusterfuck. I don't know how they managed to get it to this point.

TwoNineA• 4 years ago

My experience with the M1 mini is a bit iffy dual monitor support wise. Thunderbolt -> USBC/DP/HDMI is best bet on high resolution monitors since it offer more scaling options. HDMI does't offer as many scaling options, I prefer 3008x1692 scaling on my 4k screens but alas, only one of them can be scaled like this since HDMI is 4k (not scaled), 2k or 1080p scaling only.

bilal4hmed2• 4 years ago

thank you everyone, it was very unclear to me based on past releases.

highwaylights6• 4 years ago

Yes, but you need to pay the extra $700 for the Pro to add a third display unfortunately.

There's hacky third party solutions to this, but they all involve giving questionable applications permission to record all your screens.

fckgw3• 4 years ago

This has never been the case for the Mac Mini.

crypt1d• 4 years ago

disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini

edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.

wilsonnb32• 4 years ago

Another anecdote: I have a M1 air and an m1 iMac both with 8GB and have never run into a problem.

I think 8gb is still the sweet spot for casual users.

cmatthias12• 4 years ago

Can you define "sweet spot" in this case?

Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance.

In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x current standard retail price for SSD upgrades, my guess is that there's some room to bump up the wholesale cost a bit.

Not doing so is, IMHO, insulting to users, and given the non-upgradable nature of these machines, bad for the environment, counter to all of Apple's talk about being environmentally friendly.

theshrike795• 4 years ago

16GB M1 mini here. I've had memory issues exactly zero times. Current memory usage is at 15%.

I've had games running with full on tab-hoarded browsers and IDEs open among with any other crap I haven't bothered to shut down.

mathverse• 4 years ago

I doubt that. Almost every app out there uses at least 200MB of memory. I would say 16GB is a sweet for casual users. 32 a minimum for devs/tech people and 64 an optimum if you happen to be using a lot of k8s/docker stuff.

roebk• 4 years ago

And a whopping £200 to add an extra 8gb. Ouch.

coder54326• 4 years ago

This is the real problem. M2 is just using LPDDR5. The memory modules themselves don't appear to be anything special; it's just the memory interface bus that is different. Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs. The entry-level product is a decent value, but the upgrades are ridiculous.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Never had an issue with Firefox on M1. Time to give it a try?

austenallred• 4 years ago

1. You can add more

2. New RAM is not like old RAM.

Macs are dramatically more optimized than they used to be.

I have a MacBook Air (M1) with 16GB of RAM and it runs more smoothly than older systems that had twice that much.

8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to. 8GB of RAM can handle very process-heavy tasks, like... running Chrome ;)

dijit4• 4 years ago

Everything you said is true; I'll even add that MacOS is probably the best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions!

However the parent is right, it's disgusting how much memory capacity is needed to run a basic environment.

Maybe having exceptionally fast machines with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage.

counttheforks• 4 years ago

1. You can add more

Tell that to Apple so they can do that out of the box.

8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to

No. I think you're confusing memory speed with capacity. Making ram faster doesn't mean it can magically store more.

coder54326• 4 years ago

edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.

I see both 24GB and 32GB configurations on the Apple Store configurator. Not sure what you're looking at.

arprocter• 4 years ago

Oof - once you bump the base model to 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage it doubles the price

Apparently Mini RAM hasn't been user upgradable since the 2014 model

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#2020

shortformblog• 4 years ago

It was upgradeable in 2018, but they the teardown to reach the RAM needlessly complicated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQq4hLKv1Cc

octotoad• 4 years ago

The 2018 model has socketed RAM.

coder54326• 4 years ago

On the plus side, with a desktop like this that isn't going to be moving frequently, there's really no compelling need to upgrade the internal storage. You could attach an external 1TB (or bigger!) NVMe SSD and you should be able to install macOS on that. You could just use the internal SSD as an extra storage drive. AFAIK, you're not required to use the internal SSD at all.

dougSF70• 4 years ago

You can walk into an apple store and buy 8GB models all day long but 16GB models are special orders...this has always seemed sketchy to me

wrldos2• 4 years ago

16Gb is minimum on M1 I found. I hit problems on my 8Gb machine regularly. It’ll work fine but you do get heavy pauses.

The thing to be careful of is if your custom config breaks then the turnaround to fix it can be a couple of months. Ergo only buy stock configs. That makes the market somewhat less friendly.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

Same here. I've heard people argue that 8gb is enough for web browsing, and while that is true, I genuinely struggle to imagine a use-case that doesn't max out the memory within 30 minutes of usage.

NavinF6• 4 years ago

Agreed, 16G on my 2021 M1 Pro macbook is just enough for software development. I'm definitely upgrading to 32G when the M2 Pro is released so I can have more headroom.

Also worth mention that 64G is pretty cheap on desktop and that's what the Mac Mini should be compared to.

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 Mac mini

On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to warrant the extra memory consumption (the majority of today's day-to-day browser-based tasks have been done just fine in 2010 on that era's hardware).

melling• 4 years ago

Yeah, people have been making the argument about inefficient software for about 4 decades now.

I remember a decade ago buying a 16GB Mac Book Pro, and listening to people complain that 8GB wasn’t enough, so I’m not sure what world 4GB was enough.

That same 16GB laptop still works great today.

deno• 4 years ago

What was the resolution a decade ago? Just having the Web in 4K is going to require significantly more memory. And something like Discord is not exactly comparable to an IRC client.

guestbest• 4 years ago

I’m using a M1 and it is very performant with Brave and unlock origin with only 8gb ram and XCode opening in the background. I try to stay away from Discord and Slack on the desktop as years ago they would cause my system to slow down

JodieBenitez• 4 years ago

Actually, my M1 never uses the 16gb (8 at most), even though I have several IDEs running (also browser of course). I'm not sure what generate such memory consumption for some users.

criley2• 4 years ago

"no one needs more than 640k of ram"

friedman235• 4 years ago

Get ready for AR apps written in react native. The reason we have shitty inefficient software is because Apple, Google, and Microsoft haven't standardized on a performant cross platform framework other than the browser. Don't blame people writing software for not wanting to waste their lives translating the same logic to 3 different platforms and then maintaining 3x the code for the rest of their lives.

simplotek2• 4 years ago

On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

How would that work? You whine on an online forum over how bloated a software is, and in the process opt to be deprived of it's usage? Or would you continue to complain about bloated software while using it? Because none of those scenarios offer a compelling reason for the software maintainers to rearchitect their whole application.

Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€?

mrstone• 4 years ago

On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

I think that war has been lost. Apple should just allow more RAM to be put in.

hgs32• 4 years ago

On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

Agreed. Some might say "RAM is cheap" but that line of thinking is why one day 64GB RAM won't be enough for a dozen browser tabs.

yamtaddle4• 4 years ago

A few years back I was given an old 4GB Macbook to use temporarily when I started at a new job. Thing is, I could have kept using it indefinitely for the actual work, for which it didn't feel slow—but Slack (Electron) and Asana (project management... webapp, thing, that liked to eat tons of memory & cycles for no reason, at the time) were must-use tools and just having them open with nothing else brought that poor machine to its knees.

Cut out webapps/Electron and it was entirely fine, though. Like if we'd just used XMPP or something instead of Slack I might even have been able to make it work without serious issues

turtlebits• 4 years ago

Why take away consumer choice? They've always been available with at least 16GB.

I'm perfectly happy with 8GB on my M1 and it was fine on my 2016 13" Pro.

cmatthias12• 4 years ago

Because the alternative is to add literally a few dollars to the bill of materials for the machine, double the memory, and give everyone a better experience. This also means the machine will last longer and likely not end up in a landfill as soon.

$200 to add 8GB of memory is _insane_, and framing it as "consumer choice" is bad when consumers are being gouged so badly. It's literally at least a 20x markup on the wholesale cost. You can buy 8GB of DDR4 at retail for $20 or less.

highwaylights6• 4 years ago

I was really hopeful for these, but so disappointed.

I have a triple monitor setup, and there's essentially a 117% surcharge to add support for the third display.

phonon3• 4 years ago

There are workarounds.

https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-o...

tyingq• 4 years ago

Maybe people still want 8gb models for affordable-ish CI/CD runner farms?

qwytw10• 4 years ago

Well Apple could add the extra 8GB keep the same base price and still have higher margins than any other PC OEM.

Of course why would they do this if they don't have to...

neighbor1• 4 years ago

dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers

This is absolutely not normal...

apetresc2• 4 years ago

Huh? It's completely normal (on the low range of normal, I'd wager), especially in the market of people buying desktop computers in 2023.

JustSomeNobody3• 4 years ago

Huh? I can easily have 40 - 50 tabs open.

I don't know what a discord is though.

rsstack• 4 years ago

At checkout you can add memory, up to 32GB total.

phrz• 4 years ago

Running Chrome on an Apple product is downright wasteful.

crazygringo3• 4 years ago

8 GB is perfectly fine for most people who just use the web, office software, and play media. Even when I have dozens of Chrome tabs open it's always been zero problem on my 8 GB M1 Air.

Also, starting last month, Chrome aggressively unloads tabs in the background with its new "memory saver" feature [1]. So if you were having issues with 8 GB before because of your tabs, you might not anymore.

[1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...

bsg75• 4 years ago

I will go a step further and state that they appear to top out at 32GB which is asinine. These are not manilla envelope laptops, but semi-compact bricks where the form factor in other brands can commonly take 64GB or more.

Its sad for me that my initial reaction to this is where previously a corp Windows laptop was for email and MS Office, and the Mac was for "actual work", now Mac's are headed to the "email and Office" role, and a halfway decent machine running Linux is where "real work" happens.

coob• 4 years ago

I'm sure Apple would point you in the direction of a Mac Studio instead…

icedchai2• 4 years ago

(I was wrong here! oops!)

bitL• 4 years ago

My NUC11Pro has 64GB of RAM and 2x SSD, and is way smaller than Mac Mini. Not sure why Apple thinks they need to dumb down smallest form factor for market segmentation reasons.

FollowingTheDao2• 4 years ago

"disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. "

I can assure you that the shareholders are not disappointed. The premium you pay for more RAM (and SSD) is insane.

Besides that fact that no one is making a computer for the ordinary user anymore. Hardly anyone needs that much power in a computer.

dutchbrit• 4 years ago

Indeed, but then again, it says more about the apps really. No real reason why they should consume so much memory.

incanus77• 4 years ago

I run an M1 mini with 16GB with 10 discord servers and hundreds of Safari tabs. Chrome is the hog here.

tracker17• 4 years ago

You have to pick the higher CPU variant apparently.

GeekyBear• 4 years ago

disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM

Doesn't Microsoft still sell laptops with 4 GB of RAM?

cmatthias12• 4 years ago

This is whataboutism, but yes, the Surface Go 2 base model has 4GB of RAM. It's shameful, but that laptop is also half the price of the cheapest Mac laptop, and doesn't absolve either company of blame for ridiculously high memory and storage prices.

vlunkr• 4 years ago

It feels like they're always wasting the potential of the Mac Mini. I assume the whole point of the product is to be the cheaper desktop option (I could be wrong), but when you compare it to any Windows desktop, it's a bad value. The base model has lame specs, if you upgrade to something reasonable, it's no longer competitive on price, and most components can't be upgraded later, which is half the appeal of buying a cheaper desktop.

scarface745• 4 years ago

The mini hasn’t been meant to be cheaper in over a decade. The mini is meant to be for the odd use cases.

jbverschoor6• 4 years ago

If you're looking only at idle power usage, the difference is around 20 watt compared to an idle pc. That's 0.5KWh. With the currency energy prices in NL (40ct/kwh, subsidized by the gov btw, because it's actually around 70ct now), this will save you €73 per year when idling, and even more when it's in use.

So the macmini essentially for free after a few years compared to your windows machine

JustSomeNobody3• 4 years ago

Only thing tighter than Apple is a frog's butt and that's water tight.

They really should be upping this to 16GB RAM. There's just no reason not to.

gnicholas• 4 years ago

Before buying my M2 MBA, I had the opportunity to try one out that had 8 GB of RAM and another that had 16 GB of RAM. I set up each as a restore of my main laptop, which included hundreds of browser tabs, slack, email, messages, calendar, notes, keynote open at all times. There was no noticeable difference whatsoever.

I ended up getting the 16 GB machine (my RAM usage was around 12 GB most times, and never north of 15 GB), but I would be fine recommending an 8 GB machine to my parents. Even from a future-proofing perspective, their use is so lightweight (some photo editing, web browsing, and email) that they would never need more than this.

I could see a case for offering the new version with 16 GB and up, but keeping around an old M1 version with just 8 GB. But I don't think it's necessarily in everyone's interest to pay more for that much RAM.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Once you start adding memory and ssd, it makes more sense to just get a mac studio. You basically get less for more with the mac mini. Once you max out the memory and CPU, the entry level mac studio is cheaper and comes with the M1 Max instead of the M2 Pro. A bit of a toss up which is faster but for 230 euro extra you jump to 32 GPU cores, which is not an option with the mini.

Zanfa• 4 years ago

My 8GB M1 Air kicks my 64GB 10-core iMac’s ass in most scenarios. Don’t think I even know how to use less than 30+ tabs open at the same time. Smooth as butter.

pwinnski• 4 years ago

I have more than 18 servers in discord, 8 tabs in iTerm, Textual IRC, iMessage, Music, Signal, TextEdit, VSCode, and two different browsers running right now on an 8GB M1 Mac mini, with no issues. Then again, neither browser is Chrome.

Safari has twelve tabs open across two windows, and Arc has sixteen tabs open.

Checking "memory pressure," I'm in the yellow zone, so I definitely agree that 8GB is not enough. But perhaps you should look at alternatives to Chrome in the meantime.

frognumber• 4 years ago

Is the RAM and SSD upgradeable? The baseline model is 8GB / 256GB, and very reasonably priced at $600.

Upgrading to 24GB is a whopping $400, and to 1TB is another $400. The $700 baseline seems reasonable. $1500 for a minimum usable machine seems more than a little excessive.

izacus2• 4 years ago

Nope, soldered.

samwillis• 4 years ago

Nope, in the same package as the CPU and GPU.

mstolpm• 4 years ago

Not upgradable. But "minimum usable" all depends on usage - for a lot of users, 8GB / 256GB is sufficient, especially in office or education.

adolph• 4 years ago

Apple's pricing is pretty interesting. On the low side they annoy with a hobbled option (256G storage); on the high side they price things to ask "do you _really_ want 2T ssd in this thing?" In the middle is the product they'd like to sell the most.

An $800 box with a power cord. Spend the same and get a therma-throttled cpu with iOS and display (iPad); a little more and get a monitor (MBA). Spend double and get a larger monitor with a keyboard and mouse (iMac).

Maybe the primary question is if the user is cloud first (minimal storage) or classic filesystem packrat (better buy big).

Kerrick3• 4 years ago

With a desktop device, the classic filesystem packrat might be best off just buying an external HDD with double-digit TB worth of storage and leaving it plugged in all the time.

Analemma_• 4 years ago

A lot of people use Mac Minis as headless home servers, and for that use case I think the starting configuration is just fine and well-priced.

peanuty12• 4 years ago

Welcome to Apple pricing.

Maursault• 4 years ago

If you max out the configuration of an M2 Pro mini with upgraded

     12-core M2 Pro processor
     19-core GPU
     16-core Neural Engine
     32GB memory
     8TB storage 
     10Gb ethernet
     4 Thunderbolt ports

it costs $4,099, which is exactly the same price as a base configured Ultra Mac Studio with

     20-core M1 Ultra processor
     48-core GPU
     32-core Neural Engine
     64GB memory
     1TB storage
     10Gb ethernet
     6 Thunderbolt ports

or two base configured Max Mac Studios with

     10-core M1 Max processor
     24-core GPU
     16-core Neural Engine
     32GB memory
     512TB storage
     10Gb ethernet
     4 Thunderbolt ports

So, clearly, Apple doesn't want to sell maxed out M2 Pro minis with 8TB SSD because an M1 Ultra Studio will likely beat the M2 Pro, or at least match it with more resources, and two M1 Max Studios will wipe the floor with both the M1 Ultra Studio and M2 Pro mini.

coder54326• 4 years ago

As I mentioned here[0], it is worth considering using an external, upgradeable SSD instead of paying Apple's exorbitant prices for more internal storage on a Mac mini. For a laptop, you would definitely want to upgrade the internal storage.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413582

asdff4• 4 years ago

This is not a worthwhile solution. The jacks on mac laptops are prone to fail after a few years of regular use in my experience. I have to imagine usb-c ports are even more fragile than type a.

susrev2• 4 years ago

Apple is the undisputed king of never putting actual benchmarks in their info-graphs

varjag• 4 years ago

Yup unless there's a LINPACK comparing it to VAX 11/780 it's deeply unserious.

susrev2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I am a noob and even after googling I don't really understand the connection. Could you enlighten me?

BonoboIO• 4 years ago

Nice upselling tactic to get 32GB of RAM ... /s

setgree• 4 years ago

My first thought for this thing is to download Linux, Steam, and all the emulators you can and you've basically got a conveniently sized and priced home theater PC that can play any video game from 1990-2010 or so

smith70183• 4 years ago

You're better off buying an older Intel-based Mac Mini, then. Asahi Linux (Linux for ARM Macs) only supports OpenGL 2 atm. They'll definitely get Vulkan and later GL versions eventually but it will be awhile.

10xDev• 4 years ago

Just get a steam deck and use EmuDeck.

asdff4• 4 years ago

You are better off getting an intel 16" mac and running bootcamp.

rsynnott• 4 years ago

I feel like adding the Pro makes the Studio increasingly niche.

chazeon• 4 years ago

Seems the differentiation factor would be RAM. Mac mini maxed out at 32 GB even with M1 Pro, where I am expecting 48 GB.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

The differentiation factor is expandability. But with the Mac Pro rumored to have no user expandable RAM you can only add more storage and switch GPUs and perhaps plug in that Apple ProRes accelerator card.

ErneX7• 4 years ago

Studio M1 Max has 2x memory bandwidth of the M1/M2 Pro. And the Ultra bumps that to 4x.

gymbeaux11• 4 years ago

$4,500 maxed out. $4,500 for a Mac mini. God. They really think people are going to pay $4,500 for a Mac mini, don't they?

ChildOfChaos• 4 years ago

No, it's $599, with a load of extra customised options that allow people to add what they want, you cannot even buy this one in a store, you have to do a custom order, your regular user, walking into an electronic store will buy a base model.

You've specced it up with every customisation possible, that 999.999999% of buyers won't do and won't need and then complain at the cost in an effort to bash Apple,

gymbeaux11• 4 years ago

I'm not trying to bash Apple in bad faith, but let's be real the $599 model is inadequate. 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in 2023. There's plenty out there on the M1 Mac mini's 8GB being a bad idea even for casual users. I had an 8GB M1 mini when it first came out and returned it because it was swapping to the SSD with like 3 apps open (nothing like an IDE or Docker or Adobe X Y Z).

I just find it humorous that you can spend several thousand dollars on a Mac mini, Mac Pro, or Mac Studio. It seems like there's a lot of product overlap to me.

Kerrick3• 4 years ago

Dell's XPS tower starts at $749 (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Intel 12400) and can be maxed out (not including support contracts) for $5200. Heck, a Ford Maverick starts at $22,195 and can be customized maxed out at over $40,000. This is not an uncommon pattern.

gymbeaux11• 4 years ago

True, but I would argue that it actually makes some sense for the XPS, Dell's only "pro desktop" option (does Vostro count as "pro"?).

That the Mac mini can cost either X or ~10X is more like saying "a car starts at $15k and can cost $150k". Throw in that it clearly overlaps with the Mac Pro and Mac Studio and I can only ask "why would I pick X, Y or Z?" It seems like the Studio is the way to go vs a mini configured above or around $2000, unless Apple is simply peddling to datacenter customers with Mac mini server racks (which hey, maybe).

chirau• 4 years ago

Whatever happened to the Mac Pro line?

jon-wood• 4 years ago

It’s called the Mac Studio now.

ErneX7• 4 years ago

Not really, the Studio was more of an iMac (27inch / Pro) replacement.

Mac Pros are coming.

Tepix5• 4 years ago

It's overdue.

theshrike795• 4 years ago

The M-series doesn't have regular PCI-E or other internal expansion options so "regular" Pro line is kinda out until they solve that issue.

ErneX7• 4 years ago

Mac Pro per the rumors is definitely coming this year, probably around WWDC.

FireBeyond2• 4 years ago

I looked at the Mac Studio, and would still like to switch from my cheesegrater, as it's obvious where things are going (and in my home office, the Pro is a heater). Although now I suspect I'm going to hold off for the M2 Studio.

Apple is still doing its old tricks, though. Out of curiosity, I put my $13K Mac Pro in as a trade-in to see what it'd contribute (and to be clear, my expectations, I thought, were reasonable... was thinking $3K). 12 core Xeon, 192GB, 8TB, W5700X 16GB.

$3K? No, $1,050. Ouch.

Double ouch when you go to the Mac Pro store and find that exact same configuration is still being sold by Apple today for $12K.

synergy20• 4 years ago

All devices should be upgrade-able and repairable by customers, we paid for it and we own it, we have the rights to change it easily. We need to enforce the right-to-repair law fast, and please sue Apple if it does not conform to it(along with its only-me and pay-me-30% apple app-store policy)

dbbk2• 4 years ago

Apple have a Self Service Repair program.

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

Not only is the self-service repair program a sham, but doesn't actually address the parent's point about upgradability - the repair program, if your part is actually covered by it (good luck getting individual system board components so you don't have to replace a $700 board because of a $5 blown IC) it will still be a like-for-like replacement with no upgrade.

dusted• 4 years ago

Wow, that's pretty weak. 32 GiB memory limit? In 2023 ?

Tepix5• 4 years ago

They do sell a beefier computer, the Mac Studio if 32GB is not enough.

runjake• 4 years ago

You might be looking for the Mac Studio.

When you start pricing the Mini toward where you're concerned about the 32gb memory limit, you're approaching the Mac Studio pricing tier, anyway.

lvl1025• 4 years ago

Why get the M2 Pro Mini when you can just opt for Mac Studio with M1 Max? They're roughly in the same price bracket.

smith70183• 4 years ago

There's a $700 price difference but I'd say it's definitely worth it if you can swing it.

lvl1025• 4 years ago

Isn’t it $300 difference at 32GB RAM?

Tepix5• 4 years ago

If you need 32GB in your Mac Mini the price difference is

$1999 for the Mac Studio vs

$1699 for the Mac Mini M2 Pro 32GB.

Indeed that's a tough sell for the Mac Mini. It shows how much Apple is charging extra for those capacity upgrades.

lvl1025• 4 years ago

Plus I’d assume the M1 Studios will now get discounted in preparation for M2 refresh in March.

wrldos2• 4 years ago

The big thing is the Mac Studio is an out of box config and the M2 Pro is custom. It's risky relying on custom Apple configs from experience as the turnaround for repairs is much longer.

coder54326• 4 years ago

To truly be Apples to Apples, I would factor in the $100 option for 10Gb ethernet, which brings the price difference down to $200... and the extra $200 is getting you an M1 Max.

xuki2• 4 years ago

M2 Pro is faster than M1 Max for CPU bounded tasks. When they release the Mac Studio with M2 Max, it'll be faster in GPU department & have 10Gbps ethernet, more ports, probably for the same price.

yborg• 4 years ago

You aren't wrong. The difference between base models if you put 32 GB in the Mini is about $300. But you get 8 more GPU cores in the M1 MAX. And an SD slot.

ErneX7• 4 years ago

That's my current dilemma, but now I think I'll just wait for the Studio with M2 Max.

lvl1025• 4 years ago

I am pretty sure it will be released in March along with Mac Pro which will undoubtedly be one of the headline releases. I am going to wait and pick up an M2 Max Studio.

dnh44• 4 years ago

Maybe this wouldn't matter to a lot of people but the M2 Pro Mini has HDMI 2.1 while the M1 Studio does not. You need HDMI 2.1 to get more than 60hz out of a 4k monitor.

lvl1025• 4 years ago

That’s very interesting info I didn’t realize. Makes me want to wait for M2 refresh of the Studio.

steveBK1232• 4 years ago

First Mac to support 8K explicitly (in M2 Pro config)

dukoid• 4 years ago

The real news here!

  "One display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI"

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

coder54326• 4 years ago

This also applies to the new MacBook Pros as well, to be clear.

wyager2• 4 years ago

Anyone know if the cheap model can handle 4k60 444 10bit over HDMI? "4k 60hz" is almost meaningless without more information. There are some reddit threads where people have issues with 4k60 444 10b on the (now) previous gen mac mini.

If they've fixed that, I would consider using this as an HTPC (as Otpimus and Movist are the only desktop video players I've found that seem to actually fully support HDR, my windows box isn't cutting it).

fckgw3• 4 years ago

The new model has been upgraded to HDMI 2.1 as opposed to HDMI 2.0 on the M1 model. Not sure if that helps or not.

wyager2• 4 years ago

Yes, thank you. 2.1 should have plenty of bandwidth, so unless there's some other limitation, it can probably handle 10 bit 444.

FireBeyond2• 4 years ago

That still bugs me. Apple broke DSC in the first beta of Big Sur, and it hadn't been fixed when I switched monitors about a year ago, a little less.

Catalina on my cheesegrater Mac Pro would happily drive 2 4K 10-bit screens at 144Hz (via TB3)

Big Sur? Not so much. Had to downgrade DSC from 1.4 to 1.2 on my monitors, and even then I could only get 120Hz at 8 bit, 95Hz at 10bit, IIRC. Still not "shabby" but annoying. Really seems like it was broken as something to do with the Pro Display XDR.

xsc• 4 years ago

Technical limitation supporting quad monitors?

highwaylights6• 4 years ago

Technically they want more money

dagmx• 4 years ago

The different SoC configurations have different display controller counts.

mberning• 4 years ago

Already ordered. Been waiting a long time to get 32gb in one of these.

ErneX7• 4 years ago

A M2 Pro Mini with a few spec bumps puts it at a similar price than a M1 Max Studio.

I was waiting for the Mini refresh but now I think I'll just wait for the Studio refresh and get one with M2 Max.

jmull3• 4 years ago

With the Pro Mini, I wonder if the lower-end of the Studio "moves up"... $X00 more, but with an M2 not available on the mini?

ErneX7• 4 years ago

The Studio uses the Max and Ultra variants, so my guess is they will continue the trend.

Mini = M2 and M2 Pro | Studio = M2 Max and M2 Ultra. | Mac Pro = M2 Ultra and ??? (or maybe 2x Ultra)

jononomo• 4 years ago

I remember the first time I heard about someone getting a 1 GB hard drive -- I was astonished. I mean, I just could not believe it. Now people are complaining about only having 8 GB of RAM, lol.

haunter• 4 years ago

Dive into a multiplayer gaming session with SharePlay

How many AA multiplayer games are available on Mac? Not streaming, no VM, no Wine/CrossOver. Legit playable games. I know Minecraft, WoW, Civ6, and CSGO. Probably there is more but clearly not the target of Apple and the devs either

t3rabytes• 4 years ago

No Man's Sky and a Resident Evil reissue are the two big ones currently that Apple is touting.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

More-or-less this generation's Tomb Raider and Monument Valley, if you ask me. It's nice that Apple reaches out to AAA developers to prove that Metal ports aren't impossible, but it's a lost cause today. No Man's Sky and Resident Evil both work out-of-box on Linux without any intervention from their developers. Apple's efforts are entirely misplaced and it's obvious that they're going against the grain of the rest of the games industry.

I'd argue Apple shot themselves in the foot by depreciating 32-bit libraries as fast as they did. If they had Proton, the Macbooks could be enjoying the same surge in gaming popularity the Steam Deck has.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

How many AA multiplayer games are available on Mac?

Remember that all iOS games work on Macs, too. Here's a list of AAA iOS games from last year, for example.

https://www.reddit.com/r/iosgaming/comments/t1iqlh/a_list_of...

simplotek2• 4 years ago

Does anyone know if Mac Minis integrate with Xcode to perform distributed builds? It would be superb if a small software team could expense half a dozen Mac Minis to handle the team's build jobs.

apetresc2• 4 years ago

Yup, that works.

laweijfmvo• 4 years ago

Is it still huge? This thing should be much smaller now.

brk• 4 years ago

Kind of surprised to see a 10G Ethernet port as an option on these.

jeffbee6• 4 years ago

But it adds a month to the lead time.

vesrah• 4 years ago

It was available on the Intel Mac Minis, nice to see it making a comeback.

coder54326• 4 years ago

It was also available on the M1 Mac Mini, just not at launch: https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/20/apple-silently-updates-m1-mac...

jeffbee6• 4 years ago

The thing that's truly insulting is their trade-in offer for a late 2020 M1 8G/512G is only $330 vs. an eBay average selling price of over $500.

crazygringo3• 4 years ago

Resale prices on eBay have always been significantly higher than any trade-in for any product for any company -- this isn't an Apple thing.

And remember that eBay charges a selling fee of 12.9%, and you have to go through all of the time and effort of photographing, listing, selling, packaging, shipping, and dealing with a (small) risk of buyer fraud.

On the other hand, Apple takes it off of your hands hassle-free, risk-free, and you pay no sales tax on the trade-in value (which in NYC is 8.875%, for example).

There's nothing insulting about it.

jeffbee6• 4 years ago

Well, Apple resells the trade-in mini as a $750 refurb, so it's a pretty substantial margin they are asking for.

iainmerrick2• 4 years ago

"Available starting 1.24"

January the 24th? January 2024?

I wish the US would start writing dates in a sensible way!

otikik• 4 years ago

They only have 1 unit available. And the CPU of the second unit.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

I wish the US would start writing dates in a sensible way!

Looks like standard big-endian notation to me.

iainmerrick2• 4 years ago

I realise you're joking, but no, not without the year.

It's not even standard for the US! Did they decide "/" wasn't Apple-y enough so they had to use "."?

Varloom• 4 years ago

I can't use my M1 mini with non-retina monitor because of how blurry it is.

They stopped providing font anti-aliasing (default on Windows) few years ago in MacOS to make retina displays more relevant.

noveltyaccount• 4 years ago

Does this fix your issue? When I use my wife's Air on my Dell non-retina monitor, I can either have crisp but tiny text, or big and blurry. This utility perfectly solves it for me. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

tobr• 4 years ago

Does Apple even sell any product with a non-retina display any more?

inductive_magic• 4 years ago

I think the mac mini fits that category.

kemayo• 4 years ago

I think the last time was in 2020, when you could still get the non-retina MacBook Air?

That said, the Mac mini and Mac Studio are reasonable to consider here, since they're sold without displays and I'd be shocked if the majority of them aren't used with regular 4k displays. (We're less than a year out from Apple having a first-party retina monitor at a vaguely reasonable price-point, still.)

nicoburns2• 4 years ago

No, but you can use Apple products with external displays that may not be hidpi. And of course with the mac mini an external display is the only display option.

cosmotic• 4 years ago

Is this because the computer is sending YPrPb color instead of RGB? It seems to be a common problem on Dell monitors. A hacky work around: https://github.com/sudowork/fix_m1_rgb

speedgoose• 4 years ago

This is strange, my M1 MacBook does have anti-aliasing. Not as good as the windows cleartype one though.

jd3• 4 years ago

macOS still provides anti-aliasing — I assume the OP is referring to the removal of subpixel rendering/antialiasing.

See "The subtle death of subpixel antialiasing"

https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Scree...

The one thing I appreciate about windows is that you can completely disable cleartype/anti-aliasing, if you'd like. As far as I know of, it's not possible to do that in any version of macOS (including Ventura).

In fact Checking "Antialias text" in the Terminal.app settings profile just didn't do anything on a non-retina external monitor for 2+ years.

https://i.imgur.com/nRLReww.gif

https://i.imgur.com/fu08mPa.gif

rdar://FB8901170

ClassyJacket• 4 years ago

This happened to me the other day when I plugged my MacBook Pro into an external monitor. Sadlky I cannot use it in laptop mode at all anymore as it has a butterfly keyboard so of course not all my keys work.

It's unusable with text that blurry. I thought something was broken at first.

I guess they want to force us to buy a Pro Display XDR. No thanks, instead I'll buy a new computer and run Linux.

EDIT: My mistake, they now have the Studio Display for "only" 1500£

nojs• 4 years ago

If you can’t use the keyboard but want to keep using the laptop display, these are good:

http://www.nexstand.com/

ehutch792• 4 years ago

Your keyboard might be under warranty still

rayiner• 4 years ago

They didn’t stop antialiasing. They stopped sub-pixel antialiasing and snapping stems to the pixel grid, which is less relevant on retina displays, to avoid artifacts when text is translated and animated.

wilg• 4 years ago

Also subpixel antialiasing doesn't work if you rotate the display, like a phone, iPad, or Pro Display.

It also requires you to know the pixel geometry, so may not work correctly on OLED or TVs or other display technology.

jbverschoor6• 4 years ago

One of the artifacts is weird colors at the edges

raydev2• 4 years ago

I had the 24" 1920x1200 Apple Cinema Display for several years, and I vividly remember that text looked objectively worse after I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite.

I now use a 27" 1440p monitor and I'm always struck by how bad text looks on it compared to my 2009 MBP that's stuck on Mavericks until it dies (not due to text reasons, it's just slow as hell/no benefits to upgrading).

They did something that was relevant to 1x displays, because it used to be better.

bobbylarrybobby• 4 years ago

Surely the artifacts are better than blurry text?

deergomoo• 4 years ago

Yeah, you can really tell no-one at Cupertino uses @1x displays. I don’t find it to be unusable, but jesus christ it’s ugly—far uglier than the same monitor driven by a Windows machine. It’s not just text either, throughout the UI a lot of scaled images (e.g. App Store preview images) look awful. You can tell it’s just not a priority.

The problem is my alternatives are a 4K display with non-integer scaling on macOS, or a 5K Studio Display that my Windows work laptop can’t drive which costs almost as much as my MacBook again[0]. So I guess I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

[0] I’m intrigued by the recently announced 5K Samsung ViewFinity S9, but I’m not expecting it to be meaningfully cheaper than the Studio Display considering it’s a captive market.

asdff4• 4 years ago

You get used to it. I went back to a nonretina 2012 mac as my daily driver. From 2 feet away, you can't see any pixels so it really doesn't matter much. Enjoy the increased performance from driving fewer pixels.

tracker17• 4 years ago

Sad how much the price ramps up beyond reasonable for what it is when you bump ram and storage.

captainbland• 4 years ago

Last decade called, they want their base RAM spec back.

szastamasta2• 4 years ago

I really love the idea of Mac mini, but when you add some more RAM and disk price is almost the same as for MacBook PRO, where you get almost the same hardware a superb display and a keyboard built in. And you can carry it around with you. These machines almost make no sense because of that.

rollcat2• 4 years ago

Yes, these are more niche than a laptop. I explicitly chose an M1 Mac Mini however (as opposed to a Macbook) for several reasons that have less to do with price/specs:

- I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc

- 10Gig ethernet

- HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two external displays)

- If your computer is docked close to 24x7 (as was the case with most of my previous laptops), the battery becomes a liability

- Better cooling (I know these barely ever get hot... until you actually try to push them)

Plus also any kind of headless application, like a server rack where you also want the box to be a bit more more rugged.

misterprime• 4 years ago

I always imagined a 24x7 docked laptop was a good setup for a couple reasons: 1. built in UPS due to the battery. 2. easy to grab and go in an emergency situation.

Could you tell me more about the liability it creates? Is it a fire hazard? Decaying battery performance?

cherioo• 4 years ago

I don’t think apple would allow that to happen. The same configuration of cpu and ram between mini and MBP differs by $700, unless you are comparing base MBP to speced-up mini.

szastamasta2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I mean it’s not exactly the same price. But after you pass a certain price point adding few hundred $ is not making a big difference. While what you get - mobility, battery, great keyboard and display, speakers, webcam, touch-id, etc is quite a lot of stuff for 700$. If you just add a good external display, it’s easy to pass the price of MBP. At the same time you loose nothing. It’s not really a desktop machine, that would be much faster or allow part replacement. It is just a laptop without a lot of parts.

raydev2• 4 years ago

where you get almost the same hardware a superb display and a keyboard built in.

I just priced out a 24GB RAM/2TB storage M2 mini, and it's still $1kCAD cheaper than the equivalent Air.

There is definitely a large "screen and keyboard" upgrade tax if you're actually considering it.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

But they do have better cooling than a Macbook Pro, so probably somewhat better sustained performance.

MikusR2• 4 years ago

The Max one is 185W

mempko• 4 years ago

Kind of shocked how many people here on HN are like "I'm totally fine with 8GB of ram on my mac". What? Isn't this hacker news? What are you guys doing with your computers? Are computers just toys now? Is HN no longer a space for professionals and hackers?

It's like a plumber saying they are totally fine using a $2 Walmart wrench. I just don't get it.

nomel2• 4 years ago

I have about 20 Safari tabs open, an IDE, Excel, Slack, Discord (web), Tableau, mail/calendar/etc, and some terminal windows. Activity monitor says I'm pretty much maxed out, but this is all I need, daily.

Memory compression is a thing, and these SSDs are fast, but I still don't understand how this is working so well. I was fully expecting to exchange this for a higher memory model, since it's supposed to be a temporary computer. I'm keeping it, for now.

theusus• 4 years ago

So should I buy this or build a PC?

tw1984• 4 years ago

Apple: please give your customers ECC RAM, we take data integrity seriously.

coder54326• 4 years ago

That would at least help them justify the current RAM pricing!

FearlessNebula2• 4 years ago

Serious question, what difference does ECC make on a laptop? I thought it’s only useful on a server or for situations that are critical (aircraft computer).

walterbell• 4 years ago

On Mac Mini, ECC is useful for OpenZFS/data storage integrity.

oneeyedpigeon• 4 years ago

First time I've really been aware of an Apple product not just being like-for-like $->£ but actually a higher £ number: £649 vs. $599. For reference, $599 is £489.

habosa• 4 years ago

Interesting! Is this because the exchange rate (currently 1.23 GBP:USD but has been lower recently) is fluctuating in the same range as the VAT rate (20%)?

cma• 4 years ago

VAT?

nly• 4 years ago

Well us Brits have it too good with our train strikes, high taxes, crumbling NHS, and labour shortage. We need taking down a peg

morituri• 4 years ago

They raised all the international prices last year. For example iPhone 14 is $800 / £850

closewith• 4 years ago

The UK price includes VAT at 20%, so it's really £540.84 vs $599.

cat_plus_plus2• 4 years ago

I miss getting real innovation from Apple like in the 90s and 00s. For laptops, I still understand the appeal of serious power with all day battery life, here I am just getting less software choices and less upgradability than a Windows desktop for same price. It used to be that software innovations like running UNIX out of the box, automatic full backups and good music/photo/video tools made up for it. Now Windows and Chromebooks have all of the above, has to be something new to differentiate Macs. Like machine learning support in Applescript, so that it can select files that are likely to be my favorite, or photos of a person by name, or content relevant to current date/time/location... Or something different entirely, but exciting and useful in substantial ways. Sony and other Japanese companies used to be very innovative, now it's just overpriced stuff with compatibility issues, Apple is heading the same way. At least Dyson still makes products that are different, despite their narrow focus area, wish more companies were like that.

atonse• 4 years ago

I've thought the same but I'm not really sure what else I'd want in my laptop. With the M1s they've just hit such a sweet spot.

Battery life is great, the laptop is fast enough for everything I need. TB 3 hubs allow me to use external peripherals, two 4k 27" monitors, plenty of real estate.

Update: I just saw a couple other comments – camera for sure. A much better camera than the garbage they include nowadays.

cat_plus_plus2• 4 years ago

Agreed for laptop, but how much will power efficiency make a real difference on a Mac Mini?

amelius• 4 years ago

Nice hardware.

Too bad I can never put it in one of the industrial machines my startup builds, as these Apple computers are completely oriented towards end-consumers, locked with an AppleID, etc. in summary totally useless from a builders perspective.

It is quite sad that top tech companies nowadays produce mostly consumer electronics.

anoncow• 4 years ago

Will there be a M2 Max Mac Mini?

kderbyma• 4 years ago

"Today we package the same technology in our standard form factor, ram sizes, and we haven't innovated on design for years! it's new!"

New Mac Mini

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