With educational pricing this thing starts as $500, and at 16GB of RAM (finally) I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market).
I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini they have. I really can't think of any reasonable competition for it at that price.
One issue to watch out for: Sub-4K res monitors look surprisingly bad on newer versions of macOS with Apple Silicon Macs. And no, it's not simply a matter of non-Retina obviously not looking as nice as Retina monitors - something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux. This is partly caused by a lack of subpixel rendering for text on macOS, but it doesn't affect just text, with app icon graphics and such seemingly optimized for High-DPI resolutions only and thus looking awful too.
You commonly see people using 3rd party apps such as BetterDisplay to partially work around this problem by tricking the system to treat 1440p displays as 5K displays and then downscale, but it doesn't solve this completely.
So yes, the price for the machine is fantastic, but you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well.
Is this with newer Apple Silicon Macs? My 2020 M1 Mac Mini looks unremarkably normal on my 1440p display. I'm also going between that and my 14" M1 Pro Macbook Pro, which of course looks beautiful but doesn't really make the 1440p on the Mini 'bad'.
Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.
This is the biggest issue with Mac hardware at the moment.
All because of a decision to make it easier for their developers (and 3rd party too I guess) to be able to claim they figured out high-DPI before everyone else.
It comes at a large cost now, either more money than reasonable for one of the few compatible displays or accept a much worse experience, that is just not good for devices of this price.
This is why a big affordable iMac is so necessary, but TC's Apple likes money too much to care about their legacy customers.
After such a long history of Mac OS having better font rendering and in general better graphic stack (Quartz, everything is basically a continuous PDF rendering) feels like a big letdown.
The problem is going to improve as more high-DPI displays are released for sale but it has taken a lot of time because most customers like to focus on other characteristics that are arguably more important for other use cases.
There are plenty of premium display that are just good to great but you really have to think how it will work if you buy a Mac, most likely you'll need to compromise, feels bad considering the price of admition...
Can confirm, you absolutely need BetterDisplay and a tiny bit of elbow grease to configure the 5k clone to downscale to your real monitor. Not rocket science, but could be more streamlined.
If you say it looks fine without it, I don't know what to say.
Is there a review that demonstrates and corroborates this issue? Is it a difficult problem if choosing to buy a new display for a Mac mini? My old display is 10 years old and I would have to get a new one then.
My 7 year old QHD monitor pair through a M1 Pro MBP still looks fantastic. Then again, I do spend most of my day in apple Terminal, but I'm not really in want of anything more. Some other sibling comments are saying Windows 10/11 looks crappy, and I agree, as I have to occasionally switch between the two, I just don't like working in Windows anymore, mostly because of the poor display.
Came here to echo this. Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. Everything was fuzzy and awful looking. Not something that could be tolerated or ignored... Completely unusable. I feel like this fact is not well known enough.
The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?
This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.
Honestly I am going to say skip 4K and just go to 5K. They are not that much more. I have 2x5K setup and it is great. The main monitor is normal orientation and the other is mounted on the left at a 90 rotation centered on the side of the first. I keep my work on the main and all the documentation, chat, etc. on the vertical one. I hope to be able to ditch the 2 monitor setup next year and go to a single 8K display.
There's still good deals in mini PC land. Yes, the M4 is faster but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600. I think for a lot of people for basic usage they'll get more value out of the larger and upgradable SSDs than the faster CPU.
I bought one of these once. The specs on paper look good, but the CPUs are weak. They’re like those U series Intel CPUs where you could get say an i7-7700U, with 4 physical cores and 8 total threads, but at 15W TDP you were never really going to benefit from the 4 cores and 8 threads.
I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro and they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros. Being RAM-starved might have something to do with it though.
> but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600.
I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind. For example, most NUCs from the likes of minisforum and Beelink ship with a single SSD but support multiple SSDs, with their cases also having room for SATA drives. They even go as far as selling barebones versions of their NUCs, where customers can then pick and choose which RAM and SSDs to add.
From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value.
You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.
> I think for a lot of people for basic usage they'll get more value out of the larger and upgradable SSDs than the faster CPU
Why exactly?
What are a "lot of people" storing on their computers these days? Photos are in the cloud or on our phones. Videos and music are streaming. Documents take up no space. Programs are in the cloud (for the most part).
None of them have a proper HDMI 2.1 FRL port that is needed to run a 4k 120Hz monitor. Likely because the Iris Xe / AMD equivalent does not support it, and dedicated ITX GPUs are expensive. This isn't a problem with M4.
> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price (let's exclude custom builds, they're not the same market).
This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum.
I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten, but not "easily"), and also supports memory upgrades of up to 256GB.
There's a huge difference there. Those PCs have to be ordered from Aliexpress, or some other Chinese site, or else from Amazon via a third party resellers that adds their own markup on top.
Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies.
Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.
1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface)
2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer
So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game console.
I’m a mid 30s developer and I use a mac mini for all my hobby development. I’m planning to get a m4 mini to replace my current m1 mini. I like hooking up my own monitor and peripherals - I don’t like working hunched over a small screen and crunched keyboard. Plus, a m4 mac mini with 32GB RAM is only $999 - the most closely spec’d Macbook Air (on an M3, with 24GB RAM) is $1299. and then the m4 Macbook Pro with 32 GB RAM is $1999. So your last point about cost - why should I throw away an extra $1000 for no reason?
IMHO it's not as NUC style mini PCs with x86-64 CPUs from AMD and intel are really cheap and the 256Gb storage is way too small making the "real" price $200 higher for any sort of moderate usage.
> I think this easily beats any sort of desktop PC you can buy at that price
Not really. Do a quick googling for cheap miniPCs from brands such as minisforum or Beelink. Years ago they were selling Ryzen5 and Intel i5 with 16BG of RAM for around $300. No "educational software" bullshit either, just straight from Amazon to anyone who bothered to click on a button.
Then you have to factor in supporting those systems, because you will be the one they call. This is one of the major upsides to family & friends buying Macs.
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.
This 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
You 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.
This 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.
The 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.
I 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.
I 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.
> This basically proves that Apple shot themselves in the foot for AI on mobile by artificially restricting RAM for so long!
What they shot was us. My 14 Pro won’t do AI despite having a better NPU than an M1, all because Apple chose - intentionally - to ship it with too little RAM. They knew AI was coming and they did this anyway.
Although having played with it on my MBP it’s clear I’m not missing much. But still.
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.
If it's the shift I think you're referring to, I find it strange that you compare computing decisions from the 50s and 60s to today. You're correct, but that was over half a century ago. The reasons for those decisions, such as bus speeds, high latency, and low bandwidth, no longer apply.
Today, the industry is moving toward unified memory. This trend includes not only Apple but also Intel, AMD with their APUs, and Qualcomm. Pretty much everyone.
To me, the benefits are clear:
- Reduced copying of large amounts of data between memory pools.
>This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.
I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.
Depart? They just got there, didn't they? And on purpose. There's more memory bandwidth, and also no need to copy from main memory to VRAM. Why would they bail on it?
I think they moved away because system memory was lagging behind in speed to the memory being used on video cards?
And besides, what Apple is doing is placing the RAM really close to the SoC, I think they are on the same package even, that was not the case on the PC either AFAIK?
At 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.
What a great little computer at a very reasonable price. A few interesting things with this announcement:
1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup will just receive a spec bump soon.
2. On the product page (https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/) Apple highlights a number of third party accessories. Notably the PS5 controller and several keyboards and mice from different manufacturers. This seems small, but it would have been almost blasphemy under the jobs era.
3. This is quite the little powerhouse. Honestly it is so good it eliminates the need for most people to even consider the Mac Studio.
Jobs was extremely pragmatic, which is why for all his fault Apple would always come up with a desirable technological solution.
Most things said about Jobs are pop culture caricature derived from peoples talking shit about him (mostly because of success jaleousy).
> And the iMac's catch copy was "BYODKM" at the very start
I think you meany Mac mini there. It was definitely built as the gateway into the Mac ecosystem. Swap your tower for a Mac mini, and keep using the rest of your old hardware.
Apple has shown people gaming with PS5 controllers at events for I believe a few years now. Someone can fact check me on that but it's not the first time I've seen it.
I have to think economies of scale are coming into play for Apple. They can cut deals for chips and other components at a scale no one else is really capable of and they have the luxury of being able to pay up front in advance if they need to.
My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value.
Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the Pro model.
I have a Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, M2 Mac Mini, M1 Pro laptop, M2 Max laptop (work). All of this runs on either an LG C3 42" OLED or a 34" 1440p ultrawide.
Linux GeForce Now can only do 720p or 1080p, can't remember which. Also, it's just kind of laggy in desktop mode. The Macs run so much smoother.
My current "main" desktop is actually my Asus ROG Ally. I use one USB C hub that is capable of 4k120hz, and I can move it between my Mac laptops and Asus ROG Ally very seamlessly.
The problem for me is Windows. Yesterday my start menu stopped loading for some reason and required a full reboot. Sometimes it refuses to go to sleep. Sometimes it refuses to come out of sleep. Sometimes a Windows update kicks off in the middle of a game and it slows everything to a crawl. Windows drives me crazy these days!
> Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet.
Can you elaborate? Thinking of setting up a MacMini for my kids but worried about lack of gaming options for them (I haven't gamed on a Mac in a dozen years and the state of gaming on MacOS was sad back then).
There's a lot of Mac games on Steam, Apple Arcade, and Battle.net these days. Anything that isn't supported there, I generally use Xbox streaming or GeForce Now streaming.
Here's a list of my most played games on my Mac in the last couple of years:
WoW, Hearthstone, Dota 2, League of Legends, Thronefall, Vampire Survivors, Baldur's Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Balatro, Death Must Die, Terraria, Dave the Diver, Mechabellum, Space Haven, Hades 2, Peglin, Stellaris, RimWorld, Dead Cells, Total War: Warhammer 2, Valheim, Civilization 6, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve Together, Cities: Skylines, Oxygen Not Included, SUPERHOT.
The point of such an annoying long comment is to demonstrate that there is a very substantial Mac gaming library. The problem is that a new shiny game comes out that doesn't support Mac and you don't want to be the ONE guy in your group who can't play it because you're on Mac. The latest one for me is Deadlock. Not on GeForce Now, not on console, not on Mac... so I needed to get a Windows PC.
But if you're a kid and just looking for a general gaming machine, it plays a ton of cool stuff.
My first thought was similar, though followed quickly by "...but it's Apple, so what's the catch?" The relevant extra things to know are that the SSD is soldered, there are no slots for extra SSDs, and choosing a sensible (1TB) drive is >4X the price of buying similar storage at retail. Still a no from me, then.
(The only thing I do often that's CPU-limited is compiling, being faster at that saves me maybe a few minutes in a full working day; I don't care. I am frequently limited by RAM and I really hate shuffling things around to make space on drives.)
My Intel Mac Mini is still my "tv content" machine. Since it has no problem driving my Samsung OLED TV and keeping up with typical video framerates I suspect I will be holding on to it for many more years to come.
Are these games available on OSX? Or are you somehow booting Windows?
(Apologies if this seems like a stupid question. I've not played games for a very long time, mainly because most stuff doesn't seem to be available on Macs).
It's not a dumb question. I actually used to use an iMac 27" with an Nvidia 680 that I would boot into Bootcamp / Windows for my primary gaming computer. I covered it in "built, not bought" stickers at Quakecon one year.
You can't do x86/x64 Windows on M-series Macs without emulation and it is generally a poor experience. There's a few things like Crossover, Parallels, etc that can help you run Windows games.
But I have found that most of the games I care about are either Mac native or on GeForce Now at this point. There's a surprisingly large game catalog on Mac now.
So the short answer is that some of them run on some sort of Windows compatibility layer, some are Mac native, some I stream. But most of my favorites run native on Mac.
To be honest, there are so many games to play these days that I don't mind missing out on a few titles. Valorant is a good example of a game that I can't play on Mac, GFN, or Crossover. But it's OK, I still have CS2.
Yes — World of Warcraft, League of Legends and DotA 2 all have native macOS ports. WoW got an Apple Silicon port relatively recently IIRC (last expansion).
> Mac mini is made with over 50 percent recycled content overall, including 100 percent recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards, and 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. The electricity used to manufacture Mac mini is sourced from 100 percent renewable electricity. And, to address 100 percent of the electricity customers use to power Mac mini, Apple has invested in clean energy projects around the world. Apple has also prioritized lower-carbon modes of shipping, like ocean freight, to further reduce emissions from transportation. Together, these actions have reduced the carbon footprint of Mac mini by over 80 percent.
I’m inclined to trust Apple with this information but the skeptical side of me is questioning, how can we fact check this data? If it’s true it is very cool.
Third party auditors that come in to verify it. "We" probably can't verify it, but Apple more than likely has these claims audited so they are prepared when they get sued over them.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think it's a fair question.
The fine print says:
> Carbon reductions are calculated against a business-as-usual baseline scenario: No use of clean electricity for manufacturing or product use, beyond what is already available on the latest modeled grid; Apple’s carbon intensity of key materials as of 2015; and Apple’s average mix of transportation modes by product line across three years. Learn more at apple.com/2030.
https://www.apple.com/2030 which mostly seems to focus on the goal of being 100% carbon neutral in energy use.
It sounds like they're generally only looking at carbon emissions from _energy_ use in transportation and manufacturing, and they're probably using some sort of carbon offset to achieve that "net zero". They're probably also not counting carbon emissions from building construction and they're probably not counting carbon emissions from meat served at corporate events, etc.
Update: I found a breakdown for the Mac Mini (linked from the apple.com/2030 page).
What does it mean for the gold to be "recycled"? I get that the aluminum probably came for a pile of cans, but does this mean that the gold definitely came from a pile of electronics? Or could it be that they melted down a few old $20 coins from the US? It's not like a lot of gold ends up in landfills.
"According to the World Gold Council, recycled gold accounted for 28 percent of the total global gold supply of 4,633 metric tons in 2020; 90 percent of that recycled gold comes from discarded jewelry and the rest from a growing mountain of electronic waste such as cellphones and laptops."
But we offer base models with paltry memory and solder our ssds and ram modules (look at the ram/ssd chips next to the m chip itself under the heat spreader, they could make em low profile socketed for sure).
If we truly want to achieve zero emissions globally we need to take seriously all sources of CO2 emissions, the full carbon footprint of companies. Not just energy use.
It's not entirely unreasonable to ask companies to be responsible for carbon capture or in the short term an offset for their employees breathing on the clock, as funny as that sounds.
We need to take all sources of carbon emissions seriously. This shouldn't be downvoted.
As far as I am aware, there isn't a single competitor from big brand manufacture at $599 price point regardless of size. M4, 16GB RAM, Thunderbolt 4. The SSD is the main failing point but with TB4 you can easily get an external SSD. You can also get 10Gbps for extra $100. With EDU or Staff pricing this thing stars at $499. Which is practically a steal.
I am thinking it may be better for cooperate to buy this and run Windows on VM than buying a PC.
Considering iPad and iPhone has been replacing 99% of my workflow outside of office I am thinking if my next computer could be a mini rather than a Laptop.
I’m always confused as to why people are so paranoid about storage size. I got the base MacBook Air and an external 2TB drive for cheap. Super fast and I never worry about anything - I didn’t even manage to get up to 50% of my 256GB drive.
There is a generation of tech users that downloaded TB of media for local storage. It’s just not something a lot of people do anymore but it created a psychological need, even if it’s not a technical necessity.
Totally fine. I attached a 4TB SSD at 700-800 MiB/s for non-work files, never noticed anything slower unless it’s copying a huge file for 20 seconds instead of 5.
Apart from the huge price jump from M4 to M4 Pro, I really like this product line-up.
Last time I bought a Mac Mini was before the 2018 model got introduced, and I almost took it back in to get it exchanged (I was within 30 days of purchase when the 2018 model dropped), but it's been plugging away doing everything I have asked of it for 6 years, and it's still going strong. All the upgrades since have left me a little cool, but this genuinely looks like a contender for an upgrade. Only thing stopping me from getting the credit card ready is waiting to see what the M4 MacBook Air - which is inevitably going to be announced in the next 72 hours - looks like in comparison.
Readit News
I think this just became the go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop computer of any kind. In fact I might buy one for my parents right now to replace the old mac mini they have. I really can't think of any reasonable competition for it at that price.
Best investment you’ll ever make. They’re not all that expensive. Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions.
I feel it’s a travesty that workplaces spend thousands on fancy desks and chairs and cheap out on bargain basement monitors.
Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.
It comes at a large cost now, either more money than reasonable for one of the few compatible displays or accept a much worse experience, that is just not good for devices of this price. This is why a big affordable iMac is so necessary, but TC's Apple likes money too much to care about their legacy customers.
After such a long history of Mac OS having better font rendering and in general better graphic stack (Quartz, everything is basically a continuous PDF rendering) feels like a big letdown.
The problem is going to improve as more high-DPI displays are released for sale but it has taken a lot of time because most customers like to focus on other characteristics that are arguably more important for other use cases. There are plenty of premium display that are just good to great but you really have to think how it will work if you buy a Mac, most likely you'll need to compromise, feels bad considering the price of admition...
If you say it looks fine without it, I don't know what to say.
The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?
This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.
https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-5700U-Displays-Computers-Emul...https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-Desktop-Computer-Graphic...
I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro and they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros. Being RAM-starved might have something to do with it though.
> but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600.
I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind. For example, most NUCs from the likes of minisforum and Beelink ship with a single SSD but support multiple SSDs, with their cases also having room for SATA drives. They even go as far as selling barebones versions of their NUCs, where customers can then pick and choose which RAM and SSDs to add.
You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.
Why exactly?
What are a "lot of people" storing on their computers these days? Photos are in the cloud or on our phones. Videos and music are streaming. Documents take up no space. Programs are in the cloud (for the most part).
Nice size. The Beelink has better reviews. Any name brands?
This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum.
I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten, but not "easily"), and also supports memory upgrades of up to 256GB.
1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...
Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies.
Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.
1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface)
2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer
So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game console.
[0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/
These days the only reasons I see to get a desktop are
1. You need some combination of power/thermals or expandability
2. Kiosks, public computers, etc
3. Cost? Maybe?
For pretty much any regular person in my life who's open to a mac, I'd point them towards a MacBook Air
1. can use a smartphone for all mobile tasks
2. see better on a large screen
3. are more comfortable with a mouse than a trackpad
4. don't have to worry about spilling tea on a laptop or dropping it on the floor. A keyboard is cheap to replace if that happens.
Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education.
Mac mini with M4 Pro starts at $1,399 (U.S.) and $1,299 (U.S.) for education.
> Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education. Additional technical specifications are available at apple.com/mac-mini.
> go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop
Can anybody get it with educational pricing?
Not really. Do a quick googling for cheap miniPCs from brands such as minisforum or Beelink. Years ago they were selling Ryzen5 and Intel i5 with 16BG of RAM for around $300. No "educational software" bullshit either, just straight from Amazon to anyone who bothered to click on a button.
But I wouldn't recommend it to people who are not used to it.
I tried to recommend Linux, with XFCE setup as basically windows, and people complain. Same for ChromeOS.
Perhaps you should check out some Beelink and GMKTec Mini PC Systems.
For half that price I can get a used Dell/HP/Lenovo mico/tiny PC with a full i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 256SSD.
Still good to see. Great for an office PC or HTPC.
Dead Comment
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https://x.com/LinaAsahi/status/1820947147312820497
The base model is 256 gb. You can see it here:
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
Upgrade your memory and connect it externally over USB-C. It works brilliantly
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.
What they shot was us. My 14 Pro won’t do AI despite having a better NPU than an M1, all because Apple chose - intentionally - to ship it with too little RAM. They knew AI was coming and they did this anyway.
Although having played with it on my MBP it’s clear I’m not missing much. But still.
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.
Today, the industry is moving toward unified memory. This trend includes not only Apple but also Intel, AMD with their APUs, and Qualcomm. Pretty much everyone.
To me, the benefits are clear:
- Reduced copying of large amounts of data between memory pools.
- Improved memory usage.
- Generally lower power consumption.
I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.
And besides, what Apple is doing is placing the RAM really close to the SoC, I think they are on the same package even, that was not the case on the PC either AFAIK?
1. Interesting that they did not have this as part of an event. I think this either means they do not have much else to share around the Mac right now or the opposite, there just won't be room to talk about the iMac or Mac Mini. I am leaning towards the former as a I suspect the other computers in their lineup will just receive a spec bump soon.
2. On the product page (https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/) Apple highlights a number of third party accessories. Notably the PS5 controller and several keyboards and mice from different manufacturers. This seems small, but it would have been almost blasphemy under the jobs era.
3. This is quite the little powerhouse. Honestly it is so good it eliminates the need for most people to even consider the Mac Studio.
I feel like Jobs was a lot more pragmatic than we give him credit for. I mean we had the HP iPods, iTunes on Windows etc.
And the iMac's catch copy was "BYODKM" at the very start, fully putting the spotlight on third parties and composability.
I think you meany Mac mini there. It was definitely built as the gateway into the Mac ecosystem. Swap your tower for a Mac mini, and keep using the rest of your old hardware.
https://www.apple.com/leadership/greg-joswiak/
and you can remoteplay to your ps5 (or ps4) which also works great if your internet isnt terrible
Mac Studio and Mac Pro are getting upgrades next year apparently.
The mac book air with the M chip was absolutly a steal already. I'm surprised by this.
Is that some thing to allow cheaper MX / Arm architecture in DCs? Is getting Apple affordable oO?!
My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. Runs many games like WoW, Dota, League of Legends, etc great. Anything that it doesn't run due to MacOS I use GeForce Now over ethernet. And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value.
Very excited to see how the GPU has improved in the M4, especially the Pro model.
Linux GeForce Now can only do 720p or 1080p, can't remember which. Also, it's just kind of laggy in desktop mode. The Macs run so much smoother.
My current "main" desktop is actually my Asus ROG Ally. I use one USB C hub that is capable of 4k120hz, and I can move it between my Mac laptops and Asus ROG Ally very seamlessly.
The problem for me is Windows. Yesterday my start menu stopped loading for some reason and required a full reboot. Sometimes it refuses to go to sleep. Sometimes it refuses to come out of sleep. Sometimes a Windows update kicks off in the middle of a game and it slows everything to a crawl. Windows drives me crazy these days!
Can you elaborate? Thinking of setting up a MacMini for my kids but worried about lack of gaming options for them (I haven't gamed on a Mac in a dozen years and the state of gaming on MacOS was sad back then).
Here's a list of my most played games on my Mac in the last couple of years:
WoW, Hearthstone, Dota 2, League of Legends, Thronefall, Vampire Survivors, Baldur's Gate 3, Cult of the Lamb, Balatro, Death Must Die, Terraria, Dave the Diver, Mechabellum, Space Haven, Hades 2, Peglin, Stellaris, RimWorld, Dead Cells, Total War: Warhammer 2, Valheim, Civilization 6, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve Together, Cities: Skylines, Oxygen Not Included, SUPERHOT.
Games I play through GeForce Now:
Fortnite, Diablo 4, WoW, Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077
The point of such an annoying long comment is to demonstrate that there is a very substantial Mac gaming library. The problem is that a new shiny game comes out that doesn't support Mac and you don't want to be the ONE guy in your group who can't play it because you're on Mac. The latest one for me is Deadlock. Not on GeForce Now, not on console, not on Mac... so I needed to get a Windows PC.
But if you're a kid and just looking for a general gaming machine, it plays a ton of cool stuff.
nvidias cloud gaming offering. it works pretty well
The free tier is mostly crap (you only get to play if no paid users are using the capacity pretty much), but the paid tiers go from good to excellent.
Its main selling point is that you don't need to buy games for it separately, you can use your existing Steam catalog for example.
I was just looking at a mac book air yesterday but I just can't get over the complete ripoff of a memory upgrade from the base model.
16 gig starting at $599. I honestly don't need to know anything else to buy one.
(The only thing I do often that's CPU-limited is compiling, being faster at that saves me maybe a few minutes in a full working day; I don't care. I am frequently limited by RAM and I really hate shuffling things around to make space on drives.)
(Apologies if this seems like a stupid question. I've not played games for a very long time, mainly because most stuff doesn't seem to be available on Macs).
You can't do x86/x64 Windows on M-series Macs without emulation and it is generally a poor experience. There's a few things like Crossover, Parallels, etc that can help you run Windows games.
But I have found that most of the games I care about are either Mac native or on GeForce Now at this point. There's a surprisingly large game catalog on Mac now.
So the short answer is that some of them run on some sort of Windows compatibility layer, some are Mac native, some I stream. But most of my favorites run native on Mac.
To be honest, there are so many games to play these days that I don't mind missing out on a few titles. Valorant is a good example of a game that I can't play on Mac, GFN, or Crossover. But it's OK, I still have CS2.
Updated with known P and E amounts.
Thanks HN for posting below.
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apples-new-mac-mini-i...
Maybe Apples CDN cache is stale but I only see M2 specs on that page.
M4 Pro 12-core = 8P, 4E
M4 Pro 14-core = 10P, 4E
I don't see it stated with the specific P vs E cores are for the 14-core version on:
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
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I’m inclined to trust Apple with this information but the skeptical side of me is questioning, how can we fact check this data? If it’s true it is very cool.
But ultimately its down to the third-party auditors they hire.
The fine print says:
> Carbon reductions are calculated against a business-as-usual baseline scenario: No use of clean electricity for manufacturing or product use, beyond what is already available on the latest modeled grid; Apple’s carbon intensity of key materials as of 2015; and Apple’s average mix of transportation modes by product line across three years. Learn more at apple.com/2030.
https://www.apple.com/2030 which mostly seems to focus on the goal of being 100% carbon neutral in energy use.
It sounds like they're generally only looking at carbon emissions from _energy_ use in transportation and manufacturing, and they're probably using some sort of carbon offset to achieve that "net zero". They're probably also not counting carbon emissions from building construction and they're probably not counting carbon emissions from meat served at corporate events, etc.
Update: I found a breakdown for the Mac Mini (linked from the apple.com/2030 page).
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_...
> 100 percent of manufacturing electricity is sourced from renewable energy
> For Mac mini, we are matching 100 percent of expected customer product use electricity with electricity from low-carbon sources.
They are counting transportation in the "100 percent", but are offsetting it with carbon credits.
"According to the World Gold Council, recycled gold accounted for 28 percent of the total global gold supply of 4,633 metric tons in 2020; 90 percent of that recycled gold comes from discarded jewelry and the rest from a growing mountain of electronic waste such as cellphones and laptops."
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It's not entirely unreasonable to ask companies to be responsible for carbon capture or in the short term an offset for their employees breathing on the clock, as funny as that sounds.
We need to take all sources of carbon emissions seriously. This shouldn't be downvoted.
I am thinking it may be better for cooperate to buy this and run Windows on VM than buying a PC.
Considering iPad and iPhone has been replacing 99% of my workflow outside of office I am thinking if my next computer could be a mini rather than a Laptop.
Last time I bought a Mac Mini was before the 2018 model got introduced, and I almost took it back in to get it exchanged (I was within 30 days of purchase when the 2018 model dropped), but it's been plugging away doing everything I have asked of it for 6 years, and it's still going strong. All the upgrades since have left me a little cool, but this genuinely looks like a contender for an upgrade. Only thing stopping me from getting the credit card ready is waiting to see what the M4 MacBook Air - which is inevitably going to be announced in the next 72 hours - looks like in comparison.
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