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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

It's doubly frustrating, because Intel does basically all the work for them (even designing some of their NUCs to match a Mac Mini size and power/thermal limits). Apple could just ride the Intel product roadmap each year, with very little effort, and people would be happy enough.

But Apple can't be bothered to do even that.

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In comparison, Intel basically made a "Mac Mini Pro" called the Hades Canyon NUC. Which is roughly the same price as a high-end Mac Mini, but has 2x-6x the compute power (depending on how you'd like to measure it). https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...

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I just recently bought a Hades Canyon specifically because Apple doesn't upgrade the Mac mini, won't drop the price, and made it less user-serviceable. I would have dropped the cash on a Mac mini if it had the Kaby Lake G and could at least be upgraded to 32GB of ram. But instead Intel got my $1k. It's a shame, since now I'm back on Ubuntu and probably won't look back. I can use my wife's MBA to compile and distribute my iOS apps when I need to.

It sounds like a dremel tool when the fans are spun up, which will be often.

Where Apple excels is at system design, the Mini has a good balance between cooling capacity and noise. One of the reasons I bought the Mini was it's near-silence during typical desktop loads. Even when it's doing a build, the fan noise is lower-frequency and less annoying than the whine of the tiny fans in most of these NUCs.

I've never really heard the fan at all, a light wooshing occasionally during compilation. I often have 20-30 tabs open on chrome, vs code, Android studio, gimp, an Android emulator, four or five terminals, a BEAM VM, a redis instance, postgres, and sometimes a node server. This is with Ubuntu 18.04 with Gnome.

Only thing I could think is driver support for the Vega M graphics hasn't landed yet so I only have a basic graphics driver - I guess I'll see when kernel 4.18 comes out.

The Skull Canyon NUC is exactly what I'm thinking of. A MacOS version of that would be really great and like you say, seems fairly 'easy' for Apple to do seeing as Intel is doing so much with the form factor anyway.

FWIW, the refresh of the Skull Canyon, aka "Hades Canyon" is even more impressive than its predecessor.

Thanks, that is the unit I intended to mention above (the one with the integrated AMD GPU), but I mixed up the name. Corrected it above.

Didn't realise that there was a refresh, I'll take a look.

The jaggies on the product page image hurt my eyes.

Excellent computer though, can also be VESA mounted to the back of a monitor, something that you would never be able to do with an Apple product. Also very easy to open the box to put your RAM + M2 + SSD in, again something Apple would never make easy for you.

Apart from the special Mac OS I don't see how Apple could really improve on this type of product in a functionally useful way. Making it fiddly to upgrade and slapping an Apple logo on it would please the devoted but isn't really improving it.

Draws 100 W, not comparable to any Mac Mini. More to a “Midi.” But it is ugly.

Intel NUCs comparable to the Mac Mini only draw 15W to 30W (depending on the model), similar to a Mac Mini. See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits... for examples.

The super high end NUC, the "Mac Mini Pro" comparable model mentioned above is a specialty unit with its 100W draw.

A regular Mac Mini draws 85 watts. What's 15W between friends? https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

> But it is ugly

Isn't that just the case?

Intel sell the NUC in a couple of variants, the "kit", with an 'ugly' case or the "board".

With the latter they could design a beautiful Apple-looking case around it.

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