Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini
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Apple wants to onboard people into the new Apple ecosystem, which is iToys and backend services. They believe this will be better for you, not just for them. They control the iOS-based world in a way they could never control "computers". They're trying to get as many people as they can into their new Disneyland-ish ecosystem, where everything you do is approved and monitored and everything you buy is bought through them.
The low-end Mac seems to only matter now as a source of low-end users, who need carrot and stick to move them off Mac and onto iOS, so low-end Macs won't get better but low-end iOS devices will. I suspect we'll see touchscreen laptops running iOS pretty soon, and that will signal the end of low-end Macs.
The high-end Mac users have a better story, because Apple needs developers for their ecosystem, and those people need good tools. I can't imagine Apple being interested in developing dev tools that run on non-Apple devices, and I think they'll want an absolutely guaranteed source of computers with whatever features are needed to develop the best stuff for their ecosystem, so I think a high-end Mac product line will live on with each new version being a bit more iOS-like. If they want to keep the lockdown on iOS while retaining full power to develop for it, they will probably have to keep the less-locked-down macOS going for dev machines for a long time, but things like the Mac Mini have no place in this picture.
It got an SSD a few years ago, prolonging its life. It's probably been turned on for 90% of the time since I got it. Current uptime: 26 days.
If they release an update, I'll probably buy one.
Seems unlikely. From a 2016 interview:
> MacOS is meant to be operated with a mouse and keyboard. Apple says it doesn’t make sense to lean forward to touch your Mac screen. An iOS-powered iPad works best with fingers, which means you can just lean back while using it.
> “We did spend a great deal of time looking at this a number of years ago and came to the conclusion that to make the best personal computer, you can’t try to turn MacOS into an iPhone,” Schiller says. “Conversely, you can’t turn iOS into a Mac…. So each one is best at what they’re meant to be — and we take what makes sense to add from each, but without fundamentally changing them so they’re compromised.”
--https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/does-the-mac-still-matt...
Also, none of your quotes mention the impossibility of making an iOS device with yet another different form factor. It merely says that they won't merge the two OSes. Plus, even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't be the first time that Apple went back on a public statement while rebranding the backtracking as the invention of a whole new computing paradigm.
And I'm not talking PowerShell here. That thing is more a scripting language than a shell.
For situations where you want to be productive on a device, mouse and keyboard, desktop, big screen, proper seat all very important. For situations where someone consumes on a device, touch input, portability, small screen, headphones connectivity.
That seems to match the philosophical split for MacOS vs IOS, and maybe future developments can be best predicted by applying that lens.
Beware, simple frameworks like this might not capture the whole picture...
I would describe it more like a model. And yeah, those never capture the whole picture, and don't need to to be useful.
> heavy marketing of the new iPad as a content creation device for schools and creative people.
You can do creation of stuff on iPads, of course. I use it a lot as a very-portable writing machine. But still, I think that marketing was just... marketing. Every one wants to think of themselves as creators, and their kids to be doing things rather than watching YouTube, but still iPads are mostly used for consumption and are much better at it than at creation, except for a few jobs/hobbies.
A better counter argument, for me, would be to just watch a non-technical person use a Windows PC. Many would be better served by a safer, simpler iOS on a 20-inch screen with an ok keyboard.
We wouldn't, because we want a more-than-just-ok keyboard, and many windows, and bash, and a many-core CPU that is great at virtualization, and...
[1] Ring User is a Jared Spool term for non-core users--they are in a ring around the core. The Core/Ring more useful model than Expert/Novice, because expert conflates expertise in the tool with expertise in the domain area. https://articles.uie.com/multiple_personalities/
I've never met people that fall squarely into "producer" or "consumer", everyone you talk to has a creative hobby or three, and might be either a "producer" or a "consumer" at different times of day, or different moods, or as inspiration strikes.
It's a wide, diverse spectrum turned into a strange false dichotomy that leaves us with weird pseudo-categories like "prosumer" (and "conducer"?) middle grounds.
Maybe there is something about enforcing that dichotomy in leaving them to different contexts, different devices it forces you to switch hats in a physical visceral sense. Certainly studies say that such a forced context switch can be good for the brain to know it's time to X where X is produce or consume (or "prosume"?). Yet that seems a strange reason to force that on users. Is it anything more than an equivalent to "It's good for you, you must eat your vegetables before dessert?"
I naturally flow between consumption and production use cases, so why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?
It's an interesting philosophical split, but I'm curious how useful it is in the real world. Microsoft's "everyone can be a creator, everyone should be a creator, your devices should support you whatever you decide to do on the creation/consumption spectrum" reaction marketing seems the better approach to me, philosophically. I'm not defined by a "consumer" or "producer" 'gender', and I don't see why I should be.
How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?
I don't need my car to make me toast either (not intended with snark, just an extreme example).
Apple sees (and hopefully continues to) an actual divide even if the edges are a bit blurred. So the question here is whether or not the tablet needs to exist as a category... and I think it does, at least for me.
>why shouldn't the devices I use switch to my context instead of me switching to theirs?
Mostly because, in my opinion, every attempt to create a device that does that has resulted in failure, and those failures are due to fundamental opposing priorities with each 'mode'.
I may of course be wrong, in which case you're right this framework should be junked. But so far nobody's cracked both use cases well with a single setup, and the model holds. IMO.
>How does this philosophical split help Apple in the long term?
For a brand that's betting so heavily on the walled garden, ecosystem-based sales and marketing methods, having an 'answer' to every consumer need is essential to is to not have an answer for one of your customer's needs, ecause that opens the door for that customer to adopt something outside your ecosystem. Keep them within the curated suite of products you offer, and keep them happy, or you'll see attrition. Note all of the noise about the latest MBP devices and how they're no longer meeting the needs of many content creators, to see how tricky this can be.
And that iPad would never do stylus...
But Mac will never do touch, because they said so...?
If you had listened to Apple, the iPhone would forever be small enough to operate one-handed, the iPad would never go above or below 10", etc etc. All of that was true until it happened, and suddenly it was the best thing ever.
"If you see a tablet, and it has a stylus, then somebody did it wrong."
Fairly strong statements, too.
All that said, we all get to vote with our dollars :)
Touch on a laptop screen is a huge convenience, it's not a laptop identity problem. Sometimes tapping or scrolling a thing feels more natural, even on a laptop, even on any other screen that you own. Apple has used that very logic in their own marketing of the iPhone and iPad, that touching things is the more natural feel, that directly interacting with things on the screen is quite natural.
To a child growing up with iPhones and iPads, a screen without touch is "broken".
For an adult me, switching between a Windows laptop with touch to a macOS laptop without one takes a bit of mental gymnastics because I keep wanting to just tap the shiny icons to do things and I get briefly confused why the screen is broken when I try to touch them. I don't care how good you think a trackpad is, it's still sometimes faster to reach up and poke something with your pointer finger than track a pointer the long journey over to a thing. It's a nice convenience to have touch on the screen and do it directly.
Maybe that convenience doesn't interest you, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that convenience doesn't exist. (Plus, when you get into differently abled people you start to find people that that convenience starts to matter a lot more for their day-to-day happiness.)
Cheapest price for a prepaid iPhone SE right now: £244
Cheapest price for a Mac Mini right now: £479
...define "low-end"?
[Prices from Google Shopping]
The Mac mini is a great machine for iOS development; I do all mine on one.
I’m completely convinced that my 12 inch iPad Pro blows away my 2014 Mac mini in every respect. Mac mini has 8GB ram, and an SSD. Still doesn’t feel nearly as snappy as my iPad.
My 2010 MBAir is even worse.
They could turn macOS into an exclusive dev tool for their ecosystem. Currently it's basically the main dev platform for rivaling ecosystems like the web, and the companies in that space that compete with Apple.
A switch of the desktop architecture (they already announced that this will happen in the coming years) might enforce the apptore on iOS as well, and destroy the homebrew and third party scene.
Doesn't this already exist as the iPad Pro? Multitasking was introduced with the product line. They even heavily pushed the keyboard and pen.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJYR2LL/A/smart-keyboard-...
But in many ways its better than a laptop, especially around note taking and reading.
The iPad Pro is fine for limited tasks, including simple media creation. But there’s no way anyone is going to want to edit a Hollywood movie or record and mix a complex album on one.
https://paulstamatiou.com/made-on-an-ipad-pro/
It's pretty in line with your opinion; just a lot more detail.
This sounds so dystopic. I hope that being able to publish software without having to bow to a gatekeeper won't become a thing of the past.
And if iOS Safari (Apple's "gatekeeper" of last resort) falls too far behind, I'll take myself and the whole gang I serve as "IT installer, fixer, and advisor" for right out of Apple land.
As Mojave is getting iOS security model, Windows is merging the Win32 into UWP, ChromeOS and Android are turning into one OS, and who knows what they would do with Fucshia.
macOS is getting a new security runtime, the scope of Gatekeeper will be expanded, entitlements will be required for all security critical OS areas, application signing and registration even for apps distributed outside the store.
For Mojave, it will still be opt-in, later versions depends on how it will received.
"Your Apps and the Future of macOS Security"
I like having fun and I love my iPad. I only ever touch a computer at work and that’s the way I like it.
I don't think iOS is perfect by any means, but I take Apple's Draconian measures along with the the long term stability and higher app quality. It's the best mobile OS on the market for me. I still won't get the iPhone X because of the price and face ID replacing touch ID. I'd probably pay to replace the battery and use this phone for another 2 years. It's nice that I can reasonably count on that.
The closed system is what I want and I'm happy to pay a premium for it.
If you want a few players to control the gateway to most future communications and culture so that your kids will have to work harder to see boobs online then i question your judgment.
Yes
> are you sure that this will always be so?
No
> so that your kids will have to work harder to see boobs online then i question your judgment.
I won't be having kids but thank you for worrying about them.
The thing is the vast majority of Mac customers don't know what a clock speed is, don't know the difference between RAM memory and Flash memory, and don't care, and are buying these things by the truckload. Apple has always been tardy about hardware updates. It looks like right now they really have actually dropped the ball, and at last they recognised that with the Mac Pro. However all the actual evidence points to this is simply a miscalculation, not a conscious choice.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2051 https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/50
Does anyone know of a decent iPhone benchmark? I'd be very interested in comparing their hardware to other CPUs, but none of the benchmarks I know run on iPhones. And the people who know what they're doing, e.g. Phoronix, don't test much mobile hardware.
They don't provide source though. That's a detriment. It would be nice if their benchmarks were publicly audit-able.
I've seen this claim before. The only way it makes sense to me is that the Apple chip has a much more powerful integrated GPU than then AMD one.
I suspect that the GPU in CPUs meant for computers are more optimized for things like yield, since anyone looking for performance can just buy an expansion card. Phone SOCs don't have this luxury, so they're probably pushed to the performance limit when it comes to graphics
To be clear - this is just a guess - but it's the only one I can think of that makes sense.
> Inside the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, there's a new six-core A11 Bionic chip... There are two performance cores that are 25 percent faster than the A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7, and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster.[1]
They've added 2 low-power cores, and made the cores faster than the previous version. Normally, only one set of cores could operate at once.
> The A11 features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8-A six-core CPU, with two high-performance cores at 2.39 GHz, called Monsoon, and four energy-efficient cores, called Mistral.[1][6][4] The A11 uses a new second-generation performance controller, which permits the A11 to use all six cores simultaneously,[8] unlike its predecessor the A10.[2]
Here, the 2 high-power and 4 low-power cores can all operate at once, alongside the 3-core GPU - 2 cores of which can assist ML tasks too.
> There's a new Apple-designed 3-core GPU that's 30 percent faster than the previous-generation GPU, and two of the cores, the Neural Engine, make machine learning tasks faster than ever.[1,ibid]
Not sure how much power it consumes in that mode, but it's reported to use half the energy of the A10.
> In terms of graphics performance, the GPU is said to be 30% faster than last year’s, while consuming half the power when working at the same rate as the A10.[3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-8/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11
[3] http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/apple-a11-processor-specs...
Yes, a 3 watt CPU is better than a 40 watt CPU.
If no such test is reasonable I have no inclination to accept a, flawed one whose source is secret and methodology flawed.
That's a tiny amount in comparison to all the other pieces like cache, ultrawide SIMD units, and bus interfaces; and given that it acts as a sort of "decompressor" interfacing the slower memory containing denser instructions with the faster core and its wide uops, I'd say those transistors are quite well spent.
Add the volume of the NUC's hideous and ungainly power supply brick. Then make your judgement on size.
If you've taken a mini apart, you'd see that the easiest way volume could be significantly reduced is by replacing the space for two 3.5" drives with space for one modern NVME gum stick - a trick which the already NUC does thanks to its being developed more recently.
The mini has Thunderbolt and and digital audio in/out. The NUC has neither of these.
If you compare the interior of the mini and the NUC, the NUC does not stand out as an marvel of engineering or miniaturization.
Anyway, whose desk cannot fit a mac mini?
Sufficiently-small-form-factor computers become "AIO enablement dongles", in the sense that you can stick one to the back of a monitor or TV (much like a "compute stick") and now that monitor or TV is an AIO PC. People use NUCs in that use-case quite a lot.
Sufficiently-SFF computers are also used as kiosks, for POS systems, and other embedded use-cases. This isn't really the "pitch" behind the Mac Mini, but it's something the NUC is quite good at.
The NUC I am using at the moment (a NUC7I5BNK) has Thunderbolt 3.
The current Mac mini is stuck with Thunderbolt 2 and doesn't have any USB-C ports either.
And speaking of all in ones, the iMac doesn't have a power brick either. If you screw your NUC to the back of a monitor/tv you will end up with two power bricks if you're unlucky. They may fit under the desk, or the cable may be too short and you'd have to keep one or both on the desk. I don't see the advantage.
Apple has other, significant problems right now, but the devices not being mini enough isn't one of them.
I can't plug my MacBook in under my desk because it's one two-pronged and it's super heavy so it falls down.
I don't care if it has a power brick or not, just make it easy to plug in. Bonus: a cable material that is designed to withstand years of use not months; their cables are no better than the competition and they have a crazy failure rate.
And how in the world do they not have a grounded plug?
The Intel NUC is also a desktop (well, non battery operated) computer, not a laptop.
I don't care about the big power brick because it's hidden behind my TV desk along with my other power bricks (game console, sound system, etc.)
Right now the Mac Mini starts at £479, but the cheapest with a SSD is £859, don't forget that's without a keyboard/mouse/keyboard.
That's what's annoying about Apple hardware and great about PCs in a nutshell: the constant need to put facile design looks above actual usability. Why should I have to fiddle around the back every time I want to plug or unplug a usb device?
It's disappointing to see only 4 USB ports on the high-end Mac Pro, when high-end PC motherboards are available with double-digit numbers of USB ports.
Aside from that: enjoy your botnets.
_If_ your USB usage is not 'often plugging/unplugging stuff into the port', then having the ports in the back is better for usability and the like.
Of course this doesn't work if the bet they make is wrong (see MBP dongles)
iCloud, and a wall-wart is probably going to charge faster, also wireless charging
> headphones
Bluetooth
> 2FA authenticators
TouchID
> cameras
iCloud Photo Stream
> gamepads
Bluetooth (or a custom wireless protocol)
> printers
WiFi, also printers are very uncommon these days outside of the office
They put them at the back because to them how it looks in the Apple Store is more important than their users being irritated every time they use it.
I don't want to shell out like $1200 for a dumb macbook that I don't use, but I would be happy to shell out $500 for a Keynote machine.
For me, Keynote/Pages are the killer apps that only macOS has. iMessage/FT is the killer app that the Apple ecosystem has. Having a cheap entry to them is a great idea.
If you want your slides to be minimal and clean and you don't have a lot of time to do, then Markdown works. To me, over time I am convinced that having the ability to do animations to explain technical ideas is great. While it's not impossible to do fly in/out/moving animations in LaTEX, presentation software makes it ten times easier to maintain.
I think that not everything is best explained in code. Sometimes you need pictures/animations to convey the ideas.
Do you have an example slide? Just trying to understand what you mean.
https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen
Sorry, the slide is clipped for some reason, but that's because I don't know how to configure OBS. It's not the best illustration ever, but you probably get the idea.
Here is an animation that isn't mine and I think it's really well done to explain a hard idea (not necessarily in PPT):
(also, the 8-bit guy is great!)
... which can be quite an adventure if you get the latest generation & don't do this kind of stuff on a regular basis. You basically have to disassemble the whole machine!
Not much more than an expensive LEGO project, but with significantly fewer parts and usually more available documentation!
Pages is good, useable, nice, but not worth buying a Mac for.
Modern Apple in a nutshell, really.
Re: screens, students are really rough on equipment, and laminated screens like those in iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro are quite expensive to replace. The iPad has the glass/digitizer separated from the screen which lowers repair costs significantly.
That being said with the ending of Airports and Apple branded displays it appears first party accesories arent as important as I thought. I’m not entirely sure why it’s being left to stagnate.
The iPad at $329 is an odd exception to Apple’s typical rules, I’ll admit. There’s a large price divide between it and the iPad Pro without there being a comparatively huge feature divide, making it kind of unique in Apple’s lineup.
They are fantastic, beautiful and small machines that have worked reliably for 6-7 years. (as has Ubuntu!)
At the time of purchase the Mac Mini was the best combination of small size and still fairly decent CPU/GPU firepower.
I also have upgraded them to full SSD and 8gig ram.
Of course, I will get a NUC whenever they need replacing, but I don't see that happening anytime soon...
Hadn't thought about that. Would be awesome if it would be possible to run arbitrary software on that little TV box, e.g. use it as a real, powerful (for the size), cheap general purpose personal computer.
- run VM's on Apple TV it would be great.
- use multiple ATVs, you mighe be able to get around not having 16 GB of ram.
Still, 32 GB in an Intel NUC is very attractive.
Sorry for slideshow, but https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/want-a-more-powerful-r...
It's about the size of a 3DS, has an Intel Core m3 Kaby Lake dual core 2.6Ghz CPU with integrated GPU, 8GB of RAM and a swappable m.2 SSD. Plus built in screen, keyboard, game controller etc. Has an HDMI port, USB and so on so you can connect it to more comfortable I/O devices when using it from a fixed location.
Runs Windows 10 so you can probably get a Linux prompt on it.
Weighs 1 pound and can run GTA V at playable speeds, ~$700 or the same as a mid-tier Mac Mini. The same manufacturer also produces a few other pocketable-portables.
I think it's important to understand that a no-name manufacturer can do this, Apple should be able to do it as a rounding error in their sleep.
I'm also still hanging onto my Macbook Air, which to me is the epitome of laptop design.
An HD Netflix stream has about the same bitrate as a DVD, but has drastically better image quality. Modern codecs are extremely efficient in terms of bandwidth, but that comes at the cost of computational complexity. Decoding HEVC or VP9 is far from a simple task; hardware acceleration of video decoding is absolutely crucial for power-constrained devices like smartphones and laptops.
Right, but as with every codec, the cost is always heavily skewed towards encoding the stream.
>Decoding HEVC or VP9 is far from a simple task; hardware acceleration of video decoding is absolutely crucial for power-constrained devices like smartphones and laptops.
I don't believe that decoding video streams should come anywhere close to saturating a modern CPU in 2018. The hardware acceleration you mentioned isn't magic, and doesn't use any crazy tech either. Its going to be some kind of low powered ARM chip on MediaTek SoCs like the MT8581.
If Apple were to actually upgrade/update the Mini with new CPUs and a smaller form factor, I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade finally. Those Intel NUCs are starting to get real appealing to me, but I'm not ready to jump to Windows or Linux for my home machines...
Might be worth just riding it out until the next Mac mini that runs on A* cpu's instead arrives.
That said, I'm ready to move over to a Linux Desktop now if Apple ditches the product entirely. I don't want to, but I know I'll do fine with it.
The whole App Store / iTunes archipelago, the willful rejection of expandable and [easily] user-serviceable hardware design in favor of a 'form before function' approach, the related planned obsolescence strategy [e.g., older hardware simply will not run recent software; new OS breaks older 3-party software], and the ghastly overpricing were among the factors that drove me off.
Mainly, I liked MacOS because I prefer putting work into projects as opposed to maintaining my own system, and MacOS "just works," until it doesn't. These days though, I run an idiotresistant distribution of Linux on my productivity machine, a minimal one on my 'learning' machine, and am generally more content. Also, running Linux, I feel less like I'm directly interfacing with a villain from 'Black Mirror'
It's been a death by a thousand cuts staying with Apple these past few years. iOS is completely locked down (and shows no signs of relenting) and I only see them moving MacOS in the same direction. Their sub-par, insulting hardware offerings only further cement my view that they no longer give a crap about what the Mac used to be. So, like you, I'm out. It was a fun ride. I've been on-board since System 7.
Good call on the Thinkpad -- after I got my T61 in the mail a few weeks ago and realized immediately that its ergonomics were vastly superior to my MBPs' which cost a heck of a lot more, I was like "gee, maybe I should have taken a hard look at this issue sooner..."
If your spouse left you 4 years ago, would you still be waiting for them?
Meanwhile see https://press.ext.hp.com/us/en/press-releases/2016/hp-unveil... for what others were doing in that form factor 2 years ago...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12226/intels-hades-canyon-nuc...
The number of ports on that thing is crazy. Two displayport 1.3 and two thunderbolt 3 ports, to start with.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12226/front_back_575px.png
A lot of people are saying that Apple doesn't make a better Mac Mini because they're worried it would cannibalize their iMac/Mac Pro sales.
But if your entry level machine is providing more value for $ than your pricier models, then perhaps there's a problem with those model.
Just looking at the iMac lineup in Canada and the prices are insane for what you get. Just for example, the basic 21.5" iMac, when upgraded to a SSD, costs $1700 CAD.
Ummmm, no. That's implausible. There's no plausible way to "drive people" from a $700 computer to a $3000 computer. They're entirely different classes of buyer.
You’re thinking consumers, not businesses. Businesses or professionals will buy the tool they need to fulfill their use cases. The Mac Mini was an ideal developer workstation. So your choice was, buy the more expensive model or find some other business to be in.
Is a Hackintosh an option for Mojave?
I’m not all that fond of the Magic Keyboard (mine failed after a completely minor spill), but that’s an easy enough fix.
Especially because my maxed out 2011 Mini apparently has similar geekbench results as the current entry-level Mini, which certainly isn't true on iOS.
So maybe what I'm most upset about is that the Mini + Pro haven't had updates in so long, but the software side is behaving like they don't have an ancient product line.
The replacement is a NUC from last year (NUC7i5BNK), but there did not seem to be any point installing macos on it - over the years Apple seem to have crammed in a lot of stuff that I don't like and made it much worse as a small cheap unix workstation.
It's running FreeBSD instead and the difference in size / performance / efficiency is remarkable. It's sad that Apple have let the mac mini line die such a slow protracted death, but unless you are determined to be walled inside Apple's ecosystem there is very little reason to get one.
It would make sense that the Apple TV is so much more powerful considering Apple pours so much into custom ARM chip design and OS development. MacOS doesn't work on ARM, and it doesn't seem like Apple is interested in porting it. Seems more likely the new Mini, if there ever is one, would be ARM based.
FTFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPAsWAcmrlE
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jul/19/ipad-prot...
Apple has a history of denying something until it is working to their satisfaction.
So while I agree that updates to the Mini are being held back by a pending ARM transition, I don’t think it’ll run iOS. It’ll run macOS for ARM.
Do you think they’re still the same Apple though?
Again, I think that Apple is a very different beast even since then ...
That's more than 10 years ago. It takes a certain level of competence to actually execute upon this. I wouldn't call it a done deal.
Most importantly, Intel charges a premium for ultra-low power chips. If Apple can make a chip that's 80% of the performance for a couple hundred less per unit, it's a great deal. Moving everything to a unified ISA reduces design and developer costs and increases total control (aka vendor lock-in) which also increases profits.
HomeKit uses one of those 3 devices to allow external access to your local sensors. For instance, I get notifications when the front door is opened and closed. I can unlock it remotely too. Am slowly adding extra sensors.
From the cousin comment: > security video peripherals See HomeCam https://homecam.app
Unfortunately you can't run any old app in the background on any of these closed devices. I have a quad-core Mini that does duty as media library, software update caching, video encoding and photo export... if I could do those on an ATV it would be great.
I haven't bought into any home automation hubs yet, it just doesn't seem quite there in terms of being worth it from any of the vendors, and I think if it were, I'd just run a full up server for a central hub.
In the 2010-ish time, there was a huge mystery corporation looking into buying MIPS before it was ripped into pieces (with the actual MIPS design team going to Imagination Technologies). It's worth considering that ARMv8 64-bit is extremely similar to the MIPS ISA.
Insiders have expressed surprise at Apple's progress. It takes 4-5 years to make and launch a new architecture (and A7 was completely new in every aspect). The starting mark for a third-party design should be from Oct 2011 when the ARMv8 ISA was announced. What's the actual time to a shipping product?
* Apple A7 -- (Sept 2013) 1 year 11 Months
* A53 -- (mid 2014) 2.5 years
* Apple A8 -- (Sept 2014) 3 years
* A57 -- (Q1 2015) 3.5 years
* Apple A9 -- (Sept 2015) 4 years
* Kryo -- (Dec 2015) 4 years 3 months
* A72 -- (Q1 2016) 4.5 years -- basically a fixed A57
How did Apple design such a fast chip in less than 2 years? They did not. Even Intel with a virtually unlimited budget, many more designers, and in-house fabs can't make that happen (PA Semi was good, but not that good). Apple had to know about the new ISA when apparently no other companies did. If ARM told only Apple about the upcoming ISA, that could easily run afoul of regulators.
Here's what I speculate happened. ARMv7 is holding back chip design. Apple looks into buying MIPS because its a great ISA, but changing architectures without backward compatibility is super risky (this was during the app war period). You don't do risky if you don't have to.
Start designing a chip using a new ISA that's very similar to MIPS (a known good starting point to reduce design time). Approach ARM with the options. You can turn that ISA into a new MIPS ISA pretty easily or you can hand over that ISA for ARM to release with guaranteed backward compatibility. Between the long-time business connections, fear of losing Apple, and the fact that it's a good design, ARM agrees. MIPS is divided up with ARM buying rights to most of their patents (basically eliminating the chances of ARM getting sued over ISA similarities).
ARM starts on their own designs and releases the ISA 6-10 months later. Apple chips launch when expected (and have a multi-year lead). ARM chips launch when expected given a few months insider info. Kryo and other third-party cores launch when expected compared to the ISA release.
> Calling the Mac Mini “mini” is absurd in 2018.
The rest of it I agree with though and am patiently awaiting for a new mini or a better pro.
Sadly, I believe that this statement is true not just for Mac Mini, but for the whole "pro"/desktop line of computers.
Ultimately I chose to keep using an older macbook pro as my main driver and installed linux to run things that were too slow for Vagrant/VMs.
[Edit] Upon reflecting on this article and my (theoretical) experience, I'm going to do a little reading into how well supported AMD APUs are (i.e. Ryzen 5 2400g).
That's the definition of dead for any line of computer products - sure you might be able to buy one now, but if there are no more iterations coming then the product (line) is dead.
What does it matter if the vendor is going to, or not going to, offer a similar-but-updated one in a few years?
OSX is a much better operating system than Windows.
So Im stuck with buying from Apple and Mac Mini was their entry level cost machine, that's why it matters.
But I still don't get it. Suppose in two years time, Apple axes the Mac Mini; but today the mini meets your needs. In three years time, you will have to shop around for whatever MacOS supporting computer meets your needs then, but you'll have to do that regardless of which Mac you buy today.
Now it might matter if you are considering switching OSes. I.e. you fear that in a few years time, MacOS will support no computers that meet your needs. In that case, you might consider making your peace with Linux (or even Windows!) today.
For my purposes, and by my personal measures, OSX is far and away the very best OS out there. I therefore will buy whatever computer I must to use that OS. Nothing else matters to me.
I'll use myself as an example. I've written some scientific visualisation software, which uses OpenGL. It uses Qt and works on multiple platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS X and Windows. Should I continue to support MacOS and invest in Mac hardware to do so?
Right now, Apple have just deprecated OpenGL; maybe they will drop it entirely in a few years. Their hardware is anæmic, with low end GPUs and not much memory. I'm not going to invest in Metal support given the lacklustre hardware support for high end visualisation. I'm also not sure I'll have that many users on the platform, particularly if it doesn't get some serious improvements. You can order or build an excellent PC and run the software on any other operating system of your choice and have it run circles around the Mac in terms of performance and capabilities. So on balance, I'm retaining support for the moment, but I will almost certainly drop it in the next year or two unless they up their game.
Sad really, MacOS X was wonderful a decade back. Today, it's an outdated and poorly-maintained, buggy mess. And the hardware story is tragic.
As a consumer, from a long-term perspective, I would never choose OSX because it has no history of backwards compatibility. So I would never choose OSX for running my line of business applications.
Yes, you can buy one, but you'd be paying too much for 2014 hardware.
iMacs are almost definitely a minority compared to laptops (Apple doesn't break out sales by model), but since Apple is selling somewhere north of 10 million Macs/year, there have to be several million iMacs in active use.
- 93% of my customers have a laptop
- 70% of desktop users have an iMac
Graphs: https://imgur.com/a/H0N0BZy
That's because it's literally the only option which isn't several years out of date.
The only desktop machine they have is the Mac Pro, and that is rarely updated.
Mac Mini? It's a laptop device in a different form factor. iMac? Same thing.
EDIT: Forgot about the iMac Pro.
At the end of the day, they aren’t really selling it for the hardware. Otherwise it’d be like 6mm thick, half the footprint and three times as fast.
Or has the ardour been fading on a longer time scale?
Sure, they work. I gave me Grandma my old iMac and she uses it to this day. But it's impossibly slow, as is my 2015 iMac that I'm writing this on.
Restarting this $2500 computer takes several minutes, opening applications takes similar period of time. The computer lags when you open ANY save dialog. Even opening finder takes about 1 second.
Meanwhile I also have a five year old Windows PC I built myself, restarts in under 15 seconds. As soon as I see my desktop I can launch any application instantly.
I like using OSX but it's fucking slow.
In fact, performance has gotten slightly better for me on my 2013 MacBook Pro, especially after the Metal/APFS upgrade after High Sierra. And I’ve been upgrading since Mavericks now, not doing a clean install.
The SSD makes a huge difference in response time. It’s the only reason I’m still using my 5 year old MacBook Pro which has a PCIe SSD and I have no plans to upgrade other than to maybe get TB3 support.
I actually do real development on it, running multiple applications, running Xcode builds, the lot. It does everything I throw at it like a champ.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the 2-3 but that’s definitely not what you should be getting from a modern PC/Mac, especially if they have an SSD.
I have a 2012 MacBook Air, 8GB, 256GB SSD still works great, had to replace the battery, but that's all. I run virtual machines on it, edit photos and video, no major problems with it speed wise.