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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

I agree on the top level that a desktop computer in 2018 is actually probably more niche and pro focused than laptops, which have become the default computers for people.

But Apple has the iMac Pro and the upcoming Mac Pro update. So, what would a pro-focused Mac Mini be? It would need the reliability of a desktop machine, something the laptops have struggled with.

I guess I could see this being useful for someone who wants external displays, but doesn't need that much power.

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Apple does have one fairly unusual pro-level use case, which is that you need to have a macOS machine if you want to develop iOS applications. Having a relatively low-cost (i.e. under $1,000) macOS machine you can plug into an existing monitor and keyboard makes iOS development easier to get into for people and companies who aren't already 100% Apple-focused. A reasonably spec'ed updated Mac Mini would fill that niche nicely.

Just a different form factor for the new macbook without a display, maybe $700?

> Apple does have one fairly unusual pro-level use case, which is that you need to have a macOS machine if you want to develop iOS applications.

Which is a completely artificial requirement and it's a shame people are forced to patch VMvare just to run macOS, sometimes just for the final stages before uploading the app to the App Store.

I assume it'd look at lot like Intel's high end NUC models. Small case, Thunderbolt 3 port. Maybe multiple TB3 ports?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAE4N7YU8...

And it could actually be "Mini", which is increasingly a stretch for the current design from 8 years ago. The Apple TV is probably smaller and more powerful if you could run a general purpose OS on it.

NUC is all I want out of Apple, and I would definitely (eventually) buy a Pro Mini. I take my "laptop" to work and home every day, but I plug into bigger monitor and better keyboard. However, because the latest gen laptop keyboards are so terrible, even when I want portability I use my older gen and smaller size MacBook Pro. This has led me to realize that my needs for a portable home<->work machine differ from my needs of programming anywhere. I want two machines, and I don't want the other machine to even have a screen.

I'm excited for the potential here.

Perhaps just carring the hdd around will be a interesting option

But why reduce the size? Apple has tvOS for the living room now. The Mini is already tiny enough that you can comfortably carry it around in a backpack, or hide it behind your screen. I find it hard to see any gains beyond that.

If Apple keeps the current chassis, they could either make it more silent, or more powerful. Both would be fantastic for a pro machine.

Edit: I wouldn't even mind a slightly larger machine. The HP Z2 Mini G4 looks like it's going to be a great six-core workstation.

>But why reduce the size? Apple

You answered your own question.

Oh, I almost expect Apple to make it too thin to be useful. But I've seen people actively hope for a smaller Mini on Twitter before, and I don't understand that sentiment. What's the market for a tiny $1000 desktop Mac?

Yeah laptops I understand, I travel for work and the thinner and lighter is all the better for my specific use case. For desktops, I've never even understood the case for the Intel NUC. Isn't it just a headless laptop? And they don't seem to be substantially cheaper than a laptop, and a laptop is easy to just tuck away on/under your desk if you want it out of sight, so what's the point?

I'm sure someone is using them for something, but I've never fretted how big a stationary computer is.

All the relevant ports are on the back instead of split between the left and the right. Plus, they're purchased bare bones so you can add in however much storage and RAM you want which is an increasingly hard to find option on a laptop.

They also have somewhat better cooling than laptops because they're so thick, and you can buy silent passive cooling cases for them.

I have a 2013 NUC that I used as a desktop PC for a few years. What I found nice is that it came with its own VESA bracket, so I could mount it on the back side of my monitor to produce something that looks like an all-in-one PC or iMac.

Actually a tiny Mac Mini which could plug into an iPad as a screen is an interesting work "machine." That would be pluggable into a real setup at home.

Why would it not get smaller? Intel makes their NUCs the size that they are because that's the size of the components these days.

It's not like Apple's going to make the new Mac Mini three times the size it needs to be and stuff a bunch of 3.5" HDD bays in for people who want to use it as a file server.

Smaller with fewer components and everything soldered/glued together is a cheap way to build smaller and cheaper at the cost or repairability, and Apple clearly doesn't care about repairability. They've said that the Mac Pro redesign will be more modular, but I don't see them doing that here.

Agreed about repairability. What we don't know is whether Apple cares about noise. Powerful laptops and Intel's high-end NUCs suffer from fan noise under load[1]. One of the advantages of non-tiny desktop machines is that they can afford better cooling solutions.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/7ga2q9/skull_cany...

I'd bet on the cooling looking something like the Apple TV 4K's does:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+TV+4K+Teardown/97511#s...

At least since it's not a handheld touchscreen device, you can take it apart and replace stuff. It even uses Torx screws! But there's not a lot of discrete parts here, just the power supply,the motherboard, and the fan.

Once upon a time the Mac Minis would have let you replace the RAM or disk, but I'd expect it to look like a similar similar power supply + motherboard + fan in a box.

The Apple TV that came before it didn’t have a fan. I’m more inclined to think this was an exception rather than the rule.

Right, but we’re including a potential “pro-focused” Mini which will quite possibly use the same quad core processors available in the 13” MBP. Can you cool that passively in a small case?

Minis a few years ago had a quad core processor option and a lot of people have been disappointed by its absence, making the current generation objectively worse than previous ones. I don’t think they’ll pass up the option to put it back in, IIRC it was something to do with their choice of Intel’s processor families that got it dropped in the first place.

A lot of people need Mac servers (eg. for building and testing macOS and iOS apps). Right now, the best computer for that use case is an iMac. iMacs are really inconvenient as servers.

The Mac mini is a perfect server: needs little power, it's small and stackable, easy to replace if something fails, doesn't have unnecessary components like big graphic cards or screen.

I'd love to buy a couple Mac minis as build servers and for running unit tests, but the current version is too slow and way to expensive.

Why are you surprised a Mac Mini is too slow as a build server? It's just a low-end laptop chip in a box. I don't get the server use case.

The server use case for Mac Mini is a huge compromise. Sonnet Tech [1] makes a 1U rack enclosure with a PCIe riser connected internally to the Mini's Thunderbolt port.

Internally we had one used for our company's OSX Server running profile manager before going to Jamf Pro.

[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html

Ok. But then, which Mac would you use as a build server? Mac servers no longer seem to exist, iMacs and Mac Pros are not stackable, you can't build iOS/OSX apps on a standard linux box, and laptops have the same issue as the Mini. That's why a Pro-focused Mac Mini, with even a mid-end desktop CPU and reasonable RAM would be ideal here, and a Mini with a modern laptop CPU would still be a vast improvement of the current situation.

I'd say this use case is ideally suited to the Hackintosh but I haven't attempted it. I mean there's all that server grade hardware out there just waiting to be hacked to work with OS X.

>I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

Honestly a version of the "trash can" Mac Pro with regular, consumer level internals would suit the Mac mini use-case just fine.

Give it a very good single video card rather than whatever strange 2x Firepro thingy, a regular i7 or i5 instead of a Xeon, and regular memory instead of ECC RAM.

If they can get it in at the $500-$1,500 ranges we'd be good. The cost of the novel industrial design has probably already been paid for by the Mac Pro version of it.

Some sort of novel integration into an eGPU enclosure might be a cool addition. (Although defeats the e in eGPU I guess). But it would certainly meet a lot of peoples' needs for upgradability.

I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

Couple of disks in a RAID, lots of RAM, bring back the quad core. Like the Mac Mini Server of old. They've already built it before, they just need to bring it back in modern form.

Quad core is believable, probably the same Coffee Lake parts that just got them to quad core on the 13" Macbook Pro.

I could see a RAID of SSDs like the iMac Pro has. Not in a base model certainly, but that's what I'd put in a pro-focused mini.

Thunderbolt 3 for expansion for sure. Which will be hilarious because the Mac Mini Pro will be a more up-to-date Pro machine than the Mac Pro is. They still have Thunderbolt 2 ports (with the mini DisplayPort connector) on Mac Pro, Macbook Air, and Mac Mini. The latter two are said to be updated soon, the Mac Pro who knows when.

I would guess they move from a 28W TDP part to a 45W TDP part, but remain in the mobile line. That means an H series instead of a U series. Something like the i5-8300H (4 cores, 8 threads) and the i7-8850 (6 cores, 12 threads), with up to 64 GB of RAM, and the same ridiculously fast SSD as in the macbook pro line-up. Prices will go up by a significant chunk in keeping with Tim Cook's policy to keep pushing up the average selling price, but you'll get proportionately more hardware so it will probably be a pretty reasonable deal.

> I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

Take a look at the Mini's modern competition: Dell's Optiplex 7060 mini or HP's Prodesk 600 G4 mini, which can use Intel's i7-6700T (6 cores / 12 hyper threads) and hold 32GB of memory and, IIRC, are even slightly smaller than a Mac Mini. Not quite a modern workstation but still a lot of computing power in a small package.

That's how far behind the times the Mac Mini is and Apple would be foolish not to catch up.

Mac Mini is still the only mini desktop with internal power supply. All the photos of NUC or that HP Prodesk never show the ugly power brick.

Realistically I want:

SSD options that aren't laughable. Right now Apple charges $600 to upgrade the mac mini's Fusion drive to 1 TB, when the cost of a good non-NVMe 1 TB SSD is around $200. I don't expect Apple to ever offer cheap memory or SSD upgrades but 200% markups vs retail are a joke (and that assumes no value for the fusion drive). 50% markup is better than their phone margins and says they should be able to offer 1 TB for $300 and 2 TB for $600.

An ARM chip running alongside Intel's CPU. Most importantly this will let me run the ARM macOS they are moving to next year. More immediately the ARM chip could (1) be used as GPUs by Mojave, giving the mini pro the performance for games more demanding than puzzle, (2) run iOS/tVOS now, sleeping Intel to save power while I do light tasks and serving as a higher spec Apple TV.

With a little luck the mini pro will be something like the Hades Canyon NUC.

Kaby Lake G (I7 + Radeon Vega) seems like the perfect processor for a Mini "Pro".

That and adding their hi-speed SSD controller (T2 chip?) would be great.

I'd bet big bucks they'll be pushing eGPUs with this model. They've invested so much developer time and hardware R&D into them for Macbooks and for the form factor they're shooting for, it'll make sense to have a powerful external TB3 GPU instead of a Radeon 560X or something. It'll let them get away with a small case without extreme cooling/noise.

What would be the odds that it could be an "eGPU built-in", ie: ability to easily swap.

> I agree on the top level that a desktop computer in 2018 is actually probably more niche and pro focused than laptops, which have become the default computers for people.

Really? I wish this were the case. I even invested some serious dollar into getting a decent laptop (Carbon X1, 6th generation), but generally in my experience the smaller it is the more unreliable it is.

It gets hot, it freezes up, all sorts of annoying problems. It is really frustrating, and now at this point I prefer to do all of my serious stuff on a desktop.

For clarification, things I do include: * solidworks design, * aftereffects compositing of things made in cinema4d, * python scripting, * watching movies on vlc, * having a shitload of tabs open in chrome at any given time, * opening very large text files in Notepad++

SolidWorks and AfterEffects are probably the heavy hitters as far as workload goes. Everything else you mention is (or should be) very lightweight for a modern computer.

For reference, my typical workload for my 2018 MBP is:

* At least one Windows VM running * At least two web browsers running, sometimes three, depending on what I'm doing. * Python as needed * At least one large Java application running * The usual office-y applications - Outlook, Adium, Teams, OneNote, Word, Excel * Opening large text files in Sublime Text is a regular occurrence.

Even though there's a lot of stuff going on, there's nothing that routinely makes the machine spin up the fans, let alone overheat and crash.

>For clarification, things I do include: * solidworks design, * aftereffects compositing of things made in cinema4d, * python scripting, * watching movies on vlc, * having a shitload of tabs open in chrome at any given time, * opening very large text files in Notepad++

You realize that that's a workload that 99.99% of users do not share, right?

My workload is also unique, but interestingly has a lot of similarities.

Ideally the RAM wont be soldered on.

While we're dreaming, how about ports in the front! Miss my aluminum tower.

Still running a 2008 vintage aluminum tower at home. True story.

What software do you run on it? I'm wondering about the browser in particular.

Hopefully one standard USB 3.0 and one USB-C port on the front.

If Apple added ports to the front of the new Mac mini, they would all have to be USB-C ports (either USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3).

I can't imagine Jony Ive would find a mix of USB A and C ports aesthetically pleasing.

I'd welcome 32 gb of ram

> But Apple has the iMac Pro and the upcoming Mac Pro update. So, what would a pro-focused Mac Mini be?

I guess a lot like the 2012s. I have a 2012 mac mini server, i7, 16gb and two internal disks. The only thing I miss is that the built in GPU can't drive a 4k monitor.

I have the same. Depending on your use case a USB 3 to 4k HD adapter might work for you.

The displaylink driver for Mac seemed to take a large leap ahead last year.

I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

It would look a lot like the previous Mac Mini, quad core with upgradable memory and two drive bays. Before they crippled it to try and sell more Mac Pros.

I would say something with configurable memory (8, 16, 32, 64) and storage (m.2) and a basic GPU. If you need more powerful graphics, then get an outboard GPU.

Pretty much an Intel NUC with an i7.

>Pretty much an Intel NUC with an i7.

That's exactly what I'm thinking although Apple being Apple, base price will be $1,299 for the i5 version, storage and memory will be soldered on and marked up 200%. It'll still sell like hotcakes because the alternative is a hackintosh and the time of your average HN reader is dear enough it's just easier and arguably more sensible to spend the money unless you really want to spend the time fighting MacOS to run on non-Apple hardware.

It's easy to find out which kit works these days. All that's left after that is half an hour's reading about MultiBeast and you're off to the races. I've been running a pair of Hackies as my main workstations for the last decade. Solid as a rock on a couple of Gigabyte EX58-UD5s.

I've thought about building a Hackintosh, but the issues around having to put up with non-working hardware (sometimes WiFi, sometimes Bluetooth, etc.) is off-putting to me.

I've reached the point where I think maybe the mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina is the pinnacle of their development. While I could build something that functioned better in some areas, the overall package just wouldn't quite measure up.

I think it's useful to distinguish between desktop/workstation and laptop. I use a Macbook Pro alongside my Hackintosh workstations because there's a world of difference between Hackintosh laptops and workstations. The workstation hardware compatibility was nailed a long time ago but with laptops there was usually something you had to either replace or go without.

Do you install updates regularly? Do you use iMessage, Handoff, etc.? I've noticed that people who gave up their Hackintoshes often mention problems with those things. It seems like people who have had good experiences rarely mention them at all.

I'll admit I don't use some of the more esoteric features of OS X but, yes, I do install updates regularly. I test these on a cloned disk first but usually all that's required is to simply run the original MultiBeast configuration after installing the update and everything is back to normal. I will concede one thing I had to go without - sleep - but I don't find it matters on a workstation like it does on a laptop.

I would like a Mini Pro with a 65-95 watt 6 core CPU and Thunderbolt 3.

Plus an AMD Vega GPU and dual NICs.

It means they'll put a touch bar on it for selecting emojis

> I'm kind of intrigued by what a pro-focused Mac Mini could be.

Perhaps a minimal setup for compiling stuff for Apple's OSes?

I could go for something like that.

Put an i9 in a shortened 2013 Mac Pro case and I think that would work well as a pro-focused Mac Mini.

Would an i9 be able to stay cool in such a small case?

I think they will call it Pro is more mark of how much it will cost, then anything else.

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