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Comment by Mindwipe | Hacker News Reader

And it has got a bit worse. Just not as worse as we'd expect from Apple.

Well, quite a bit faster, in ways that are relevant to my interests. Stands to reason designing a thing like this together onto a bespoke board allows for some optimizations: it's hilarious that it's apparently faster than any other Mac anywhere ever, for single-core things that suit it. Including Mac Pros and iMac Pros… I just think that's amusing.

I'm now wondering if VCV Rack is sufficiently multicore that it will perform better on more expensive Mac boxes, or whether this little thing has now set the bar for ability to run demanding modular synth software live. That would be really convenient.

Building a PC mothership is certainly cool as hell and I'm not knocking it, but there's something to be said for 'this is my live performance rig, it's stable as a rock and it fits in my pocket. And it's cheap enough that if I'm headlining Coachella with my modular jams, I'll buy a second one and clone it so I have a backup, there onstage ready to be plugged in if there's a problem'.

I'm with Marco on this one. Looks nice. I know what I'm getting with a Mac of this type, and this definitely looks nice to me.

And it still has real USB A ports so you don’t have to hop your audio interface through a C to A dongle thing. Though I don’t know if a C->A adapter is just rerouting wires, or has circuits with their own latency - either way, it’s a bit of mess you don’t need with one of these.

(Assuming you use a typical USB A audio interface rather than something more exotic)

FWIW, I also do electronic music, though just as a hobby.

Nah, my audio interface is more exotic. Thunderbolt MOTU 16 channel in and out, 192k/24. So I love that it has so many thunderbolt ports, because they're spoken for. I think you might well be able to run two MOTU 16As and have 32 in, 32 out. You'd start to have issues with drive space but the computer can probably handle it.

"more exotic" :-)

OK, hardcore studio level stuff.

Yeah, that's a bit beyond my hobby "Behringer" type stuff. Recently upgraded from 2-in/4-out to 4-in/4-out. Still plenty of bandwidth on USB 2 for that.

Worse how? There are a couple of directions you can go in, just curious (price/storage)?

Probably price. $800 is pretty steep for the entry version, when you can buy a better equipped Lenonvo ThinkCentre for $200 less.

A Lenovo ThinkCentre is like 10x bigger than a Mac Mini. I wouldn't want one of those sitting in my living room. And my wife would absolutely forbid it.

The only real competition I see for the Mac Mini is the little computers from System76. But they're about the same price.

My Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q is almost identical in size to my old (very) Mac Mini.

I just customized a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a Core I7 (I’m assuming it’s the six core), with a 128GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, Windows Pro, and a WiFi card and the price was $979. The equivalent Mac Mini is $1099.

Are the USB C ports Thunderbolt?

Does that Lenovo have Mac OS?

Obviously it does not. And that's a pity. Whether or not that justifies a more than $200 difference is up to whoever wants to use it.

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