Mac mini review–a testament to Apple’s stubbornness
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Why? Well, I already do that. I have a MacBook Pro 2017, and I treat it like a MacMini. I don't use it like a laptop. Partially because I have monitor/keyboard setups that I prefer at both work and home, but also because I simply don't trust the laptop to withstand any real usage. The keyboard, mainly. I have two friends with the same laptop, under sane conditions and both have experienced problems (with the keyboard).
So what do I do when I actually need a laptop? I travel with my trusty 2014 (or whatever year it is) MacBook Pro. I love it to death. And when it dies I guess I'll upgrade it. But I've realized I prefer a lesser, small and portable machine for my travel laptop. My "main" work machine is too expensive to feel safe traveling with. My travel laptop is in a separate category.
So when the need occurs, I'm debating hauling a Mac mini between work and home as my daily driver. For travel, it will be a smaller, much more cheap laptop that if I lose/damage I won't be out $3.5k. It just seems to fit my needs better.
On that note, anyone think a Mac mini will survive daily hauls like that? I am concerned that it will be too much movement for a non-laptop. Thoughts?
I'd look into protective bags for DJ gear: some of that has similar sizes and should make a good equivalent to a laptop sleeve.
The storage is but the mini still has moving parts, a fan. Still, I wouldn’t worry much about transporting it daily.
What product is that?
I bought 32 for the one we ordered and will wait on moving it to 64.
I also have a MacBook Pro 2015. I'm doing lots of Java/JVM languages development including Android from time to time and using Parallels for VMs. The MBPro feels considerable slower to work with than the 2011 iMac.
The big plus of a mini is that, just like you describe it, I can put it in the backpack and bring it with me pretty much anywhere and plug it in. I do travel and work remotely from time to time, so this would be of a benefit to me. Right now I have to always keep my iMac and MBPro in sync and that costs time.
To be fair, Apple's hardware seemed a lot more solid back then.
Have done that for 3 straight years without a hitch. Yes, you might feel the weight a bit, but the only time I had to carry it was from home to home parking and office parking to cubicle.
For portability (think making presentations in a conf room), I would just have Screen Sharing & Remote access enabled. Worked fine.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner for bootable backups to 2 disks, the second disk being my bootable volume for the Air. When traveling and updating my Air volume, I would just use Chrono Sync to sync my home folders on the mini and the Air.
This was at my earlier workplace, and hope this helps.
I think I would've bought the equivalent Mac mini had it been out at the time I got my MBP. Would've saved me about $1,200, while seeming to offer many more ports, more options for self-upgrade, while taking up less desk space. My main hesitation is the lack of discrete GPU, but I suppose that's not much of a concern with the Mac's support for external GPUs.
Have you personally used hibernate mode more than a few times?
(I ask because if you have, then I'm willing to try it on my mini.)
I hope Apple is not seriously thinking that the laptop market isn't worthwhile because sales are poor. No, sales are poor because people were/are terrified of keyboard issues! Myself included.
Edit: At least you're guaranteed you won't have keyboard issues with the Mac Mini!
Two decent desktops are each going to be individually more powerful than a good, expensive laptop.
But realistically we're probably not working on a fixed budget. My job is how I get almost all of my income, so I will do whatever is necessary to continue being able to do it. If that means spending more money on another computer so be it -- what that money is buying is less hassle from having to move a computer around twice a day, and reducing risk of forgetting it or not having it at the right place, as well as reducing risk of damage or theft in transit.
I don't pay for these extra computers anyway, though. I simply have two work laptops. The refresh cycle here is two years long, and the first laptop I had was a top spec 15" ~2014 gen Macbook Pro, so it's still way more than adequate. I simply didn't turn it in when I got another laptop two years later, so now I have two -- the powerful Macbook Pro at home, and a lighter Chromebook at the office I carry around and primarily use in meetings (nothing comes close to touching my monster of a workstation in performance anyway).
For a while I did have an iMac at work, iMac at home and small laptop for whatever. But it was too much hassle.
Additionally depending on OS / hardware similarity at each end you might even be able to make it bootable and carry your toolset everywhere too.
It's something I do semi frequently currently and it's totally do-able, but there's enough friction that I'd rather not ever worry about it. Hell, I'd rather not have a travel laptop either, but as mentioned I don't want my high end machine to be taken with me.
One benefit of the mac-mini is that monitors usually outlast hardware. Think of how many laptop/iMac screens still look amazing, and amazing you paid for, but have to be ditched with the rest of the machine because the screens is so tightly integrated with the rest of the hardware.
The external Dell ultrasharp bought at the same time is still in use daily. (but now it's not as pretty on Mojave as it was on High Sierra)
It will survive. I've hauled my 2011 mini between my home and my girlfriend's home on approx 200 round trips. Sometimes I hike the distance; usually I take 2 buses.
At first I'd haul it in the very-high-quality white cardboard box it came in but a year or 2 ago I stopped bothering. Since then my only precaution has been to try to remember to put the mini in my travel bag with the "holes" (ports) up so that cruft from the bottom of the bag won't work its way inside the mini.
My model of the mini uses laptop components. If Apple has changed that in the new model, then my experience might not apply to you.
Interestingly, it never bothered me that the mini is about an inch thick. I'd rather it weigh a few oz less than it be as thin as a Macbook or an iPad.
1tb SSD upgrade + dual 8gm ramses and its currently my favorite machine VS a tricked out windows box, 2014 mbp and the shitpile of 2014 minis I have.
IE
"Need a Mac because you're wanting to explore iOS development? Get the Mac mini and continue to use the keyboard/mouse/display that you've already got on your desk. It's no longer the affordable way into the macOS environment that it once was, but it's the best thing Apple really has to offer."
"Apple's refusal to build, y'know, a regular desktop computer means that the mini often ends up being the best option if you really are committed to using macOS."
etc
I've own/owned 5 or 6 mac mini's at this point (including the 2018)
At this point, i buy them to shove them in a closet somewhere. Size is not a factor in that.
It's big enough at this point (compared to NUC's, etc) that it has no meaningful size advantage.
As a server, you'd want some different tradeoffs. As a desktop, the only reason you'd use it is, as the author says - you don't have a lot of options in what you can use for MacOS and this checks some boxes the other option doesn't.
It'll probably be the last computer i buy from apple to set up for others - MacOS isn't as bulletproof as it used to be.
For the second time, I had to debug obscure apple bugs for my parents over thanksgiving - which is why i set them up with a mac mini in the first place - to stop having to deal with this on windows or linux.
What have you moved on to if I can ask? Windows 10?
I have a few Windows 10 machines around, for example, the one that controls my CNC machine, and the one i use for CAD.
So far, zero issues, which is "better than it used to be".
I'll try it for the family and see what happens.
In the past, my dad used to set up Linux server machines for my Mom, which is what was there pre-mac-mini (he's a long time software engineer). They were just so finicky in practice (IE audio on webcam would stop working so she could never be sure a video chat she started would actually work, etc)
That did not last all that long. My mom started to avoid that desktop like the plague, so it ended up with Dad running Linux and Mom running Windows.
My main experience with them is in Google Hangouts through a 3rd party (Promevo), and the only troubleshooting I've had to do required a total system refresh, which the box itself found it's own OS was corrupted, re-installed from a remote source, and then after a quick 10-min setup was right back to where it was the second it broke.
I would probably not use one personally, but for family computing they seem a right treat.
The world in fact, may still suck elsewhere, but MacOS is no longer so good that i'll avoid trying. It used to be.
Problem? Apple store mate. Go ask there.
The smartphone market is saturated, the tablet market is saturated, the laptop market is saturated, the desktop market is almost dead and Apple doesn't have (a lot of) users in the workstation market.
So why put a lot of effort in designing new products every year?
What we now see is that Apple is focusing on people with money and on paid services.
And it works. They won't tell you how many iPhones they sold but the profit will be huge.
http://thesweetsetup.com.s3.amazonaws.com/img/sponsors/2013-...
Thunderbolt is PCI express.
this guy didn't like apple and his review simply reflects his emotion, nothing more.
External GPUs + enclosures are larger and more expensive than power bricks and therefore are probably best kept somewhere relatively safe, especially while connected to a tiny Thunderbolt port - I've personally seen plenty of bent/broken USB/FW ports due to cable management "issues" among friends/acquaintances/colleagues.
I’m always using a multiple monitor setup anyway and the Mac Mini supports three. I don’t need large internal storage, I can always add external hard drives.
So why buy a more expensive, less capable laptop that will only be used in one spot at home for my personal use instead of just buying the Mac Mini?
Second question is usually why not just buy a cheaper PC? I’m slowly moving away from the Microsoft Windows ecosystem - but I still will be using some .Net Core - and the macOS is real certified Unix that just works.
I'm genuinely pretty surprised there's not a market for that kind of thing among software developers in particular.
The only problem is I am not sure about the performance penalty of eGPU, may be two Thunderbolt connection instead of one will help?
What does ECC refer to?
So that leaves me with a Mac Mini, Macbook, Macbook Air, or one of those services which claims they can do virtual Safari testing (but I'm unclear how that would work on localhost/internal sites). Is there any real advantage to the Mac Mini aside from slightly more power and ports? For the same money a Macbook/Air comes with its own screen, keyboard, and mouse.
I'd say it's pretty good if you're doing basic functionality checks, but it's ultimately not as nice as having the real thing, especially not if you're trying to debug anything graphically intensive etc.
The only goofy thing was that I had to buy a doodad[1] to stick in the HDMI port to get it to switch into certain resolutions even though I'm running it headless. While not a big deal, that seems like kind of a bug.
Overall, I continue to be very happy with the purchase.
The one thing that was a little annoying is that it does not have UEFI firmware, and the BIOS cannot deal with GPT, so I cannot boot off the HDDs and need an additional USB flash drive for that. Other than that I cannot say a bad thing about it.
I might think about rejigging my setup soon to use that SSD as an L2ARC cache and instead boot off a pair of USB sticks. 16GB of RAM max on the Gen8 is a bit of a pain with ZFS, so that might be a sensible evolution before I eventually look to get a newer model :)
My server runs FreeBSD, and I have restricted the ZFS ARC to 8GB, so I have some RAM left for the other stuff, performance has been okay for me. Then again, a) a home network with about half a dozen client devices is not that big a challenge, and b) due to a combination of laziness and stupidity, my home network still is 100MBit, so I do not have to worry about any bottlenecks on the server. ;-)
My Gen8 has an upgraded Xeon E3 in it and runs a ZFS array; works extremely well as a media server, and transcodes very well (works pretty well with the base processor, but for multiple simultaneous streams I opted to upgrade).
I was living with my Father at the time, who worked for Microsoft in networking (he now works at Azure), and he had nurtured my interest in programming from the age of 8 or 9.
He agreed we could put half aside for my college fund, and I could use half to buy or build a new computer, among some other niceties.
So I basically had an $800 USD budget for a computer, including any RAM or HDD upgrades I wanted to do, or any extra peripherals I wanted.
I had a vast interest in moving away from Windows, and a continued interest in audio production/recording already - I fell in love with the original iMac G4, and, while it was definitely out of my price range, being an all-in-one starting at, I think, $1,199 - but all I wanted was to make music with GarageBand, movies with iMovie, and try to explore MacOS and learn about xCode and Objective-C.
So, at $499, the original 1.42ghz G4 Mac Mini was, for me, as a high school student - who literally would've had to save months for it had they not been so lucky - well, it might has well have been a Lamborghini to a 15-year-old.
But, I was fortunate, and, given my desire to explore in the Apple ecosystem, I was willing to invest in what my Father thought was a very underpowered machine for the money.
What makes me sad is that today, that same 15-year-old kid could not have walk into that store and have the same experience.
Today, I'm a professional iOS developer at a major bank, when I'm not running an independent music label with artists that exclusively run on Logic Pro X systems that I configure for them, so collaboration is seamless. Everyone loves them.
But I exclusively use 2010-2013 MacBook Pro hardware for my artists that I purchase, upgrade, shove an SSD and the most RAM I can in them and often experience better performance, or at the very least certainly a more enjoyable experience, than the 2017 15" Touch Bar Macbook Pro I'm 'typing' on right now. (While I was writing this post, I accidentally brushed the lock screen button and was temporarily locked out.)
The Mac Mini was a very important and crucial product in their product line. Something at least reasonably affordable. Something you could basically justify with, well, hey, it's got a $100-200 Apple Tax on it, but at the end of the day, it's still something affordable for education and low-income markets who may otherwise simply need to turn to other hardware.
The $999 MacBook/Air was also a crucial piece of hardware in this position.
tl;dr: an increase of price of this magnitude would've probably have robbed me of my future career of an iOS developer if it'd happened to me when I was younger.