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Comment by dvdbloc | Hacker News Reader

Does the Mac Mini not satisfy this need? At least for the desktop requirement, I’m aware it may not satisfy your driver requirements.

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The new Mac Mini starts at $700+ and still requires a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc. Certainly not meant to be portable, so if you're a developer and want a laptop (as many developers do) your next choice is a MacBook which is well over $1k.

You can buy some shitty Windows laptop to make Android apps on for $400. Will it be a good experience? Absolutely not; but at least you can get it done.

Apple no longer sells the MacBook; the cheapest portable they sell today is the MacBook Air.

The latest MacBook Air starts at $849 refurbished. Quite a good value even compared to Windows laptops.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133...

It’s essentially five year old technology and I don’t see it being supported for much longer. I’m not sure I can recommend it anymore :/

Are you talking about the latest MacBook Air, as per the comment, or the previous version that hadn't changed much since 2014? GP is talking about the 2018 model.

Missed “latest” in that comment, thanks for the heads-up.

No problemo.

Not really. It'd be nice to have a Nvidia eGPU but that's not supported anymore. Apple controls this and there isn't much we can do to change their choice of which GPUs are supported in the OS.

PS: My use case would be for CUDA stuff. It being a Mac is nice because I can directly use it as a development machine. So having a Linux desktop at home is the best alternative and SSHing into it.

The Mac Mini is sort of limited by the lack of any graphics horsepower and the lack of stand-alone displays from Apple. You also can't get one with a really powerful CPU.

It's a cool machine, but the tiny form factor is fairly limiting.

There’s the Pro Display XDR, but it’s obviously quite expensive.

Yeah, I'd expect nobody to buy a $6000 display+stand for their $1000 machine, except for special circumstances where a movie studio or something needs a reference monitor and just a weak machine to just show images on it. That's not exactly the mainstream desktop use case.

IIRC, it's relatively cheap as a reference monitor for the price. Way more than I'd want to pay, but compared to some of the studio alternatives.

It is. I'm not saying it's a bad or overpriced monitor. I'm saying it absolutely doesn't fit the common somewhat budget-conscious desktop use case.

Mac Mini supports Thunderbolt 3 which has enough throughput to run a powerful external GPU with minimal (~10%) efficiency loss.

Ha!

That's fair. From what I hear, thunderbolt GPUs are a fair bit more finicky than internal PCIe ones, so for a desktop I'd still say having an internal GPU is better, but it should at least be a reasonably good workaround.

It's a bit sad to trade reliability, GPU performance, tidiness (since the external enclosure adds more boxes and wires and power supplies), price, and CPU power just for a smaller core computer though.

It gets even worse when you want a couple of big HDDs which would have just gone in drive bays with a traditional computer. With the mac mini, you'd have to add even more expensive external enclosures to your desk, which is expensive and messy. Suddenly, instead of a nice self-contained smallish desktop, you have an impressively small core machine box, with a wire to your GPU box (which has to be on top of the desk due to the short length of thunderbolt cables), a wire to your HDD box, and you still have the slower CPU.

I don't really mean to say the Mac mini is a poor choice, it probably fits a bunch of desktop use cases reasonably well. It's just not as optimal as it could be.

To illustrate how a real small and powerful desktop from Apple could've been: I'm using a really small (though not as small as the mac mini) Fractal Design Node 304 [0], with a 2.5 slot width, full length GPU, a 3.5" drive, two 2.5" drives, an m.2, and a standard ITX card with regular RAM and CPU slots. I have a 1080Ti and an i7 6700k in it with no thermal issues. Apple could've made a similarly expandable machine in a smaller form factor with better thermals and looks, but they... don't.

[0]: https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-serie...

If Apple could do it, then so can other companies. So, where are the other companies that manufacture the Not-Apple Super Mac Mini that you’re talking about?

EDIT: More importantly, where are the other companies that are selling billions of dollars worth of this kind of hardware?

I don't see how other companies are relevant? There's a lot of people selling bigger computers with a lot of power and expand ability, so there's clearly a market for that. I showed that it's not that hard to make a computer with that expandability, while not making a big tower computer; that it's not a binary choice between a powerful big tower and a really limited tiny mac mini-style computer. It also wasn't my comment's main point.

* for interpretations of GPU not to include NVidia

I'm actually really curious, can someone please tell me why pointing out that the mac mini makes certain trade-offs for its form factor is apparently controversial?

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