Hacker News Reader

Comment by lilactown | Hacker News Reader

I’ve recently purchased a MacBook Air to replace my Pro as my day-to-day laptop while coding on the couch, and been thinking of getting a Mac mini to handle the times when I want the extra power: for playing games like WoW or doing mobile development. Android Studio brought my 2013 Air to its knees previously.

Has anyone done this and been satisfied / dissatisfied? The Mac mini just seems so economical both in terms of size and dollars. I guess the only thing I would maybe want to shell out for is an eGPU, but I’m not even sure that’s necessary for my usage.

View on HN

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, there's an excellent project for Hackintosh support on the Intel NUC8i7HVK Hades Canyon machines.

https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

The only "hacky" bit is the necessary wireless card swap. You get an Intel CPU and Radeon Vega graphics, so the result is more similar to iMac internals than Mac Mini when it comes to graphics performance. Price is steep for the NUC, but starts to pull away in price/perf for higher end configurations like 32GB DRAM + 2TB NVMe.

The Mac Mini will be a nicer and more trouble free experience in every way, and can be supplemented with an eGPU like a Sonnet breakaway puck, so only do this if it sounds like a fun project.

But I can confirm that it does work and work well.

Many people will point out that the equivalent NUC or SFF PC will be less expensive. If you feel like you need macOS and have a monitor already, then there aren't a whole lot of options than the Mac mini. Hackintoshes are too much work in my experience.

If you can live with Windows or Linux, then you can get a whole lot more bang for your buck. I got my first NUC this year for family and it's totally plug and play. There are gaming NUCs which are beefier than the ones I had heard about. Bigger form factor machines have the typical PC building experience, but even these seem easier to put together.

The Windows Remote Desktop app for macOS is a really good experience compared to old versions, so you can easily move from where the PC is setup to your couch for many apps. I'm enjoying where VS Code is going with remote dev too, but I don't think it'll help you much if your focus is primarily on mobile.

I have no experience with eGPUs, but it feels like something you can add later.

If I was more of a hacker, I would spend time to get a Linux system just to my liking. I find myself chained to the Apple ecosystem mainly because it’s what I use day-in-day-out across all my other devices (esp. for work) and I just have no desire to experiment. It’s just enough *NIX and just enough polish to keep me happy.

I don't have personal experience with such a setup, but one consideration for a Mini + eGPU is that depending on the screen being driven, Thunderbolt 3 may bottleneck many GPUs. This is one the factors that led me to build a hackintosh tower instead of buying a Mac Mini and eGPU.

Hm that’s interesting. In which case(s) does Thunderbolt 3 become a bottleneck? I do have a thunderbolt 3 monitor.

The bottleneck isn't usually between the GPU and the monitor, unless you have an absurdly high rez monitor (8k, or 5k on machines that don't support Display Stream Compression).

Where problems show up is with an external Thunderbolt GPU, because Thunderbolt 3 only has a fourth of the bandwidth of PCI-E, meaning in situations that would be pushing an internal GPU to 100% will have an external GPU sitting at ~25% barely doing anything at all because it simply isn't getting enough data from the CPU.

The extent of this effect depends on your needs, though. Older or less demanding games for example probably won't exceed Thunderbolt 3's bandwidth limits, but if you're looking to play relatively recent games on high(ish) settings an eGPU might not make sense. It's best to look eGPU benchmarks for your games/apps and make a decision based on that.

I use a Mini for mobile development. My advice is to get the biggest SSD possible. The number of lanes for writing are dependent on SSD size, so you will get much faster writes from a 512Gb SSD than a 256GB, and fastest of all from a 1Gb.

Yes! Do this and if you're constrained by disk size, get an external NVME ssd enclosure.

They come in USB and Thunderbolt variants. I've only used the USB variant and am seeing Read speeds of 1000mb/s and Writes at 1300mb/s using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app. This is using a Samsung 970 1TB drive (~$200) and an Orico enclosure (~$35).

For reference, my onboard SSD soldered to the motherboard of my Mac gives me 1250mb/s Reads and 2400mb/s Writes. I'm guessing the Thunderbolt enclosures go higher but they're wayy more expensive right now over USB.

I have the off the shelf 6-core Mac Mini. It is delightful for coding tasks. Last time I played WoW on it it was functional, but I had to limit the resolution to 1080p and disable anti-aliasing.

Compared to 2020 Macbook Air, a Mac Mini's CPU has up to 3x the base clock frequency or 3x the number of cores. So there should be a performance difference.

> while coding on the couch

Just reading that makes my back and wrists hurt. Are people really able to be productive this way for extended periods of time?

For me, sitting for periods longer than 20 mins makes my back hurt; so I alternate between standing, kneeling and laying on my back on the couch :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com