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Comment by wukerplank | Hacker News Reader

On paper the new Macs seem like Raspberry Pis with a fancy case and display.

There’s a fairly significant performance difference between Apple’s new cores and the Pi 4’s A72s.

If you ignore that and the high-end display, touchpad, and keyboard, then I suppose it’s not too far off from a Pi in a fancy case, but then you could say the same for any laptop.

The specs that irk me are RAM and SSD, even more since they started soldering them on. CPU & GPU were always kinda on par with the rest of the field.

In 2012, the same Mac mini case held a cooling system for a 45W chip, 2x2.5" storage bays (or one storage bay and a DVD-Drive), 2 RAM slots, and had three more ports and a card reader. They really used every last corner.

The new one is apparently half empty: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22027513/m...

None of these new M1 devices will be densely packed. They’re putting smaller boards into the same enclosures. I assume next gen is when they will take advantage of space savings.

Plus a significantly more polished OS, which is the reason I enjoy coding on my Mac.

I'm also a fan of macOS, but those hardware specs (RAM, SSD) were weak 5 years ago.

I was thinking the same thing. I have new Pi and it's pretty close performance wise to my old Mac Mini which is still a fine desktop PC.

Seriously considering getting a Pi for Christmas (8gb) as my current laptop is slowly dying, and just do python on it and return to a simpler life.

My 2012 Macbook Pro was also slowly dying. As a Hail Mary I opened it up, cleaned it and renewed the thermal paste on CPU and GPU. Now it's back to old speeds!

so maybe we can expect raspintosh?

The new raspberry pi 400 ?

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