I Returned the Mac Mini M2 Pro | Hacker News Reader

I Returned the Mac Mini M2 Pro

jeremymorgan.com

53 pointstodsacerdoti94 comments

The author notes how Tensorflow on the M1 isn't useable and hasn't been this whole time, but then uses this as one of the reasons why the M2 needed to be returned? Did he not realize that the same would be true on the M2 as the M1? If he needed fast Tensorflow for his workflow and bought an M2 mac expecting better I'm not sure what to say. (Also who is using TF? every hot thing recently is using PyTorch and while Metal support in pytorch has had struggles at least people are getting things working)

I don't disagree that with the main conclusion, it is a lot of money and for most people it doesn't make sense. If I was spending $2600 I'd be looking at places that do certified refurb M1 Ultra Mac Studios with at least 64gb unified memory, which I think will be going a long way soon to helping future proof a machine for the next few years.

From the article:

> You could say, “well, it’s not designed to be a Machine Learning trainer” > to which I say, then stop marketing the super duper AI chip.

It reads odd as it is written as someone having the understanding of their technical workflow and doing benchmarking while simultaneously essentially falling for the same marketing hype that Apple used for the previous chip. Like, you can't act both ways.

It is true that Apple is pushing the ANE very hard in its marketing considering how little apps actually use it.

How else do you test the claims that marketing make?

I made some assumptions about the AI chip and they were wrong. Article will hopefully prevent others from making the same assumptions.

Author says:

"You may like the Mac Mini if: You require the OSX environment for your work (I don’t)"

Author should have started the rant with that.

But then later on he suggests he's using macOS Ventura, which is confusing. Also, "rendering" is doing a lot of unspecified heavy lifting here — I'm curious whether he's comparing apples to apples, so to speak.

Why? A lot of work doesn't require OSX. It's just the thing you use because work bought you a macbook pro.

Most don't. Some audio workflows require it, and if you're locked into a certain applications like... uh... Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Xcode?

Then you have articles like these: https://techjourneyman.com/blog/great-macos-exclusive-apps/

> Despite having a version of it in Windows, there’s a good reason why people preferred using Photoshop / Illustrator on Macs. First and foremost, Photoshop was developed on the Macs first. Color is more accurate on the mac out of the box than on windows. macOS is more stable than Windows. These reasons make Macs the preferred platform for graphic illustrators around the world.

wut?

Color is more accurate on a Mac if you don't pay attention to the display you purchase with/attached to your device. Yes, Photoshop was first developed on the Mac... 33 years ago.

I get if you like macOS, but the marketing behind it has done a really good job to paint it as if it's the only option out there. It's insane.

replied to the wrong person?

Nope, just continuing your thought process. "Most don't" should probably be "Most [work] doesn't."

In that case: indeed.

As someone involved in both, most people don't work in commercial audio production or photography. And even for audio and photography, Windows has similar or even the exact same applications available, with perfectly fine performance.

Ableton, Kontakt, Lightroom, Premiere and Resolve all work fine on "not macos"

As for color accuracy, I have a plenty expensive monitor (bought on black friday, of course, never pay full price for expensive hardware) and a Spyder calibrator because factory calibration is a nicety that stops being true a month into using the thing. Although of course the mac mini doesn't even have a display, so it can't even get points there =D

I’m not a photographer, nor a creative expert, but my understanding is that colour work is one place that that MacOS actually excels, fundamentally, at at the operating system level.

It’s able to handle colour profiles correctly on a per app basis, rather than per display.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2313...

I only know a bit about color profiling, but I don't understand why you'd want a color profile on a per app basis? I see it for device-level... like a printer would have a profile, a camera would have a differently calibrated one, and multiple monitors with different color profiles to make sure they're uniform.

I mean if they have that feature and it's used for something big I'm not privy to, cool, but otherwise it's something that most large OS's handle.

Again only going on off hand knowledge. But colour is one of those things that seems straightforward to begin with, and soon becomes insanely complex as you start peeling the layers back XD.

Different files, applications, media can be encoded in different colour spaces, as can different displays, printers, dyeing processes take them as inputs - and the conversion isn't always straight forward.

For most consumption activities this doesn't matter, but if you work in colour and your job is to make sure that that signiture 'Pepsi Blue' is consistent in print media, television advert, merchandise, and the product, some finer treatment of them in the OS becomes necessary.

To iterate - not a colour expert, but I just thought I'd politely enlighten you as why macOS is so highly regarded for this kind of work, it isn't just marketing. Though no doubt, there is plenty of that too.

He doesn't say he wasn't using it on this machine. In fact elsewhere he mentions he was.

He just says his workflow is not bound to macOS (like it would be if you would do iOS development in Xcode for example) so he's got other options too.

I'm in the same place. I also moved from Mac to a NUC with FreeBSD as my main driver. It was cheaper than a medium mac mini and that's with 64GB RAM in it and 1TB NVMe 980 Pro SSD. Whereas the mini that's more expensive wouldn't even have half that.

Additionally I have much much more customization of my user experience with KDE. So I can really tailor the interface to my workflow. This was a bigger reason to switch than the hardware price. The ability to max out the RAM for cheap was also not 100% necessary but it's nice not having to worry about this later. And it allows me to run VMs whenever I need.

Yeah, probably. I like OSX a lot, which influenced my original decision. But I don't require it like some do (IPhone developers for instance).

90% of devs do not require OSX, but still want to use a (generally) fast, consistent, stable, unix-like platform.

> Typing lags horribly in Sublime Text

Fascinating. I use Sublime daily on my M2 MacBook Air and haven't encountered this.

With all these GUI apps crashing and monitor problem, I wonder if there was an issue with his specific Mini Pro, like with the GPU.

I wonder if he was using a Bluetooth keyboard. I've had to restart the Bluetooth module on my M1 a few times to stop this from happening.

Oh i do remember this happening a long time ago but haven't had that issue in like 6 months.

Although in my case it might have been a specific Language Server Protocol (LSP) package I was using that was consuming 100%+ of my CPU (they fixed it).

Used to have an issue where my bluetooth headphones would annoyingly hiccup every minute or so while listening to music.

I too have had 0 issues with Sublime Text on my 14in M1 Macbook Pro...I've been using the machine since last March and never noticed anything like this...

On some docks / external displays Metal rendering is really slow. Jetbrains IDEs have an option to disable Metal for this reason.

I suspect the Onboard GPU being so new and different contributes to many of these problems.

I use Sublime Text 4 on an M2 Mini and it's mostly perfect. However, a few days ago, it exhibited a strange pattern of behavior where it would freeze every 2 seconds. No beachball, just froze and unfroze repeatedly. I didn't experience this with any other application. I'm all USB - no bluetooth. Looking back, the only thing I changed that day was I turned off my 3rd monitor from the DisplayLink Manager. I have 3 monitors connected (Thunderbolt Display, HDMI, and DisplayLink). I think there's a high chance it's related because I frequently experience a problem where if I disable the 3rd monitor, ST4's editing surface will rotate 90° if I move the window to the top corner of my 2nd monitor. It's a strange sight.

I've since kept the 3rd monitor on and haven't had any problems. So, if anyone has this problem, try fiddling with your DisplayLink connection: perhaps try disconnecting the adapter completely and/or try turning it off/on from the manager.

Oddly, this makes me think maybe I should look into the M1 Mac Mini. I’m mainly a management type doing email, but I use a lot of screen space. I typically have 3 different chrome windows (1 for each gmail account: work, research, and personal). I’m currently using an M1 MacBook Pro which easily handles 2 XDR monitors. Would a mini handle 2 XDR monitors? I suspect so. Probably need the Pro to get the extra thunderbolt ports, but that’s ok. $800. Hmmmmm

An M1 Mac mini? Like buying a used one?

I'm not sure that you would be happy with the dual monitor performance - it was one of the few complaints people had about the first M1 chips. Does your MBP have an M1 or an M1 Pro?

I've got one and really enjoy it, but I can't get it to output to a 1440p monitor. Two different 4K monitors - no problem.

This might not be the right place to ask: I was given an absolutely enormous curved monitor by my employer (it’s what they had on hand), and I would like to move to something more moderate in size. I am also mostly doing management type work, eye fatigue is a concern, and I’d be pushing it from an M1 MBP. Any favorite moderate sized monitors that won’t break the bank?

I have two of them. Absolutely love them.

My workflow isn't nearly as heavy as OPs (mostly DevOps stuff; some Kubernetes clusters here, some toy Go apps there), but it does a great job at these tasks while being super quiet and fast about it.

Our other Mac Mini sits in our living room and is used for Zoom game nights. We play Jackbox on it.

The Intel Mac mini that it replaced would really struggle with Jackbox despite having "fast" chips. On the M1 mini, the fans don't even turn on, even while sharing it over Zoom with other people's video on.

This is clickbait. I can run Stable Diffusion (and PyTorch, and so on) on my M1 Pro just fine, although you do have to know what you are doing.

Although it is true that an Intel machine with a dedicated GPU is just “easier” and can be assembled for far less (I did just that a month ago: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/02/18/1845), none of the other criticisms are valid and seem to stem from a lack of understanding of how to actually use the machine and what it excels at (I intend to get one myself, despite having built a CUDA box, because it excels at audio and video editing).

The only thing that is worth taking away is that Apple kneecaps the entry-level M2 Pro configuration with only 512GB of storage (it should start at 1TB).

Classic case of “holding it wrong” and doing it for the clicks/viewers/controversy.

About mac storage — buy large high quality nvme, 40Gbps thunderbolt 3 enclosure for it, install your system there. Perfomance is very acceptable (~50% of the internal bandwidth, sorry no idea on latency) BUT you can simply take and boot it on any other M1/M2 mac if something happens.

Booting off an external drive is not that simple these days.

I was trying this and that, and what worked for me was having an external PCIe drive (thunderbolt+nvme). Then booting on another mac involved a series of reboots into recovery to pick that drive (no idea what is goong on there) every time the drive was connected to another mac, but, on the whole, I do not remember having troubles.

I did not manage to boot from USB drive at all.

Macbooks have pretty bad GPU per USD performance compared to Nvidia but this post is just a clickbait.

"Why advertise some super AI chip if it doesn’t do AI stuff? Who knows." => Neural engine is fp16/int8 limited so it wouldnt be good enough for training anyway but its pretty good for inference with CoreML in a lot of cases. Also training anything outside Nvidia ecosystem is very bad cause software was written with CUDA first and everything else second (AMD for example have similar story to Metal backend).

As someone who works on Deep learning for past 6 years I can easily say CUDA wont be replaced anytime soon at least for training, almost every software out there was written for either CUDA or CPU.

And for local model development you don't need your rig to be powerful as training wont be done on your local machine anyway and MacBooks are good enough for that (a lot better than windows for sure).

A 32 GB GPU costs > $5000, for that you get a whole Mac Mini M2 Pro (not as fast as NVidia, but sufficient for memory hungry LLMs)

It's also just a weird nonsense comparison. You buy a GPU from Nvidia and you just get a GPU. You buy a Mac from Apple and you get a whole computer that includes a GPU.

To make a meaningful cost comparison we need to include an equivalent computer in which to put Nvidia's GPU.

Then we get into what workloads you need the GPU for.

He mentions specifically that for machine learning its performance was underwhelming.

Now he mentions tensor flow which probably has very different requirements than running an LLM. But the point about the toolchain is a good one IMO.

Also, running an LLM is pretty niche for now since there are no open models yet (meta's is only an unofficial leak)

How is it a clickbait? He bought an M2 Mac based on the advertising and reports from other users. He did some pretty in-depth research into if the machine will work for his workflow. He decided it didn't because of a lack of performance for the price.

I kinda quit reading when the real-world task and Geekbench compute were conflated. Please list some actual task times and chart them when that's what you're discussing.

Also - it was unclear - did the software have issues with the M1? Or only the M2 Pro? I have no idea what OBS is.

OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, is for streaming video (or your desktop) to Twitch, or other streaming services.

OBS is widely used video recording and live streaming software. If you're looking at a Youtube video or a Twitch stream where multiple streams of video are overlapped with one another, e.g. the commentator is in the bottom corner while the commented content covers the rest of the screen, you're probably looking at OBS.

Probably referencing Open Broadcaster Studio (https://obsproject.com/), very popular for Twitch streaming, or streaming in general (my mom uses it to live stream church).

OBS has had issues on my M1 Macbook, but not anything related to performance. It's mostly that the OS doesn't allow OBS to pick up desktop sound. There's an app that allows you to capture the desktop sound by routing all of the sound into it, but it requires you to disable some security features on macOS, which I'm not happy about. However, if using OBS was part of my job, then yeah I'd remove it 100%. But ultimately I just found it easier to go back to Windows to do gaming. It's amazing how far macOS has come... I just wish it was better for gaming. I can't wait for the day I never have to use Windows again, although it may never come.

TL;DR: Author is returning because it’s expensive, had some bugs with the apps they were running and they didn’t get the performance they were expecting (unoptimised apps seem to be the culprit).

The bugs mentioned, sporadic crashes across a range of apps, seem odd. Maybe a faulty unit or a bad OS install? I’ve occasionally had Macs come “fresh out of the box” with buggy OS installs.

I agree that there's something else happening related to the "ghost in the machine" stuff, and wish he would've pursued that further. I'm also not sure why he imagined that the Mac mini's integrated GPU and AI hardware were going to beat $1,200 of dedicated hardware and CUDA-optimized software.

Calling these "some bugs" is quite the downplay. Any machine with the issues mentioned (whether it's a mac mini or a puget sound monster pc) is an immediate return. And if you drank the mac koolaid, that would also be the moment you sober up and go "hold up, I know I've used multiple generations of mac mini but can I actually get better performance by spending less?".

As mentioned, unless you absolutely need OSX (which tends to not be true for the vast majority of users), the "why don't I just put a 4080 in a PC" route is a pretty reasonable path to go down once you realize that doing the work you need to do is more important than the machine you do it on.

I had a friend who worked for an airline many years ago (pre-9/11) and told me lots of stories.

One thing he told me sticks in my mind though.

The airline would periodically have problems - cancelled flights, bumped passengers, etc. He said this was disservice, and it was handled ok by most normal people. But one situation was different. He said that first class customers, who would routinely pay 10x the price for a ticket - they did not handle bad service well. Disservice a first-class customer and they would be MAD.

Surprised he went with a 4080 rather than a 4090. The budget would have covered it, and the performance per $ is much better

Is there a site that ranks GPUs by performance-per-$?

Or even performance-per-watt?

Lots and lots of YouTube reviewers give their opinions and various benchmark-oriented stats around this. Gamers Nexus are pretty good in my view (though their videos tend to take a long time to not say a whole lot)

It's hard to express how much I hate when the only source of information is a YouTube video. Discord "servers" are almost as bad.

Is it so hard to make a list? Ideally, a sortable one?

I tend to use videocardbenchmark.net by PassMark, but I'm sure there's more out there.

Once you return a $2600 computer, you realize you have $2600 in your pocket. And now you're going to actually do some bang for your buck math to make sure you're wasting money _again_

Both the 4080 and the 4090 are very expensive, but the 4080 is pretty universally considered to be much worse value for money.

The best value for money, though, is money. If the 4080 does what this guy needs, even if the 4090 is better, that's still hundreds of dollars saved. The bar to clear is "is it fast enough for what I need it to", after that it's a luxury spend.

Thank you. I see this all the time where theoretical performance/w or performance/$ purchases are made as if you own a data center. Performance unused is very expensive indeed.

Author here.

Sorry, but your reply is really funny, even if it's a jab at me.

I outlined the reasons for the 4080, full knowing it's drastically less performance than the 4090. I balanced power usage, heat and noise vs how much performance I need.

Doesn't make your comment any less hilarious though.

There was no jab, just a typo. That was supposed to say "you're not wasting" money. But you only get an [edit] link for so long before your comment's permanent.

Author here.

I strongly considered the 4090, at $500 more you get a lot more performance. (if you can find one). However it mostly came down to this:

1. I'd need a new power supply as well (need 4 PCIe Ports) 2. The power usage is drastically more (I care about this) 3. More heat and noise 4. I don't need the extra performance that much.

So yeah from a value perspective 4090 is a better bet for most people, but after careful consideration I went for the 4080. It's been fantastic so far.

Two and a half years ago, I put together a PC for 1500 euros that matched the performance of a 10k mac pro (at the time).

It replaced a macbook pro (with touch bar, no less) that costed me $4500. It swelled on me about two year after purchase, shortly after the expiration of the standard warranty.

Faulty unit perhaps? Some of those symptoms indicate that. Like type lagging and Chrome crashing a lot.

I've wondered that myself. Either way it had to be returned.

Agreed! This issue sounds like a case of a bad machine. I have about 50 tabs open in Chrome on my Mac Studio and have consistently had far too many open for over six months without issue.

disappointing for the price; but the $600 m2 mini seems pretty compelling for an under the tv server

Some weird glitches, but a lot of these seem to boil down to "You don't need a maxed out Mini M2 Pro if you already have a high end Mini M1 from two years ago". Yeah, I can believe that.

I use a m1 mac mini with 8GB Ram/512GB running OBS using hardware acceleration for the stream and it doesn't have any issues.

He might have been using OBS that's compiled for Intel, which struggles a lot and has weird bugs. OBS just recently started officially shipping Apple silicon builds. Those perform way better.

Damn. Anyone had the same vscode lags and crashes? These machines have great reviews from other sources but if my editor is dying it’s not going to work out.

VScode works better on m1 mini than on Windows with 12700k+rtx3090 at least for Python in my case.

We've had none whatsoever here. All of our engineers who've received new Mx Macs love them, me included.

Not really. I got a M2 Mini Pro, just the base model. Using VSCode, XCode, iOS, Android Emulators, Affinity Suite, bunch of other stuff, some casual games too. Can't complain, everything is very smooth and fast all around. Best thing is fans are very quite and rarley even turn on at all.

Thanks. Not complaining about moderation, but it's very strange being downmodded into dust for asking 'is anyone else asides from the reviewer experiencing this?'

My daily driver is a Macbook Air M1 with 16GB of RAM, and my backup is a Mac Mini 8GB; both hooked up to 5K displays.

I live in vscode, a plethora of browser addons and tabs (with auto-suspend extensions after 30min of idle), some Teams and Google Meet sessions (video piped through OBS) and some terraform every once in a while; no discernible performance difference between the two machines 99% of the time, although the remaining 1% is a swapping-party on my Mac Mini because 8GB of RAM is certainly not enough.

I haven't had any issues on my Mac Studio with VS Code, Chrome, or any other apps. Has your machine always behaved that way? Could it be something you installed that isn't playing nicely with VS Code?

Great product review, I appreciate the thorough performance testing. In a world where everyone is rushing products and APIs to get on the hype train, it’s good to see some sanity from our community.

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