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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini beats the current $3999 M2 Ultra Mac Studio on GeekBench 6 multi-core: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/31/m4-pro-chip-benchmark-r...

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Back in the early 90s, when Apple was literally building their first product line with the Mac, they would come out with their second big honking powerhouse Mac: the Macintosh IIx. It blew everything out of the water. Then they would come out with their next budget all-in-one machine. But computing was improving so fast, with prices for components dropping so quickly, that the Macintosh SE/30 ended up as impressive as the Macintosh IIx with a much lower price. That's how the legend of the SE/30 was born, turning it into the best Mac ever for most people.

With how fast and impressive the improvements are coming with the M-series processors, it often feels like we're back in the early 90s. I thought the M1 Macbook Air would be the epitome of Apple's processor renaissance, but it sure feels like that was only the beginning. When we look historically at these machines in 20 years, we'll think of a specific machine as the best early Apple Silicon Mac. I don't think that machine is even out yet.

I think that machine is this M1 Pro MBP I'm using right now, and will probably still be using in 20 years.

I look forward to seeing you at a conference in 20 years' time where we'll both be running Fedora 100 on our M1 MacBook Pros.

I hope the SSDs lasts long enough for you folks (the only thing + money that hold holds be back from snagging one of those)

Agreed. It might share the title with the M1 Air which was incredible for an ultraportable, but the M1MBP was just incredible period. Three generations later it's still more machine than most people need. M2/3/4 sped things up but the M1 set the bar.

The airs are incredible. I’ve been doing all my personal dev work on an M2 Air for years, it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned.

I’m only compelled to upgrade for more ram, but I only feel the pressure of 8gb in rare cases. (I do wish I could swap the ram)

I was the same with the M1 Air until a couple months ago when I decided I wanted more screen real estate. That plus the 120Hz miniLED and better battery and sound make the 16" a great upgrade as long as the size and weight aren't an issue. I just use it at home so it's fine but the Air really is remarkable for portability.

I have the M1 Air, too. I just plug in to a nice big Thunderbolt display when I need more screen!

I'll likely upgrade to the M4 Air when it comes out. The M4 MacBook Pro is tempting, but I value portability and they're just so chunky and heavy compared to the Air.

My only regret is getting base RAM.

It’s not a server so it’s not a crime to not always be using all of it and it’s not upgradable so it needs to be right the first time. I should have got 32GB to just be sure.

Apple's sky-high RAM prices and strong resale values make this a tough call, though. It might just about be better to buy only the RAM you need and upgrade earlier, considering you can often get 50% or more of the price of a new one back by selling your old one.

Thankfully, Apple recently made 16GB the base RAM in all Macs (including the M2/M3 MacBook Airs) anyway. 8GB was becoming a bad joke and it could add 40% to the price of some models to upgrade it!

Yep, that's definitely a thing I'm proud or correctly foreseeing. I was upgrading from an old machine on 8GB, but I figured especially with memory being non upgradable it was better being safe than sorry, and if I kept the machine a decade it would come out to sanwitch money in the end.

In the 90s, you probably wouldn't want to be using a desktop from 4 years ago, but the M1 is already 4 years old and will probably be fine for most people for years yet.

No kidding. The M1 MacBook Pro I got from work is the first time I've ever subjectively considered a computer to be just as fast as it was the day I got it.

I think by the time my work-provided M1 MacBook Pro arrived, the M2s were already out, but of course I simply didn't care. I actually wonder when it will be worth the hassle of transferring all my stuff over to a new machine. Could easily be another 4 years.

Funny that we can buy renewed Intel Macs for less than $200 and do exactly the same.

...until the battery runs out hours earlier.

Or your lap gets hot. Or the fans drive you mad. Good luck with the available ports. Oh, it’s slow AF too, but if you get the right model you can use that stupid Touch Bar.

Where can you get Intel Macs for $200?

I bought an Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro for a friend that I’m working with for $200-$250 from woot.com.

Amazon. Search for "renewed".

Thanks. Are these the same as Apple refurbished (as in completely reskinned with a new genuine battery)?

Maybe the desktops, but the laptops were always nigh-unusable for my workloads (nothing special, just iOS dev in Xcode). The fans would spin up to jet takeoff status, it would thermal throttle, and performance would nosedive.

The M1 Pro was a revelation.

There was a really annoying issue with a lot of the intel MacBooks where due to the board design one of the two power sockets would cause them to run quite a bit hotter.

Yeah I remember that, I posted a YouTube video complaining about it 6 years ago, before I could find any other references to the issue online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rox2IfViJLg

That would cause it to throttle even when idle! But even on battery or using the right-hand ports, under continuous load (edit-build-test cycles) it would quickly throttle.

Oh yeah, I'm very aware. My work machine was a 2015 MBP until about 6 months ago. It was really bad towards the end.

Congratulations on upgrading away from it!

To be fair, MOST computers are like that nowadays, regardless of brand. I'm using a Intel desktop that is ~8 years old and runs fine with an upgraded GPU.

Sure, apple isn't the only one making good laptops, though they do make some of the best. My point was just that we definitely aren't back at 90s level of progress. Frequency has barely been scaling since node shrinks stopped helping power density much, and the node shrinks are fewer and farther between.

Apple's marketing is comparing this season's M4s to M1s and even two generations of Intel ago. The 2x or 4x numbers suggests they are targeting and catering to this longer cycle where subliminally suggested updates are remarkably better, rather than suggesting an annual treadmill even though each release is "our best ever".

Yeah they did this last year and before. It’s super annoying. I’d say it’s super stupid, but I’m sure from a marketing point of view it isn’t.

I was going to say why not compare it to something older! 100000x faster than a pc-xt!

I mean, most people don't buy a new phone each year, let alone something as expensive as a laptop. They are probably still targeting Intel Mac, or M1 users for the most part.

I think it's also part of the sales pitch, tho – a lot of folks are sitting on M1s and pretty happy but wondering if they should upgrade.

So long as Apple is willing to keep operating system updates available for the platform. This is by far the most frustrating thing. Apple hardware, amazing and can last for years and even decades. Supported operating system updates, only a couple of years.

I'm typing this from my mid-2012 retina mac book pro. I'm on Mojave and I'm well out of support for the operating system patches. But the hardware keeps running like a champ.

Have you tried OpenCore Patcher? It allows newer macOS to be installed on unsupported macs.

Luckily m1 has Linux.

Apple hardware, amazing and can last for years and even decades. Supported operating system updates, only a couple of years.

That’s not accurate.

Just yesterday, my 2017 Retina 4k iMac got a security update to macOS Ventura 13.7.1 and Safari even though it’s listed as “vintage.”

Now that Apple makes their own processors and GPUs, there’s really no reason in the foreseeable future that Apple would need to stop supporting any Mac with an M-series chip.

The first M1 Macs shipped in November 2020—four years ago but they can run the latest macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence.

Unless Apple makes some major changes to the Mac’s architecture, I don’t expect Apple to stop supporting any M series Mac anytime soon.

I bought an M1 MacBook Pro just to use it for net and watching movies when in bed or traveling. I got the Mac because of its 20 hours battery life.

Since Snapdragon X laptops caught up to Apple on battery life I might as well buy one of those when I'll need to change. I don't need the fastest mobile CPU for watching movies and browsing the internet. But I like to have a decent amount of memory to keep a hundred tabs open.

>the Macintosh IIx. It blew everything out of the water.

naa... Amiga had the A2500 around the same time, the Mac IIx wasn't better with regards to specs in most ways. And at about $4500 more expensive (Amiga 2500 was around $3300, Mac IIx was $7769), it was vastly overpriced as is typical for Apple products.

Worth remembering that Amiga went out of business just a few years later, while Apple today is the largest company in the world by market capitalisation. Doesn't matter how good the product is: if you're not selling it for a profit, you don't have a sustainable business. Apple products aren't overpriced as long as consumers are still buying them and coming back for more.

[flagged]

The 100 million dollar investment from Apple ended up not being needed. Jobs put the hatchet to enough projects to reverse the trend himself. That investment from Microsoft was valuable because they promised to keep releasing Office for Mac.

Nonetheless, Apple was almost out of business at one point. Microsoft invested in Apple instead of Commodore. If the opposite happened, we may be having a discussion about Commodore now, and not Apple.

That doesn't even make sense. Microsoft hadn't released any software for the Amiga AFAIK, while the Mac market for Word/Excel/Powerpoint was still a decent chunk of revenue for Microsoft at the time (obviously still much less than the Windows/PC market).

The Nubus in the IIx was great.

It never went far. "Nubus" was around for a few years and then ditched when Apple went to PCI.

Far enough. I had a Symbolics Lisp Machine on a NuBus card, the MacIvory. Actually I still have it, in a Quadra 950.

I owned an SE/30. I watched my first computer video on that thing, marveling that it was able to rasterize (not the right word) the color video real-time. I wish I had hung onto that computer.

> Back in the early 90s, when Apple was literally building their first product line with the Mac,

cough

like saying, "Back in the 70s with Paul McCartney's first band, Wings (...)"

kids? get off my lawn

Getting older comes faster than you think. I was an adult, blinked, and decades had passed seemingly in a moment.

They had the Apple II, sure, but the Mac was the first time they built a line of different computers for different users.

Playing Chuck Yeager’s air combat or Glider Pro on the SE/30 was great.

> I thought the M1 Macbook Air

I've got one and it's really not that impressive. I use it as a "desktop" though and not as a laptop (as in: it's on my desk hooked to a monitor, never on my laps).

I'm probably gonna replace it with a Mini with that M4 chip anyway but...

My AMD 7700X running Linux is simply a much better machine/OS than that MacBook M1 Air. I don't know if it's the RAM on the 7700X or the WD-SN850X SSD or Linux but everything is simply quicker, snappier, faster on the 7700X than on the M1.

I hope the M4 Mini doesn't disappoint me as much as the M1 Air.

There are tons of affordable and upgradable NUC form factor machines for running Linux, so why a Mac Mini (if you're not running LLMs locally, then the good support and fast integrated RAM might be a reason)?

I'm reminded of the Intel dominance. Whatever happened?

Yes, but I suspect the 64GB of memory in the studio compared to 24GB in the mini the is going to make that studio a lot faster in many real-world scenarios.

In that case, you can get the mini with 64GB of memory for $1999.

It would be $2,199 for the highest end CPU and the 64GB of memory but I think you're point remains: the Studio is not a great buy until it receives the M4 upgrades.

But it was a great buy for the customers who needed it when it was released. I presided over IT at an architecture firm that bought a bunch of Studios when they were new. Just because it's no longer a good buy two and a half years later, when compared to the thing that ships next week, doesn't mean it wasn't a great machine.

And the bandwidth. A M4 Ultra would be a nice upgrade for large LLM inference on a budget.

Personally, the Mac Mini will be my reentry into desktop computers after more than 1.5 decades [1]. Your comment got me thinking: could this be another perfectly calculated move by Apple? After all, I’ve only bought mobile devices from them until now. I’m eager to see Apple’s financial results for Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 to understand how this strategy plays out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996008

this is crazy, i'm more than happy with the current performance of my M1 Max Studio but an M4 Max or Ultra might actually be too good to pass up

I’m already planning on swapping mine for an M4 Ultra.

I love my M1 Studio. It’s the Mac I always wanted - desktop Mac with no integrates peripherals, a ton of ports - although I still use a high end hub to plug in… lot more. Two big external SSDs, my input peripherals (I’m a wired mouse and keyboard kind of guy) then a bunch of audio and USB midi devices.

It’s even a surprisingly capable gaming machine for what it is. Crossover is pretty darn good these days, and there are ARM native Factorio and World of Warcraft ports that run super well.

I haven’t dug too much into gaming since I have a Linux PC that supports all my steam games but what’s the experience of running Crossover on Apple Silicon like? Can you run x86 Windows games using Rosetta (or is it some other method)?

Yea, it’s running via Rosetta. Just install windows steam and launch game. That is with the paid version of crossover though.

Don’t expect to play dark souls on it, but for indies and the like it’s fine.

Cool. Just saw it has a 14 day trial, will give it a shot on my M1 Max Studio and see how it goes.

(Dark Souls is my favourite game/series…how did you know)

I mean, you actually probably COULD play Dark Souls on it, but you'd be turning settings down a bit I bet (I don't actually know how optimized that game is). I'm pushing a 1440p display which certainly doesn't make things easier on the Mac.

The biggest annoyance I've hit actually is that game controller support is pretty bad. Don't expect generic USB HID game controllers to work, support for that isn't baked into MacOS the way it is Windows (Via DirectInput, etc).

The happy path is pretty much specifically a bluetooth xbox controlle.

I've been thinking about getting a Mac mini as a small server box due to how powerful it is.

What would you be running on it?

I’d like a few VMs for a media server and the associated apps. Pihole too ideally, but I keep that separate as that VM going bad is never good.

It's my plex server and nas (m1). I've abandoned all the complicated complications and just have an 8 bay thunderbolt enclosure full of drives (JBOD)

And pg server. And a few web sites server. And something running in orb stack.

It's the 8gb model and I have around 2gb free most of the time

What enclosure do you have? Do you like it?

Owc thunderbay 8

I like it in every way except price. It just works, comes back online after a power outage, etc. I don't recall any unscheduled disconnects.

Additional thoughts: I think there are complaints about the fan being loud so I swapped it out when I first got it. I also have it in my basement so I don't hear anything anyway -- HDDs are loud, especially the gold ones

Not who you asked, but I have the OWC Express 4M2 [0]. Four M.2 chips RAIDed in a thunderbolt chassis. Fast as can be. I absolutely love it.

[0] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

And both those machines are way faster than the last Intel Mac Pro which started at around $7000 iirc

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