M4 Mac Mini Cluster [video] | Hacker News Reader

M4 Mac Mini Cluster [video]

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33 pointsrdhyee8 comments

Tangent rant

I wish I could run Linux with first party-driver support from Apple on the M series devices. To me, the premium price would be worth it and I'd buy a top spec'd M4 MBP and a Mac Mini today.

However, unfortunately due to the limitations of MacOS, my workflow has settled into using an M1 MBP as a thin client for an AMD based mini PC that I SSH into for work tasks and use for gaming. I carry my MBP + mini PC with me when a travel which is kind of annoying.

So while the M4 chips are eye wateringly powerful, especially for video editors/content creators, for me they are "big for nothing" as I can't really use that horsepower for anything meaningful (work and play).

So I don't see any reason to upgrade my M1 MBP "thin client"

It's genuinely terrifying how narrow the use cases are for a Mac, and how much power Apple is shamelessly stuffing into them.

It’s funny, I have a somewhat opposite setup - Surface Pro 7+ (Windows) as a thin client, M4 Mac Mini as the beefy machine, using mainly VS Code Remote over SSH. It works great for development, builds etc, and for gaming I can still use the Surface. Then again, it’s not like I have much choice because builds involve an iOS app

Dare i ask... what is the thing you can do on linux that you cant do on mac that your... remoting into a linux pc. For gaming i sorta get it but even then most of the new and old games ive played work fine on mac recently, and for work tasks at least for what i've experienced most apps are on mac if their on linux.

Well, yeah gaming obviously single handedly necessitates carrying around a second computer - which is a shame given M4 MBP laptops benchmark around the same levels as mid range desktop graphics hardware.

Otherwise it's little things like the lack of containerization support, poor tooling (gnu vs ancient bsd tooling). Brew is an _okay_ package manager but a far cry from anything on Linux. Support for things like FUSE. You have to buy utilities for basic things like window management, and also Finder is the worst file explorer I've ever used. Building applications targeting MacOS is also a joke.

If you're just doing basic web development, it's about as good as Windows (not that bad), but you run into lots of oddities that you need to fix (again, much like Windows)

Naturally the option would be to be more supporting of Linux OEM laptop vendors.

Apple always has been a desktop company, the forays into the server space never were that serious, and in what concerns UNIX, mostly an implementation detail of the userspace stack that actually matters, even in the old A/UX attempt.

I would be supportive of OEM vendors if they offered hardware that was comparable.

Sadly, no Dell, Surface, Asus, etc laptop has a screen, trackpad and speakers that come close to the MBP - let alone battery life.

They've repeatedly demonstrated that they don't know how to build a laptop so I've given up hoping they will eventually test drive an MBP and shamelessly copy it.

The surface comes close but also doesn't have Linux support.

It's an interesting point in Apple's Unix core being an implementation detail. It feels like an accident that MacOS is POSIX compliant which makes it suitable for general purpose development

It is definitly an accident caused by NeXT acquisition, neither BeOS nor Copland had great plans regarding UNIX like support.

And even in NeXTSTEP's case, that was a side effect of Steve Jobs wanting to go after the UNIX workstation market, the idea was to make it easier to sell NeXTSTEP into those clients, there is very little UNIX in Objective-C, or the related XXXXXXXKits.

"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU

Surviving NeXTSTEP documentation,

https://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

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