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Comment by dankohn1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a credible answer for our new default developer machine, now that it has 2 Thunderbolt ports, but it doesn't seem cheap enough. We want dual 27" 2560 x 1440 displays, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB fusion drive. This is for Rails development, so we're not taxing the CPU or GPU, although we do run parallel_rspec and parallel_cucumber, so more cores are helpful.

The 27" iMac is $2199 + $399 for this Monoprice monitor w/ DisplayPort <http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=..., for a total of $2598. This has a 3.2GHz i5 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1GB GDDR5.

The new Mac Mini with 3 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB fusion drive, keyboard and trackpad is $1537 + 2 x $399 for the monitors = $2335.

I'm not convinced saving $263 is worth going from 4 cores to 2, and presumably a worse graphics card.

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You don't tax the CPU, but you want to pay an extra $200 for a build-to-order option to bump the CPU by 0.2 GHz?

How about getting the mid-tier 2.6 GHz Mac mini, with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Fusion Drive, keyboard, and trackpad for $1,237? Then you'll be saving an additional $300, for a total of $563 in savings.

If you want to save a little more, don't buy additional memory from Apple, buy it from Crucial or another vendor instead. You'll pay less than $200 for 16 GB of RAM (which is what Apple charges to bump from 8 GB to 16 GB), plus you'll have the 8 GB of RAM that is pre-installed in the machine, which you can sell, if you want.

All true, except the 2014 Mini has the RAM soldered down. Buy it with the memory you think you'll need.

Ah, you're right. I saw that the enclosure was the same (or at least nearly the same) as the old Mac mini and assumed you could replace the RAM yourself, but I was wrong. That's a shame.

Good advice, thanks.

  parallel_rspec and parallel_cucumber, so more cores are helpful.

How well do parallel_rspec and parallel_cucumber use all cores?

I was a little dismayed by the move from 4 to 2 cores as well, since I was looking at using the new Mac Mini as a server. Was hoping for a max of 32GB of RAM for the server as well.

Now, though? I'm thinking of this as a development machine. I think the higher single-core performance might just make it faster than the old 2.2ghz quad-cores in my 2011MBP and the old Mini....

parallel_test by default divides your tests by your number of cores and runs them each in parallel. There's a startup cost, and some contention, so I find that running on 4 cores is a little better than 2x faster than running normally.

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