Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call The world's fourth biggest PC company sells three desktop PC lines, but it hadn't updated one of those three for four years. Maybe Apple had forgotten that the humble and unassuming Mac mini was there at all. But it fixed that this week. The Mac mini has been revived as a machine for grown-ups, professionals such as …
Yes, they did. I've had a couple of Mac Minis in the past, my most recent was one of the first Core 2 Duo ones they released. Decent little machine, and lasted me a long time due to RAM/HDD upgrades. Last year it was really showing its age and I decided to replace it with another mini system. I had the choice of an outdated Mac Mini with 3-year old components and zero upgradability, or an Intel NUC where everything is upgradable, it used modern parts, and it was cheaper to boot.
End result, the little mini server running under my desk is now a NUC. Sorry Apple, too little, too late (and too expensive). On the plus side, I have seen some pictures that suggest the RAM is upgradable again. Anyone know for sure?
...but I'll wait for the iFixit breakdown
Yep - that's what I was thinking too. But I also took a look at it on Apple's site and, whilst it doesn't say-so categorically, it does show a series of images showing the bottom circular panel removed. These appear to show a standard, easily accessible SO-DIMM mounting, and an accessible SSD card.
Here's hoping...!
"...but I'll wait for the iFixit breakdown."
Do you mean like Microshaft's bollocks of 1802/1803 cloistersmurf, then the goat rope of 1809?
Seriously, I suggested in our staff meeting that the 1802 was beta tested by interns, staff suggested that beta testing was performed by the interns children.
I'll not bother going into our organization's costs on the more ancient patch level, 1809, well, it followed an earlier pattern that we observed, Microbrain fouling older drivers.
Only one version survives the earlier patch, so I suspect it was a test case, which its fix patch fouled up.
On my employer standard issue macbook pro I use a USB to RS232 convertor with the lead patched through to the RJ45 serial port on the Cisco switch. Screen as the terminal.
Ways and means. I did similar on a Win7 machine, but make sure your terminal runs in admin mode, for some reason, to load the USB-serial drivers.
As I proved recently on another forum, for the same price (of all the models available) I can get a PC that out-performs the Mac for a-half-to-a-third of the price - and that usually a laptop with an HD screen to boot!
It's another Apple "designer" product, and I don't see why anyone would touch them, nor why Reg would cover it at all seriously.
"mainstream professional power users"... yeah, right. The kind of people who want to buy a machine that can barely cope in its default config, where the highest config is comparable to a run-of-the-mill PC and where the graphics card is an optional extra because it only has the Intel HD graphics...
Literally for the same price I can get a gaming laptop that'll knock every feature it has for six. Or I could buy a desktop (no monitor) that'll wipe the floor with it so badly the poor thing wouldn't be able to network with it from embarrassment.
Honestly, stop bigging up their over-priced peddled trash.
@isJustabloke
I am going to argue about the "over priced". Firstly, I am prepared to pay a considerable premium for not having my data sold everywhere. So not all "price factors" are being considered. You are comparing Apples with rotten fruit.
Secondly, I went Apple (as did my family) when Apple went FreeBSD or Jordan Hubbard went Apple whichever way you want to put that. Since that time I have spent far, far less than prior budgets for the family computing (family includes 3 students). Your long term TCO with Apple is considerably lower than people think.
Thirdly, consider longevity. My phone is still a 6+ no need or serious inclination to upgrade. I would like the OLED screen, but it can wait until my 6+ dies. Still get two days use from it. But I never leave it on overnight charge. My fondleslab is the first 12" iPad (the first with a pencil) is still running as new. Some apps now have noticeable pause on loading but I think that increased overhead not the machine.
Fourthly, my watch saved my life by insisting I get medical help when I just wanted to go back to sleep. Septicaemia from two seperate organisms. Doctor said I would not have made it to the morning and I nearly did not make it anyway. I should have acted on first warning. Anyway, my watch saved my arse. That is simply priceless.
Really - and your soopa doopa machine runs a supported OSX as well? It meets lots of needs and TCO is actually very reasonable (something that so many people tend to forget about - I've listened to many wings about the cost of running a colour printer - 'well what do you expect if you only paid £29 for the bloody thing, the manufacturer wants their profits'). But as hon doubt will be pointed out - don't have a need don't buy it, they are not compulsory.
> I can get a PC that out-performs the Mac for a-half-to-a-third of the price
So? Can you legitimately run macOS on that PC? The OS is what makes a Mac a Mac, and I would guess is the main reason why people choose to buy a Mac over a Windows/Linux PC.
If everybody was like you and cared only about hardware specs and purchase price, then nobody would buy Macs. However, many people realise that the software and OS running on that hardware is where the value lies, and for those people who prefer macOS, the extra cost is worth it.
(Macs typically have a longer usable life than Windows PCs, and have higher re-sale value, so that also helps to offset the higher purchase price).
Mac OS legitimately? No.
But my 8-year-old laptop has a VMWare virtual machine on it with MacOS from my "proving" the same thing to somebody else.
With that OS, running inside a Windows 7 hypervisor, I can allocate 25% of the laptop resources and enjoy BETTER performance inside the VM than on a real Mac. While also getting real-work done and even virtualising other OS (I have Windows, Mac and Linux VMs running on a Windows machine, all picking up the same codebase and all compiling via Eclipse and running the result to test it works, in case you wonder why.)
Granted, it was a couple of years ago that I last did this specifically to prove the point, but my laptop is EIGHT YEARS OLD. And it can virtualise MacOS in one-quarter of its resources, faster than Mac native hardware. Seriously... go try it. VMWare Workstation and a couple of UEFI config file tweaks to make it boot.
Honestly, that same 8-year-old laptop still beats out this Mac Mini! It's Intel i7, 12Gb RAM, dual-drive bays with 1TB in each (but I later replaced one with a 1Tb SSD - however the tests above were NOT done when it had an SSD) and has nVidia graphics (I think it's a 960M, to show you that it's hardly top-of-the-range even back then!).
If you don't realise that MacOS is clever-tricks and showmanship and NOT actual performance, then you've not looked into it. The slippy-slidey menu at the bottom is a perfect example. You're led to think it's scaling those icon in real time. It's not. They are pre-cached bitmaps in a variety of sizes. It's giving you a GIF animation, basically. On the VM I made, you can knock the allocation down to a single-core and it still does slippy-slidey quite smoothly, but every performance metric of "real work" (e.g. loading apps, browsing websites, compiling code, etc.) falls below on the actual Mac hardware compared to a VM experience.
MacOS is designer shine on a hardware turd. Sure, it's "clever" in its way, but it's entirely snakeoil.
Honestly - if you have VMWare (I don't think it works in anything else as it has a serious UEFI integration), go Google how to do it, load MacOS up and run it. If you dial-down the resources allocated, you'll instantly spot what's snakeoil and what's actual performance. And your PC will still kick the Mac's arse.
Honestly, the only reason to own MacOS is if you need to cross-compile to Mac, where you can only reasonably do so via an up-to-date XCode, which usually needs and up-to-date MacOS, no matter what compiler / development environment you are using. I use Eclipse and the CDT, and the only sensible way to cross-compile to Mac is to load Eclipse on MacOS, configure it to load the XCode etc. compilers and libaries, and then make that do the compile.
> But my 8-year-old laptop has a VMWare virtual machine on it with MacOS from my "proving" the same thing to somebody else.
BFD. I can run windows on VMWare partition on a 2010 series Mini. And that Mini cost me less than £500 new! How much did you pay for your super-duper laptop?
Horses for courses my dear. Just because a <insert your hw> doesn't do what you want doesn't mean it is bad for everyone.
"BFD. I can run windows on VMWare partition on a 2010 series Mini. And that Mini cost me less than £500 new! How much did you pay for your super-duper laptop?"
Made my old pc in 2009 for £500 that would make the mac look like a toy...
(kids still play 1080p games on it now..)
As people have said apple sell over priced, over hyped crap..
Granted, it was a couple of years ago that I last did this specifically to prove the point, but my laptop is EIGHT YEARS OLD. And it can virtualise MacOS in one-quarter of its resources, faster than Mac native hardware.
Except if you ran it on time-period-correct OS X version (maybe Snow Leopard), and you used GPU passthrough, I can't believe you. Like really. Anything above Mavericks runs like a dog in a virtual machine (and that's coming from a "gaming" laptop test).
Snow Leopard, on the other side, ran perfectly fine on Intel Atom. Yeah, Intel Atom. No wonder it'd run fast on a laptop with an i7 (of back then).
Anyhow, you can run macOS/OS X on the hardware itself (that's called a hackintosh setup). Lots of resources online, but you have to fix drivers et al.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than on a VM, and that's how I got myself a touchscreen "Mac".
Nah - your claim that MacOS / OSX is "Snake Oil" to run on poor hardware is nonsense. Whilst I totally agree that a typical Mac, on the face of it, costs a bit more than typical PC hardware, in my experience the build quality (thus also the resale value) is sky-high. Take your 8-year old PC laptop, sell it online and get £50 -£100 for it, a similar mac, 3-4 times that value. And the claim that a seven-year-old PC laptop with no SSD runs MacOS faster than a current "Real" Mac is nonsense. It's just not actually possible. My Mac VMs do run fast, granted, but nothing as fast as a real machine to run them on. It's like claiming that you 10-year-old Ford Mondeo drives faster because you nailed a Lamborghini badge on the bonnet !
> Honestly, the only reason to own MacOS is if you need to cross-compile to Mac,
No, it's not the only reason. The biggest reason is that you just want to get you friggin' work done but still need access to commercial software like Adobe or for whatever reason.
You can piss and moan about 'tricks' all you want, but at the end of the day what matters is this: I can measure the uptime on my Mac in months. Windows? A few days if you're lucky. Especially with Windows 10 and Microsoft's update nonsense, you get the added benefit that when your machine reboots it may not come back up again at all.
Running MacOS in VMWare completely misses the entire point. You'd still have Windows underneath so you'd be dealing with the worst of BOTH worlds.
I know this is difficult for you to believe, but some of us use computers to get WORK done, and not to have a wank while reading the tech specs like a porn magazine.
> Macs typically have a longer usable life than Windows PCs
I can vouch for that. I have one from 2010 still going strong (headless server) and 2 from 2012 editions - again running one of them as headless server and the other as my working from home kit.
I used to build my servers and run *BSD on them for 24/7 operations but I could not get anywhere near the low power consumption + small footprint + near silent operations of Mac Mini's hence I switched.
I stack them in a cupboard and forget they are there.
Two desktops at home:
A circa 2009/2010 Mac Mini with maxed out RAM, and a Dell Inspiron 540 of similar vintage which has been running Ubuntu since the original HDD died and now sports two hard drives and maxed out RAM. I’ve stuck at Ubuntu 16.04 as I suspect the driver compatibility creeping death for the decade plus old Dell hard ware it getting close, which is incidentally why my equally ancient Dell Netbook has Mint 17.2 on it.
I had to buy a VGA to HDMI converter box for a tenner earlier this year when the original Dell monitor died and I wanted to re-purpose one of the spare HD TVs we had kicking around (they breed).
Keeping this old hardware running is a hobby in and of itself....
But then millions of folks like myself have Windows PCs that are still trucking just fine after 10 years. I just upgraded a old M6400 to a quad core CPU which will keep it going running Windows 10 (it sold with Vista back in 2008). It already has a SSD etc. etc. etc.
Plenty of Macs fail pretty quick, check out Louis Rossmann on YouTube.
Moot.
I still have a working 2004 Acer laptop. It still gets monthly updates from Microsoft (Windows 7 upgrade). It is slow these days, but is just used to manage an old ISDN system that doesn't support Windows Vista or newer (it uses XP Mode in Windows 7). Luckily that system is finally being replaced and I can retire that old notebook.
Around half the PCs we use are pre-2010 and being gradually updated to more modern systems.
On the other hand, Apple gave up supporting my 2007 iMac in 2014, even though it still works - only the Bootcamp Windows gets security updates these days.
@big_D:"On the other hand, Apple gave up supporting my 2007 iMac in 2014, even though it still works - only the Bootcamp Windows gets security updates these days."
What's your point?
PC manufacturers don't support hardware from 2007.
Microsoft doesn't support operating systems from 2007.
Is any linux distribution from 2007 still supported?
@Snorlax Apple stopped providing upgrades or security updates with Lion for my iMac. On the other hand the Bootcamp side still runs Windows 7 happily and still gets updates. I could upgrade it to Windows 10, but Apple don't provide any drivers for it and it would probably be too slow.
The point being, whilst MS might not still support XP / Vista, machines from that era machines will most probably still run Windows 7, when not Windows 10 and they will get monthly security updates until 2020 at the very least.
The iMac was an Apple abortion, with a 64-bit processor but only a 32-bit UEFI, which they dropped like a hot potato in 2014.
Windows 7 is still in support, having been released in 2009, regardless of what hardware it's running on.
You're slightly correct in saying that OS X Lion isn't in support, having been released in 2011. There have been several *free* upgrades of OS X in the meantime that allow Mac users to stay current.
I'm still not getting your point... You're comparing apples and oranges (no pun intended).
@Snorlax, did you actually read my comment? Apple abandoned the 64/32 Mac with Lion.
There have been no free updates for them since Lion. There might be upgrades for other / newer models, but the 32/32 bit and 64/32 bit Macs have long been abandoned by Apple in terms of security updates or new OS versions.
@big_D:"Apple abandoned the 64/32 Mac with Lion.
And they abandoned the PowerPC architecture after 10.5 - so what?
Oh dry your eyes... Times change. Technology evolves.
Sure was great using Windows 3.1 on a 486SX, but that was then and this is now.
My 2008-manufactured Asus laptop runs Windows 7, 8, 10 just fine, with everything supported and working. Linux Mint 19 works great on it too. I don't need to use a distro from 2008 or Windows from 2008... that's exactly the point. I can use a fully supported OS from 2018 on hardware that is ten years old, and it works. You can do that with a Mac that old too-- but not with the OS that defines a Mac as a Mac. For the kind of money they cost, I'd expect better. The rate of PC hardware obsolescence has slowed greatly, and as long as my hardware is good enough to be useful, I expect it to be made useful by its OS.
I also have a HP laptop from 2004ish, and it works fine too. I even put 10 on it to see if it would work (it did, but slowly). It's really too slow to be of much practical use, but the point is that it works.
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