New Mac mini with new M1 chip

[OtinG]

This might be an affordable option. I won’t be buying any Mac for quite a while, so I’ll have plenty of time to hear what the actual, real world performance will be like from users. At a starting price of $699 though it might be a decent buy, depending on how much “upgrade” you have to buy. Apple loves socking it to us for extra RAM and extra SSD capacity. I assume the $699 starter will be stripped down.

[leebase]

Apple Silicon Macs: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/...e-release-date

Now we wait for reviewers to put Apple's marketing speak to the test. 3.5x fast CPU, 5x faster graphics...upteen billion times faster machine learning!

Seriously, Apple has made some bold claims about their M1 chip. Fastest core's ever in a CPU? At least with the graphics they kept saying "fastest INTEGRATED graphics". Still...I await to see what these will mean in real life for Mac users.

15-20hour battery life...while fanless on the Mac Air....and with fan on the Mac Mini and Macbook Pro 13.

Double the speed on the SSD's and Apple already had amazing SSD's.

$699 for the Mac Mini, $999 for the 13" Mac Air, and $1299 starting for the 13" Mac Pro.

Faster than 98% of all PC's sold. Yeah, well, 98% of all PC's sold don't cost $999. Most PC's are junk.

So...again...we wait for the performance reviews. Still, an exciting day for Mac users.

[OtinG]

Yep, I got tired of hearing their “this is X times faster than” rhetoric! I will definitely wait until benchmarks come out to see just what their capabilities are. I’m skeptical. I’m also not knowledgeable of their “unified memory” rather than the older RAM memory. I noticed that the mini comes with only 8GB of unified memory, upgradable to only 16GB. But I have no clue how that compares to RAM. It will cost $200 to upgrade 8GB of unified memory to 16GB, and $200 to upgrade the 256GB SSD to 512GB.

[pazos]

With an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU, M1 on Mac mini delivers up to 3x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 6x faster graphics² than the previous generation.

1. Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction Mac mini systems with Apple M1 chip, and production 3.6GHz quad‑core Intel Core i3‑based Mac mini systems, all configured with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. Prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 tested using a 55‑second clip with 4K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 4096x2160 resolution and 59.94 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 422. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac mini.

Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction Mac mini systems with Apple M1 chip, and production 3.6GHz quad‑core Intel Core i3‑based Mac mini systems with Intel Iris UHD Graphics 630, all configured with 16GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. Prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 tested using a complex 2‑minute project with a variety of media up to 4K resolution. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac mini.

So, yeah. The mac mini looks very good and is "cheap" for being an apple product. The performance gain looks BS to me at this point of time. They're comparing the M1 with a i3 running a program transcoding video using a format propietary of theirs. I'm not sure but looks like cheap marketing and these tests are backed by hardware instructions and not really CPU/GPU bounded.

Of course nothing against offloading work from the CPU in new chips, but the big numbers are just PR.

Also, a fair comparation from the price POV would be between the M1 and a i7-10510U as both are relatively new, have the same TDP and came with an integrated GPU.

[tomsem]

Unlike the previous Mac mini, this one does not apparently have upgradable memory, it is ‘unified’ (used for both applications and graphics), and it maxes out at 16GB (same as MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro). I assume that they make up for it by having faster SSD to swap out to. So yes, some benchmarks are needed to verify the performance boosts. I doubt it is all smoke and mirrors. I’m probably going to get a mini, my MacBook Pro is 10 years old (now mostly serving up a second monitor via Luna Display, but it’s a bit slow) and I am curious about running iOS apps on it.

[OtinG]

Well $1099 gets you a Mac mini with 3.0GHz Intel Core i5 6-Core Processor with Intel UHD Graphics 630, 512GB Storage.

For $899 you get the new Mac mini with Apple M1 Chip with 8-Core CPU and 8-Core GPU, 512GB Storage.

The older mini with i5 is $200 more, but I suspect it will beat the new M1 mini when it comes to speed and capability. I agree, Apples PR is likely BS and when it comes to running current image processing software from 3rd party vendors, all that BS won’t help much. But we should soon see as they are available for order today.

[pwalker8]

No new iMacs announced. The mac Mini looks good. Thunderbolt 3 ports should be really fast. Once again, not useful for me until Drobo starts producing again.

[OtinG]

Big Sur is being released on the 12th (this Thursday). I’m still trying to decide whether to upgrade my 2014 MacBook Pro to it. Maybe in a few weeks.

And yes, Apple mentioned the Mac minis with unified memory are NOT user upgradable. I think I saw it on their website when I was checking prices.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I’m probably going to get a mini, my MacBook Pro is 10 years old (now mostly serving up a second monitor via Luna Display, but it’s a bit slow) and I am curious about running iOS apps on it.

Now leaning to the MacBook Air, I will probably appreciate portability even though I am not traveling much at the moment.

[leebase]

Being able to edit multiple 4k video streams on the Air or Mac Mini is certainly a new level of ability.

If you are using Apple's video editing software. I imagine it will take some time for software developers like Davinci and Adobe to retool to take advantage. In the mean time it looks like performance under emulation is pretty good.

The battery life has reached the "work all day disconnected" level for me. That's a nice new bar.

FYI: High Efficiency Image Format—HEIF—isn’t an Apple-invented format. It’s actually a standard created by the MPEG group, and it’s a container rather than a format. Article

But yes, Apple has built in support in silicon to make working in this "much better than jpg" format fast.

[leebase]

As for upgrading to Big Sur....I only have 1 Mac and it's my daily work machine. I'll have to hold off and see how the upgrade goes for other people.

I'm also not so sure what it's bringing to the table that I'd need to run right out and grab it. I'm not running an M1 Mac, so I'm not going to get to run iPhone/iPad apps.

[downeaster59]

I bought an early 2020 MacBook Air with an Intel i3, and I am pleasantly surprised by the overall performance. I am curious to see how the M1 chip does in real world situations.

As for Big Sur, I'm in no rush either. I don't see the advantage of running iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac, since mobile apps are designed with a touchscreen in mind. Show me an iPad that can run Mac desktop apps, and then I'd be interested!

The people at CodeWeavers say that their CrossOver app will be able to run on M1 devices, and run at least some Windows apps/programs even with the ARM architecture of the M1. That could be interesting if they can pull that off!

[tomsem]

It appears to be easier to adapt iOS app to macOS than the other way around. We still don’t have Logic or Final Cut for iPad. It took Adobe a long time to get Photoshop for iPad, and Illustrator for iPad just shipped.

Going the other way, Music, News, Home apps (among others) are essentially iOS apps.

But there’s still some work to optimize for macOS, and developers may not think it is worth it.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by leebase

As for upgrading to Big Sur....I only have 1 Mac and it's my daily work machine. I'll have to hold off and see how the upgrade goes for other people.

I'm also not so sure what it's bringing to the table that I'd need to run right out and grab it. I'm not running an M1 Mac, so I'm not going to get to run iPhone/iPad apps.

I've been running the beta on my laptop for a while. The most recent release candidate is noticeably faster than Catalina and that's on a 2018 MacBook Pro. I'll likely upgrade my iMac to it when it comes out. It's always interesting to see if support for my Drobo and my weatherstation still work. We will see. As with most Apple OS upgrades, there really isn't anything that I see and say, "Oh yea, got to have that". My use case for my mac and i-devices tends to be a bit different that Apple's target audience. The only real issue that I've run into is that the weatherunderground site doesn't work with firefox anymore. It works fine with safari. It works fine with the same version of firefox on Catalina.

[tomsem]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barryco...ort-of-memory/

The MacBook Pro, based on Apple’s M1 silicon, has a different type of RAM to what’s gone before. This is what Apple is branding ‘unified memory’, where the RAM is part of the same unit as the processor, the graphics chip and several other key components. This is called a system on a chip (SoC), which is more commonly found in smartphones and tablets.

...

With everything sharing the one pool of memory, you might think that Apple would want to include more RAM, not less than before, but the reams of benchmarks Apple shared last night suggest the company is confident that even a limited allocation of RAM will outperform most equivalent PCs.

We will have to wait for independent benchmarks to be carried out on the new Macs before anyone can verify those claims. The benchmark graphs that Apple showed in last night’s keynote were extremely vague, not revealing which specific PCs or PC processors the comparisons were being made with.

Hard 16GB limit

There’s another reason Apple isn’t taking its traditional approach of charging customers a hefty premium to include more RAM in their MacBooks: it can’t. Currently, the M1 cannot support more than 16GB of memory.