They stopped providing font anti-aliasing (default on Windows) few years ago in MacOS to make retina displays more relevant.
It also requires you to know the pixel geometry, so may not work correctly on OLED or TVs or other display technology.
I now use a 27" 1440p monitor and I'm always struck by how bad text looks on it compared to my 2009 MBP that's stuck on Mavericks until it dies (not due to text reasons, it's just slow as hell/no benefits to upgrading).
They did something that was relevant to 1x displays, because it used to be better.
The problem is my alternatives are a 4K display with non-integer scaling on macOS, or a 5K Studio Display that my Windows work laptop can’t drive which costs almost as much as my MacBook again[0]. So I guess I’ll stick with what I’ve got.
[0] I’m intrigued by the recently announced 5K Samsung ViewFinity S9, but I’m not expecting it to be meaningfully cheaper than the Studio Display considering it’s a captive market.
See "The subtle death of subpixel antialiasing"
https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Scree...
The one thing I appreciate about windows is that you can completely disable cleartype/anti-aliasing, if you'd like. As far as I know of, it's not possible to do that in any version of macOS (including Ventura).
In fact Checking "Antialias text" in the Terminal.app settings profile just didn't do anything on a non-retina external monitor for 2+ years.
https://i.imgur.com/nRLReww.gif
https://i.imgur.com/fu08mPa.gif
rdar://FB8901170
It's unusable with text that blurry. I thought something was broken at first.
I guess they want to force us to buy a Pro Display XDR. No thanks, instead I'll buy a new computer and run Linux.
EDIT: My mistake, they now have the Studio Display for "only" 1500£
That said, the Mac mini and Mac Studio are reasonable to consider here, since they're sold without displays and I'd be shocked if the majority of them aren't used with regular 4k displays. (We're less than a year out from Apple having a first-party retina monitor at a vaguely reasonable price-point, still.)
It usually doesn't look as good, but it's not like distractingly bad.
Upgrading to 24GB is a whopping $400, and to 1TB is another $400. The $700 baseline seems reasonable. $1500 for a minimum usable machine seems more than a little excessive.
An $800 box with a power cord. Spend the same and get a therma-throttled cpu with iOS and display (iPad); a little more and get a monitor (MBA). Spend double and get a larger monitor with a keyboard and mouse (iMac).
Maybe the primary question is if the user is cloud first (minimal storage) or classic filesystem packrat (better buy big).
I’m not talking about laptops. I specifically said that.
Regardless, USB-C has the springs in the cable, not the port (unlike Lightning), so the port should never fail with regular use anyways, but you may need to replace the cable at some point. You may need to clean the port out eventually, since gunk build up could make the connection feel looser with enough cycles, but then it should be fine again after cleaning. But again, I’m not talking about a laptop where you would be removing and reattaching the drive constantly, so this is completely off topic.
1,500 connect/disconnect cycles for A
5,000 for the Mini
10,000 for micro and type-c
>> Nope, soldered.
> Nope, in the same package as the CPU and GPU.
The SSD certainly isn't in the same package as the CPU and GPU, so your comment is simply wrong, given the question that was actually asked. Whether the RAM is on-package or not is irrelevant to the question asked further upthread. It is soldered. Neither the RAM nor the SSD can realistically be upgraded after the fact. That's the answer to the question.
I don't understand the purpose of your comment.
12-core M2 Pro processor
19-core GPU
16-core Neural Engine
32GB memory
8TB storage
10Gb ethernet
4 Thunderbolt ports
20-core M1 Ultra processor
48-core GPU
32-core Neural Engine
64GB memory
1TB storage
10Gb ethernet
6 Thunderbolt ports
10-core M1 Max processor
24-core GPU
16-core Neural Engine
32GB memory
512TB storage
10Gb ethernet
4 Thunderbolt ports
- I do not like the laptop form factor for doing actual work at my desk; I strongly prefer a bigger and better positioned screen, an ergonomic keyboard, etc
- 10Gig ethernet
- HDMI (wasn't available on Macbooks at the time, also couldn't plug in two external displays)
- If your computer is docked close to 24x7 (as was the case with most of my previous laptops), the battery becomes a liability
- Better cooling (I know these barely ever get hot... until you actually try to push them)
Plus also any kind of headless application, like a server rack where you also want the box to be a bit more more rugged.
Could you tell me more about the liability it creates? Is it a fire hazard? Decaying battery performance?
I just priced out a 24GB RAM/2TB storage M2 mini, and it's still $1kCAD cheaper than the equivalent Air.
There is definitely a large "screen and keyboard" upgrade tax if you're actually considering it.
January the 24th? January 2024?
I wish the US would start writing dates in a sensible way!
Looks like standard big-endian notation to me.
It's not even standard for the US! Did they decide "/" wasn't Apple-y enough so they had to use "."?
edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?
I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to warrant the extra memory consumption (the majority of today's day-to-day browser-based tasks have been done just fine in 2010 on that era's hardware).
How would that work? You whine on an online forum over how bloated a software is, and in the process opt to be deprived of it's usage? Or would you continue to complain about bloated software while using it? Because none of those scenarios offer a compelling reason for the software maintainers to rearchitect their whole application.
Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€?
The issue is that Apple is integrating the RAM in the SoC. Personally, I'm not really a fan of "smart-phonification" of my desktop computers.
I get that the mini is in a bit of a weird spot, since it's still got fairly challenging size constraints, but still... not my cup of tea.
Ha! Not if you want to get it in your MacMini. 8GB will set you back $200!
The Apple Cult has gone all in...
I think the M2 chips use on-chip LPDDR5. is it a 6400MT/s LPDDR5 stick for that price or a 2133 MT/s SO-DIMM?
I remember a decade ago buying a 16GB Mac Book Pro, and listening to people complain that 8GB wasn’t enough, so I’m not sure what world 4GB was enough.
That same 16GB laptop still works great today.
Cut out webapps/Electron and it was entirely fine, though. Like if we'd just used XMPP or something instead of Slack I might even have been able to make it work without serious issues
If you decouple your UI from your business logic, then you only have to re-write the UI. If you must use a web-based UI, then consider using the platforms native browser control rather than bundling electron.
Also Slack, Discord etc. are not really using React Native (but rather normal web react if they are not using another framework). You don't really need Chromium for React Native which significantly reduces memory footpring (in fact a react native app can be close to indistinguishable from a "normal" native app in most ways). You can probably reduce React Native overhead to not much more than 100-200MB compared to purely native apps which seems reasonable.
When has there ever been a performant cross platform framework?
I think that war has been lost. Apple should just allow more RAM to be put in.
To add to that, my 8GB "late 2014" Mac Mini is very performant with (the modern) Linux on it. (It was barely usable running a recent MacOS.)
Agreed. Some might say "RAM is cheap" but that line of thinking is why one day 64GB RAM won't be enough for a dozen browser tabs.
Personally I think 8GiB should be more than enough for any normal end user though the Electronification is taking a real toll these days. However, this is the M2 Pro, labeled for professionals, and professionals generally need more resources. Capping the machine at 32GiB means I can't even comfortably run my current stack without swapping. I can only imagine what this will do do professional video/photo editing.
Like always, it depends on your usecase. For some 4GB will be enough, for some it wont.
Its sad for me that my initial reaction to this is where previously a corp Windows laptop was for email and MS Office, and the Mac was for "actual work", now Mac's are headed to the "email and Office" role, and a halfway decent machine running Linux is where "real work" happens.
A top-spec M2 Pro Mini on CPU and RAM (12-core CPU, 19-core GPU, 32GB unified RAM) is $1,999.
A bottom-spec M1 Max Mac Studio (10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 32GB unified RAM) is $1,999.
Since the low-end Studio has 10Gb Ethernet and four Thunderbolt ports at the same price, and neither has upgradable RAM, there's no reason to buy the high-end Mini.
Apparently Mini RAM hasn't been user upgradable since the 2014 model
When I owned a Mac mini it moved all the time: I took it on the bus with me to and from my girlfriend's house 100s of times.
(Although it died faster than it would have if I had left it in one place, it did last almost 9 years.)
I think 8gb is still the sweet spot for casual users.
Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance.
In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x current standard retail price for SSD upgrades, my guess is that there's some room to bump up the wholesale cost a bit.
Not doing so is, IMHO, insulting to users, and given the non-upgradable nature of these machines, bad for the environment, counter to all of Apple's talk about being environmentally friendly.
There is simply no need for more than 8GB for those use cases.
I've had games running with full on tab-hoarded browsers and IDEs open among with any other crap I haven't bothered to shut down.
I had FF open with a ton of tabs, Capture One open, and I was stacking 400 frames in PixInsight.
The fact I had to push that hard was immensely impressive.
So the macmini essentially for free after a few years compared to your windows machine
I see both 24GB and 32GB configurations on the Apple Store configurator. Not sure what you're looking at.
Also, starting last month, Chrome aggressively unloads tabs in the background with its new "memory saver" feature [1]. So if you were having issues with 8 GB before because of your tabs, you might not anymore.
[1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...
Yup. I just checked Newegg, and laptop form factor DDR4 (not DDR5ᵃ) RAM is selling for $126 for 64 GB (2 x 32 GB).
So market price for 1 GB of DDR4 small form factor RAM is $1.96 per GB.
ᵃ DDR5 is almost twice the cost.
Apple is charging 200/8 = $25 per GB.
Apple charges 12 times the retail price of DDR4, and about 6 times the retail price of DDR5.
It's crazy, but they get away with it by soldering these chips down.
If we could legislate a working effective Right to Repair bill, we might be able to fix this predicament.
The thing to be careful of is if your custom config breaks then the turnaround to fix it can be a couple of months. Ergo only buy stock configs. That makes the market somewhat less friendly.
Also worth mention that 64G is pretty cheap on desktop and that's what the Mac Mini should be compared to.
I also have over 200 PDFs loaded in preview in the background, related to a law suit I’m researching. Still no issues.
ETA: I’m likely to replace my m1 with the m2 since the m2 gets +30% scores in common web benchmarks and heavy JavaScript hacks are my main thing. That should bring it up to par with my Linux box that has the top of the line Intel CPU.
I ended up getting the 16 GB machine (my RAM usage was around 12 GB most times, and never north of 15 GB), but I would be fine recommending an 8 GB machine to my parents. Even from a future-proofing perspective, their use is so lightweight (some photo editing, web browsing, and email) that they would never need more than this.
I could see a case for offering the new version with 16 GB and up, but keeping around an old M1 version with just 8 GB. But I don't think it's necessarily in everyone's interest to pay more for that much RAM.
I can assure you that the shareholders are not disappointed. The premium you pay for more RAM (and SSD) is insane.
Besides that fact that no one is making a computer for the ordinary user anymore. Hardly anyone needs that much power in a computer.
I have a triple monitor setup, and there's essentially a 117% surcharge to add support for the third display.
https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-o...
Of course why would they do this if they don't have to...
This is absolutely not normal...
I don't know what a discord is though.
They really should be upping this to 16GB RAM. There's just no reason not to.
Safari has twelve tabs open across two windows, and Arc has sixteen tabs open.
Checking "memory pressure," I'm in the yellow zone, so I definitely agree that 8GB is not enough. But perhaps you should look at alternatives to Chrome in the meantime.
Doesn't Microsoft still sell laptops with 4 GB of RAM?
I'm perfectly happy with 8GB on my M1 and it was fine on my 2016 13" Pro.
$200 to add 8GB of memory is _insane_, and framing it as "consumer choice" is bad when consumers are being gouged so badly. It's literally at least a 20x markup on the wholesale cost. You can buy 8GB of DDR4 at retail for $20 or less.
2. New RAM is not like old RAM.
Macs are dramatically more optimized than they used to be.
I have a MacBook Air (M1) with 16GB of RAM and it runs more smoothly than older systems that had twice that much.
8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to. 8GB of RAM can handle very process-heavy tasks, like... running Chrome ;)
Tell that to Apple so they can do that out of the box.
> 8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to
No. I think you're confusing memory speed with capacity. Making ram faster doesn't mean it can magically store more.
For real. This myth that "Unified RAM" doesn't need as much capacity as "regular RAM" needs to stop being perpetuated. Intel-based Macs already had memory compression and SSD swap.
My M1 MBA with 16GB of RAM was definitely limited by the amount of RAM a number of times throughout its life, and my 24GB M2 MBA has a much better balance due to the additional RAM.
8GB is fine for someone who doesn't do anything but basic web browsing and word documents, but I'm not comfortable recommending 8GB of RAM to anyone who intends on doing more than that. I'm honestly a bit uncomfortable with 16GB these days, but it is tremendously nicer than 8GB.
If Apple hadn't just lowered prices by $100 on Mac mini, I would say that 16GB should be the minimum, but for $599... I think 8GB is probably fine for what you're getting.
However the parent is right, it's disgusting how much memory capacity is needed to run a basic environment.
Maybe having exceptionally fast machines with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage.
RAM is dirt cheap these days. Bloated apps are bad, but 8GB really is simply a joke that punishes many people for the sake of product categories, at least until RAM is indistinguishable from storage.
Not it's not. Gnome or KDE can have 2x if not 3x memory overhead.
> with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage
Why? Memory is cheaper than designing new CPUs. 8GB in the base model is just a way for Apple to upsell upgrades and improve margins through market segmentation. If they shipped 16GB in the base model they'd have to cut prices or lose customers. It's a simple as that.
Even my thunderbolt 4 hub / dock … has another hubs for “lesser” devices.
How many AA multiplayer games are available on Mac? Not streaming, no VM, no Wine/CrossOver. Legit playable games. I know Minecraft, WoW, Civ6, and CSGO. Probably there is more but clearly not the target of Apple and the devs either
I'd argue Apple shot themselves in the foot by depreciating 32-bit libraries as fast as they did. If they had Proton, the Macbooks could be enjoying the same surge in gaming popularity the Steam Deck has.
My relatively anemic "Mac compatible" list of games, in my Steam library, went from about 20 to 3.
Remember that all iOS games work on Macs, too. Here's a list of AAA iOS games from last year, for example.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iosgaming/comments/t1iqlh/a_list_of...
$1999 for the Mac Studio vs
$1699 for the Mac Mini M2 Pro 32GB.
Indeed that's a tough sell for the Mac Mini. It shows how much Apple is charging extra for those capacity upgrades.
I think the Mac Pro will be announced months before it releases, announcement at WWDC then fall release.
And remember that eBay charges a selling fee of 12.9%, and you have to go through all of the time and effort of photographing, listing, selling, packaging, shipping, and dealing with a (small) risk of buyer fraud.
On the other hand, Apple takes it off of your hands hassle-free, risk-free, and you pay no sales tax on the trade-in value (which in NYC is 8.875%, for example).
There's nothing insulting about it.
It's like a plumber saying they are totally fine using a $2 Walmart wrench. I just don't get it.
Memory compression is a thing, and these SSDs are fast, but I still don't understand how this is working so well. I was fully expecting to exchange this for a higher memory model, since it's supposed to be a temporary computer. I'm keeping it, for now.
"One display with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over HDMI"
The previous Macs supported so many 5k/8k display at once, they arguably should be able to drive a single 8k display, technically.
Example, Mac Studio supports up to 4 x 6k displays AND 1 4k at once. So that is 4 x 18M pixels + 8M pixels = 80M pixels
8k displays are 32M pixels, so Mac Studio is arguably already able to push 2x that many pixels...
Or maybe it's related to the HDMI chipset they chose specifically until now.
Battery life is great, the laptop is fast enough for everything I need. TB 3 hubs allow me to use external peripherals, two 4k 27" monitors, plenty of real estate.
Update: I just saw a couple other comments – camera for sure. A much better camera than the garbage they include nowadays.
I was waiting for the Mini refresh but now I think I'll just wait for the Studio refresh and get one with M2 Max.
Mini = M2 and M2 Pro | Studio = M2 Max and M2 Ultra. | Mac Pro = M2 Ultra and ??? (or maybe 2x Ultra)
If they've fixed that, I would consider using this as an HTPC (as Otpimus and Movist are the only desktop video players I've found that seem to actually fully support HDR, my windows box isn't cutting it).
Catalina on my cheesegrater Mac Pro would happily drive 2 4K 10-bit screens at 144Hz (via TB3)
Big Sur? Not so much. Had to downgrade DSC from 1.4 to 1.2 on my monitors, and even then I could only get 120Hz at 8 bit, 95Hz at 10bit, IIRC. Still not "shabby" but annoying. Really seems like it was broken as something to do with the Pro Display XDR.
I am looking at the rear ports of the M2 pro and I see 4x TB4 ports and 1x HDMI ... can't this drive 5x displays ?
If not, why not ?
There's hacky third party solutions to this, but they all involve giving questionable applications permission to record all your screens.
The Mac mini M1 requires a displaylink driver to support a third display, which in all cases requires uninterrupted screen recording permissions to function. M1 laptops require the same to support more than ONE external display, regardless of whether or not the laptop is in clamshell mode.
You'll note that, for example, on the Macbook Air (both M1 and M2 versions), Apple labels the ports "Thunderbolt / USB 4," which is confusing and IMHO downright misleading. Either way, the reason they do that is that those ports don't support dual displays, so they only meet the Thunderbolt 3 spec, which doesn't mandate dual displays.
A better label for the Macbook Air might be just "USB 4," or "USB 4 with Thunderbolt 3 support" (though TB3 is part of the USB 4 spec, so that's technically redundant).
USB/Thunderbolt standards are fun.
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/
And up to three monitors for certain models.
Apple is still doing its old tricks, though. Out of curiosity, I put my $13K Mac Pro in as a trade-in to see what it'd contribute (and to be clear, my expectations, I thought, were reasonable... was thinking $3K). 12 core Xeon, 192GB, 8TB, W5700X 16GB.
$3K? No, $1,050. Ouch.
Double ouch when you go to the Mac Pro store and find that exact same configuration is still being sold by Apple today for $12K.
You've specced it up with every customisation possible, that 999.999999% of buyers won't do and won't need and then complain at the cost in an effort to bash Apple,
I just find it humorous that you can spend several thousand dollars on a Mac mini, Mac Pro, or Mac Studio. It seems like there's a lot of product overlap to me.
For most of the folks on HN, that's probably true. We're an edge case.
For my parents? A Mac mini is gonna be more than enough. There are folks happilly using Chromebooks with a tenth of the power.
It's like a faith amongst some people that this is bad, but the idea seems to lack evidence.
That the Mac mini can cost either X or ~10X is more like saying "a car starts at $15k and can cost $150k". Throw in that it clearly overlaps with the Mac Pro and Mac Studio and I can only ask "why would I pick X, Y or Z?" It seems like the Studio is the way to go vs a mini configured above or around $2000, unless Apple is simply peddling to datacenter customers with Mac mini server racks (which hey, maybe).
Too bad I can never put it in one of the industrial machines my startup builds, as these Apple computers are completely oriented towards end-consumers, locked with an AppleID, etc. in summary totally useless from a builders perspective.
It is quite sad that top tech companies nowadays produce mostly consumer electronics.