The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming

[Crosscreek]

This is the chromeBOX.

He was talking about a Chromebook,
Maybe it was just a clerical and he means the box.

Asus is going to release new Chromebooks according to news reports, but they are not for pre order yet. A rumor says the 13" version will have a i3 with HD4400.

Chrome devices are really becoming a good alternative to Apple products.
They are more stable and bug free than let's say windows and not very expensive.

Sadly you can't use it with Apple products, there should be an itunes app for Chrome OS.

Chrome OS is not yet a full OS, but it's possible that in a few years it will be an alternative to windows, osx or ubuntu.

@BTT:

I really hope that we see something new before WWDC.

These haswell cpu's with HD4600 make no sense, even the nearly one year old MBA have better gpu. I think we see at least the HD5000 with entry level mac mini and for the more expensive there will be Iris/Iris Pro

Hopefully it will be not smaller than the Apple TV and with everything soldered together,
Apple won't kill the server version for sure, but maybe it will be only available for businesses, so we either have to buy the smaller, soldered version or ask friends that run a business.

Ya, I agree 4600 would be a useless upgrade. I'll just keep my I5 until a Broadwell shows up.
What ever Apple does with the Mini, it will have to be 4k capable to compete with other Minis.

 

[873089]

Ya, I agree 4600 would be a useless upgrade. I'll just keep my I5 until a Broadwell shows up.

I'm planning to buy the mini as my first mac.

The HD4000 is too slow for my needs,
I'm really hoping that Apple doesn't screw the mini up or even kill it,

that would mean that I have to buy a iMac, which is kinda silly because I have a good screen and it also have no upgradeability.

 

[deconstruct60]

A redesign is only possible, if they remove a lot of ports and if they use more efficient processors with a lower TDP.

There are three major possible paths. Not just two or one.

a. Track the MBA (as headless, keyboard-less MBA) Lower TDP is easy. Port count doesn't have to go way down (still stays more rectangular than the MBA in overall shape) but SATA drives and FW port(s) are probably tossed.

[ there are folks that hope that shrinkage (along performance and size ) leads to a price drop. I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Folks looking for the "perfect" HTPC module may have better luck hoping the AppleTV line up expands and the original AppleTV concept makes a return as "bigger" AppleTV. i.e. ARM system with some internal storage. ]


b. Internals tweak. Mostly same design except probably drop one of the SATA drive bays for PCIe SSD blade slot + (cooling/radios/etc improvements). Not tracking MBP's move to MBA characteristics (e.g., soldered RAM for minimized height) but fair amount of component overlap on CPUs and other major components.


c. Go vertical (chimney) with TDP expansion. Track entry iMac with desktop IrisPro options. Similar to above will probably loose at least one SATA bay and FW (like iMac). Volume constraints that preclude dGPU+VRAM, but following the progression that iMac made over time from mobile centric CPUs to desktop centric ones. ( given desktops CPUs are getting better at TDP. This doesn't have to be radically bigger volume increase. Like the iMac, collect heat relatively near the fan and blow it straight out of the container. )

In terms of desktop footprint it would be smaller. ( the Mac Pro 2013's desktop footprint is slightly smaller than the mini's. )

desktop IrisPro options are cheaper than mobile ones so can hit the current Mini price points with few problems. High design overlap with entry iMac gives better amortizing of R&D costs. ( instead of tracking leading laptop, track leading desktop. )

Otherwise it is impossible that they reduce the size of the power supply and the size of the cooling surface.

The size of the mini' current power supply isn't a big problem. And part of the cooling problem is the 90 degree turn they air go through to exit along with high colocation of ports and heat exhaust.

 

[Crosscreek]

I'm planning to buy the mini as my first mac.

The HD4000 is too slow for my needs,
I'm really hoping that Apple doesn't screw the mini up or even kill it,

that would mean that I have to buy a iMac, which is kinda silly because I have a good screen and it also have no upgradeability.

I bought this one the first of the year because my old windows machine was dying and I had a IPad and iPhone and I got a great price on open box. It really impressed me although I do want more GPU power so I'll just wait it out.

 

[deconstruct60]

.....
Sadly you can't use it with Apple products, there should be an itunes app for Chrome OS.

iRadio perhaps but iTunes is doubtful. The classic iTunes is a media file management app. Chrome devices are not bulk media storage devices. Media streaming devices? Yes. Bulk storage? No.

What Apple needs to do is decouple their radio media streaming network service into its own app and then roll versions of that app out to various OS types.

Chrome OS is not yet a full OS, but it's possible that in a few years it will be an alternative to windows, osx or ubuntu.

There is no good reason to bulk out Chrome OS so that the hardware covered highly overlaps with the other OS. One reason Chrome OS works is that can chuck having do deal with a bunch of issues its hardware doesn't have to cover. It is a "thin client" oriented OS. The "offline" mode will work good enough for much smaller periods where operating without wireless, but the normal mode will be as a "thin client" to network services.

 

[873089]

The classic iTunes is a media file management app.

On my current windows machine I'm using itunes with all my files stored at my NAS-Server or external drive. Nothing local any more, so bulk storage is not my problem!

This is what I would do with a chromebook too, but yet there is no itunes.

Maybe there will be a third party app that let you sync with your iDevice, because I doubt that apple is willing to make a offical version for a google os.

Most chrome devices use NGFF-SSD, they are kinda expensive and hard to get in big sizes, would love to see the chromebox using a standard 2,5" drive.

 

[DavidG328]

no mini is coming :-(

but at least: WINTER IS COMING

A new Mini will be out before the next book is ever released.

 

[deconstruct60]

The die shrink of the Broadwell will greatly improve thermal characteristics, netting a substantial increase in IGPU performance under load. [Edit: this is the 40% mentioned in the post above...]

Huge swings in thermal characteristics aren't going to happen. Die shrinks primarily allow more transistors. Hence they can drop more graphics cores and functionality into the GPU and hence drive up performance.

The TDP constraints for Haswell and Broadwell products of the same targeted type are approximately the same.

The thermal performance of some of the CPU package internal subcomponents may have shifted a bit, but that is typically applied to performance (faster clocks , more transistors , etc ) than to overall radical shrinkage. Intel is far more interested in keeping the price point of their Core i / Xeon products constant than in dropping price and/or radically changing the TDP.

My opinion, worth exactly nothing, is that they will not wait all the way to Broadwell to refresh the mini.

You can always wait another year or two for a new computer. The performance will be better, but you are unlikley to see radical changes in general performance at any one tick-tock shift. If wait two or three tick-tock cycles you'll see very substantive changes, but that is far more so because waited so long.

It isn't generational broadwell shifts that would bring major improvements. It would be throwing a much bigger transistor budget at the graphics subsystem. Holding the x86 core count at four means the vast majority of the transistor budget increase can be assigned to graphics improvements. Intel has gone from graphics getting the "left overs" in the budget to one of the top three major line items.

For the "Pro" graphics likewise the bigger transistor budget gets a bigger eDRAM cache. Better cache performance through higher budgets at about the same TDP constraint.

 

[dalupus]

I usually just replace the drive. But it makes for a good excuse. How will people justify replacing their old computers in the future if there is nothing to wear out? Alternatively, a few years from now we will be reading about peoples' SSDs failing and complaining that at least their old HDDs made strange noises as a warning first.

Yeah I'll be curious how long it takes before ssd's start failing. Although I believe the way it would work is it would just keep getting smaller and smaller rather than an all out drive failure like what happens with the mechanical ones.

----------

perhaps, but i would weary of proclaiming the immanent death of the HDD... SSDs are, and will probably remain for the near future, prohibitively expensive storage solutions. When a 1TB TB array costs over 1k... the average jane/joe will be hardly lining up to buy one...

similarly, making the mini SSD only option will at minimum raise the base price by the cost of the SSD... So i very much doubt that a new mini will not be HDD based. especially when a 120gig SSD for a desktop unit is today consider rather limited space... thus needing at minimum 250gig..

I think apple has already shown they don't really care about forcing people into smaller drives to make the chassis smaller and more reliable.

 

[talmy]

Yeah I'll be curious how long it takes before ssd's start failing. Although I believe the way it would work is it would just keep getting smaller and smaller rather than an all out drive failure like what happens with the mechanical ones.

I suppose the answer is somewhere on the Web. My experience with EEPROMs (the storage element in SSDs) is that they fail in two ways -- failure to successfully write to a location and memory locations that start to forget their contents.

No matter what, having an SSD is no excuse for not making backups.

 

[Cape Dave]

I suppose the answer is somewhere on the Web. My experience with EEPROMs (the storage element in SSDs) is that they fail in two ways -- failure to successfully write to a location and memory locations that start to forget their contents.

No matter what, having an SSD is no excuse for not making backups.

The other issue is the the controller chip on the SSD fails. Thus killing the entire drive regardless of whether individual Flash chips fail and are read only or not.

So, in that regard, having an SSD requires a backup even more

 

[dudedude]

I'm not trying to start an argument but backups are useless for me these days. I keep my data separate from my OS. If my OS drive fails I'd replace it and install a fresh OS, more time consuming yes but how often does it happen? As for my data if any redundancy fails I'll just swap the drive out. No harm No foul. I don't understand what everyone's obsession is with Time Machine and backups in general. Less downtime...sure but sometimes I almost prefer to start fresh.

Obviously if it's for work or business that is a totally different story.

 

[talmy]

I'm not trying to start an argument but backups are useless for me these days. I keep my data separate from my OS. If my OS drive fails I'd replace it and install a fresh OS, more time consuming yes but how often does it happen? As for my data if any redundancy fails I'll just swap the drive out. No harm No foul. I don't understand what everyone's obsession is with Time Machine and backups in general. Less downtime...sure but sometimes I almost prefer to start fresh.

Obviously if it's for work or business that is a totally different story.

I don't want to lose my financial data or photos. Photos especially are irreplacable. You mention redundancy (RAID, I guess) -- well that won't protect you from accidental deletion, failure of the controller (which tends to take all data with it), theft, or natural disaster.

 

[Crosscreek]

I'm not trying to start an argument but backups are useless for me these days. I keep my data separate from my OS. If my OS drive fails I'd replace it and install a fresh OS, more time consuming yes but how often does it happen? As for my data if any redundancy fails I'll just swap the drive out. No harm No foul. I don't understand what everyone's obsession is with Time Machine and backups in general. Less downtime...sure but sometimes I almost prefer to start fresh.

Obviously if it's for work or business that is a totally different story.

What.............?

 

[dudedude]

I don't want to lose my financial data or photos. Photos especially are irreplacable. You mention redundancy (RAID, I guess) -- well that won't protect you from accidental deletion, failure of the controller (which tends to take all data with it), theft, or natural disaster.

I don't keep financial data on my computer. As for photos I have a RAID yes but I also backup the most important ones to a cloud drive and then to a seperate usb hard drive that is kept off-site. If I lose it all after that then apparently I wasn't meant to keep it.

I take backups seriously just not for my OS drive.

 

[talmy]

Good! Your earlier post implied that you didn't take backups seriously at all.

 

[dudedude]

Good! Your earlier post implied that you didn't take backups seriously at all.

Lol yeah re-reading it, it sounded a bit silly. I think I'm going to jump soon so I can get rid of my big old PC. I'm still wondering if I should go with an i5 or an i7. I'm coming off an AMD Athlon II X4 640 which is a quad core. I'm probably never taxing the processor but I tend to enjoy the legroom so to speak.

CPU boss actually scores the i5 better than my current processor basing it on Performance, Single-core Performance, Power Consumption and Value:

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3210M-vs-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-640

It seems like the i5 would be quick enough and I'm guessing once I upgrade it with an SSD and 16GB of RAM it should scream. My system now only has 4GB of Ram and a mechanical hard drive and is very fast. There is just the little voice saying get the i7 get the i7.

 

[talmy]

CPU boss actually scores the i5 better than my current processor basing it on Performance, Single-core Performance, Power Consumption and Value:

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3210M-vs-AMD-Athlon-II-X4-640

It seems like the i5 would be quick enough and I'm guessing once I upgrade it with an SSD and 16GB of RAM it should scream. My system now only has 4GB of Ram and a mechanical hard drive and is very fast. There is just the little voice saying get the i7 get the i7.

As you increase the number of cores the amount of work that can be performed in a given time increases but it's not proportional since all the cores share the same memory resources which quickly becomes the bottleneck. This also means that each core will effectively run slower because of the loss in efficiency and power consumption limitations further decrease the performance per core.

The bottom line is that if you are running a single task having fewer cores (i5 dual core in this case) will be faster but if you are running multiple tasks the i7 with more cores will win.

 

[chelch]

I'm planning to buy the mini as my first mac.

The HD4000 is too slow for my needs,
I'm really hoping that Apple doesn't screw the mini up or even kill it,

that would mean that I have to buy a iMac, which is kinda silly because I have a good screen and it also have no upgradeability.

That's the whole point of the mini. Cheap entry level mac. If they throw any chip with a GPU better than the HD4600 into the refresh, then the entire pricing model is skewed. Unless there's a complete redesign of the mini, don't hope for more than waking up one day to updated minis with SSDs and Haswell chips with HD4600s.

Since the delay of the mini refresh looks to be due to the delay of i5 Haswell chips at 37W, then a redesign is unlikely.

 

[MrGuder]

I have a question, if I get a refurb mac mini with the SSD and I add my own western digital 1 TB external hard drive. When I am using the mac mini and I purchase songs off iTunes or I add CD's into iTunes to create AAC files for my library do they get saved to the SSD or to the external?

Also the same for like photos and software I may purchase download or word docs or excel spreadsheets..etc when I go to save them, does the Mac Mini ask me each time where I want to save them?

Sorry if this sounds stupid but I've never worked with an external drive as part of your actual daily PC, I've only used them as a backup drive to prevent me from losing data but to have one as an actual fixed external drive how does it work since it will be connected 24/7.

I don't see me opening the mini up to add a HD so I am either going to buy one with an SSD and add an external or buy the OS X server model and get 2 SSD but that is pretty costly.

I also want to purchase the 2013 Time Capsual 2 TB with the router and HD built in for backups.

 

[fredr500]

Should we retitle this thread "Random mini discussion"?

 

[talmy]

I have a question, if I get a refurb mac mini with the SSD and I add my own western digital 1 TB external hard drive. When I am using the mac mini and I purchase songs off iTunes or I add CD's into iTunes to create AAC files for my library do they get saved to the SSD or to the external?

Also the same for like photos and software I may purchase download or word docs or excel spreadsheets..etc when I go to save them, does the Mac Mini ask me each time where I want to save them?

In iTunes preferences you can tell it where you want the song library to go. When you create new documents you will be asked where to save them and it will default to the Documents folder. You can create "Aliases" so that folders on the external drive appear to be on your internal drive.

 

[Schnort]

Random nitpicks:
- SSDs use some variant (SLC, MLC, TLC, etc.) of NAND flash, not EEPROM. Intel tried pushing a muti-bit per cell NOR variant about 10 years ago, but it was too expensive and lost out to NAND.
- The HD4600 is actually faster than the HD5000 (at least according to the benchmarks)

 

[apfelmann]

Since it is very unlikely that the next Mac Mini (and the next Macbook Air) will be "4K-ready", I wonder if Apple will release two types of new Thunderbolt Displays: one with the current resolution (hopefully at cheaper price) and one with 4K resolution?

Haswell Mac Mini (current design) + cheaper Thunderbolt Display (+ USB 3.0) would be my perfect combination!!!

 

[RoastingPig]

i dont think the new cinema display will be released untill the whole mac lineup can somehow do 4k even if its crappy. apple dosent want to make the apple store employee say no this monitor can only be used with so, so and so but not that when asked questions. no chance in hell they make two monitors again. not happening. if they did they would have a 1080p thunderbolt display rite now along side the 27. but they dont care about whats affordable.