Top-end Mac mini, you say...?!? ;^p
Mac mini
- 10-core CPU (8P/2E)
- 32-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 64GB LPDDR5 RAM
- 1TB NVMe SSD
- 10Gb Ethernet port
- (4) USB-C ports
- (2) USB-A ports
- HDMI 2.0 port
- 3.5mm headphone jack
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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming
- Thread starter GabrieleR
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Top-end Mac mini, you say...?!? ;^p
Mac mini
Well technically the 2018 did get revved last year when they upgraded all the storage.. They still call it the 2018 but it did get an 'update' last year.. And before the 2018, the last Mini came out in 2014.. The Mac Mini is just not on Apple's high priority list.
Ok I’m answering my own question here, I caved and bought a maxed out 16” MBP with 4TB drive! Looking forward to my first proper Mac in years (last one was a 2010 MBP that still works and a Mac Pro 5.1) I’ve had a hackintosh for years!
"Technically"...
Come on dude, you know that is not what we all mean when we talk about a refresh cycle...!
Waiting it out. I just want more ports and don’t want the expense and pain of a dock. So, to get my PC to hobble along a while longer, I just deleted, repartitioned, reformatted and reinstalled Win 10...and then all the other installs, settings, etc. Wasted a day. But at least the old desktop is snappier and can hobble along for how ever many months it takes...hopefully.
The Intel Mini still being sold brand new into 2022 certainly doesn't hurt its prospective lifetime (in terms of receiving macOS updates) so that's a silver lining I guess.
Why buy brand new when odds are we are going to get a lot of refurbs? Heck, when the M1 mini came out the reverb store was filled to the gills with Intel Minis. People who wanted one grabbed what was there and now it is down to two - one M1 and one Intel i5
I meant from the perspective of existing Intel owners, and whoever might later receive their hand-me-downs
I would always go with a refurb if it's available. My 2018 Mini is a refurb, took about a month of constant checking to find it in 2020 but I saved a lot since it's the top-spec model. Only issue with refurbs is that the price remains pretty steady at 15% less than Apple's list price. At the end of a model series, that is typically not a very good deal since you will find sales on the discontinued models.
For example, B&H Photo was blowing out the 2014 Mini when it was discontinued, got a new 2.8ghz i5/8gb Mini from them for $500. At the same time, Apple was selling the exact same 2014 Mini as a refurb for about $1000. 😐
For example, B&H Photo was blowing out the 2014 Mini when it was discontinued, got a new 2.8ghz i5/8gb Mini from them for $500. At the same time, Apple was selling the exact same 2014 Mini as a refurb for about $1000. 😐
So for the 1st time ever, I felt so sure that Apple was bringing the new Mac Mini at the last event to kill off the remaining intel Mac Mini I sold my current M1 Mac Mini ahead of time. What a great decision that was 
However, every cloud has a silver lining and all that! I picked up an M1 MBA, 256GB/16GB for just £799 in the UK. Brand new and sealed. Bargain.
That will work well for me until we see something new in the Mac Mini and then the MBA with 16GB Ram will still be a great device for many years as a family spare.
However, every cloud has a silver lining and all that! I picked up an M1 MBA, 256GB/16GB for just £799 in the UK. Brand new and sealed. Bargain.
That will work well for me until we see something new in the Mac Mini and then the MBA with 16GB Ram will still be a great device for many years as a family spare.
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Good point.
My 2018 Mini is running really well as should be expected. I'm getting sick of replacing Apple hardware and software due to architecture changes. I'm going to be irate if some of my niche software purchases break under Apple Silicon.
It's interesting seeing the MBP orders getting pulled forward. I'm hoping that means the manufacturing process for the chips is going ok and they can put these new chips in a mini chassis. I'm not overly bothered about a redesign as it lives in a cupboard.
I've got an old 2012 Mac mini that is crying to be upgraded. It's my always on Docker machine/build/CI Server, plus VMs and Plex Server and I don't think it's had memory pressure in the green since about 2016. I'm glad I didn't cave and get one of the 2018 models though, although the refurb store does pull me in from time to time.
Edit: its a 2012, not 11
I've got an old 2012 Mac mini that is crying to be upgraded. It's my always on Docker machine/build/CI Server, plus VMs and Plex Server and I don't think it's had memory pressure in the green since about 2016. I'm glad I didn't cave and get one of the 2018 models though, although the refurb store does pull me in from time to time.
Edit: its a 2012, not 11
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How much memory do you have in the 2011 Mac mini? Apparently they can take up to 16 GB.
I'm at the full 16. I had a spare 16gb stick so I tried to go up to 24 (16+8), but it didn't work. I can't remember if it wouldn't recognise it or just wouldn't boot. I'm not sure I'd need a M1-Max but I can see 64GB of memory being useful in the not too distant future. I know a lot of people have said the RAM doesn't translate from x86 to Apple Silicon, but in a wired memory situation like, I don't see how it can act that differently. Happy to be proven wrong though
I agree. A lot of people claiming memory is less necessary in the M1 series Macs were not really accurate. The main thing is that memory swapping was masked since the SSDs in these things are so much faster.
If you look at the M1 reviews 3 months after the initial reviews, a lot of people were complaining they'd get random problems on 8 GB models, even though those 8 GB models seemed otherwise fast. The problem was due to memory constraints of course, and some software was sometimes behaving erratically if the machine was forced to swap all the time. Some of the reviewers also said that once they upgraded to 16 GB, most of those erratic issues disappeared.
I think they are only incrementally faster than the 2018 Mini, aren't they? This is what I get on mine.
Well, two things:
1. I was thinking mainly of the MacBook Air. Its SSD is literally twice as fast as the previous MacBook Air SSD.
2. Yours is a high end 2018 mini with 2 TB SSD. I suspect its SSD may be significantly faster than the entry level mini's 128 GB SSD, but I'm not sure.
EDIT:
Here we go, from reddit, for the 2018 minis:
From what I’ve seen.
128GB -> ~600MB/s
256GB -> ~1.3GB/s
512GB -> ~1.9GB/s
1TB -> ~2.6GB/s
Reads are all > 2GB/s.
Since this is a thread about the Mini in the Mini forum, that was the context of my reply. Yes, the 2tb ssd has a faster write speed than the smaller disks but the read speeds are about the same. Anyway, swapping is also very fast on the 2018 Mini but that SSD gets hot with heavy disk access. I have 64gb however, so not a problem.
Yes, the 2tb ssd has a faster write speed than the smaller disks but the read speeds are about the same. Anyway, swapping is also very fast on the 2018 Mini but that SSD gets hot with heavy disk access. I have 64gb however, so not a problem.
That was only part of the problem. The other part was people pushing those machines to levels they never were really designed for given the specs they gos. For example there was the bank that used a mini, something generally looked at as an entry level transition Mac, as a postgres server. Also part of the problems was due to Rosetta 2 having to translate (not emulate which is slower) a greater amount of Intel software (many programs have made the transition since then), running software known to eat RAM like candy to the point it had become a meme also known as Chrome or anything written in older versions of Electron, trying to run way too many programs for the RAM available, and a host of other explanations.
The idea that somebody could find s particular web page with more that 10 tabs is totally alien to me. How could you even know what tab opened what especially if as some claimed they were going well north of 20 tabs?
I also looked at the numbers being reported and many of them simply didn't make sense in that the percentage used didn't line up with reasonable TBW early on.
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I think a few people fell for the hype, but it was fairly telling to me that they kept the top end Intels around. That gives me shudders about a bank using it for anything even close to mission critical. Swap is going to cause some major issues on any locking transactions.
I might be mistaken, but I think DDR4 has a bandwidth of about 25GBps per channel, so the intel mini swap is still ~10-20x faster than the read speed of the NVMe drive.
Why wouldn't they keep the the top end Intels around? Anybody that depended on those was going to wait for the new technology to settle down and for their software to get upgraded or replacement options to become available.
Nevermind, it had only been 13 month earlier the previous Intel system Catalina 10.15 got rid of 32-bit MacOS code and from what Go64 (a tool to check programs) and the various reports were saying that broke a lot. Anything that had taken the lazy route and used WINE stopped working. The M1s couldn't run anything less then Big Sur (11.0) so everybody using 32-bit code was stuck on old hardware and some 40% of people appear to have been in that boat when Big Sur dropped with the M1s.
Yet the bank did something that stupid.
The problem is the architecture of Intel and M1 are so different that they don't really compare that way: MacBook Pro M1 Max is "FASTEST GPU EVER TESTED" - Affinity, Apple M1 Max GPU beats $6,000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in Affinity benchmark. Also that DDR4 is limited by the CPU's bandwidth and the fact the Intel CPU has to play hen-chicken-fox with whatever the GPU is doing. The new M1 Max can send 400GB/s to its unified memory.
A fully blinged out to the gills 14‑inch MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine; 64GB unified memory; 8TB SSD storage) is only US$5,899.00. If that is what a laptop can do what do you think a M1 Max desktop is going to do?
Also Intel NEEDS this to go well... shows that the old way of figuring how RAM works just went out the window...Windows 11 that is
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A lot of workflows can't afford to deal with the quirks and growing pains associated with new hardware and immature software. If the workflow has already been perfected, why change it? These businesses are the ones that will want to continue to buy the Intel Macs for now for their mission critical work, until the Apple Silicon ecosystem has all the kinks worked out. Perhaps in the meantime they can buy an M1 series model to test, but it may take a while before they adopt them fully.
Apple can keep these Intel Macs around until 2022, and then with Apple Care 3-year support contracts, these machines will be good until at least 2025. That's 4 years from now, ample time for such businesses to implement the new Apple Silicon machines into their workflows, along with mature software.
Apple will keep the Intel Mac minis around until they launch the M1 Pro / M1 Max (M1 Max Duo?) powered (and redesigned) Mac mini (Pro?) models, as soon as those show up, the Intel models will be banished from the Apple Store! Which will probably be Spring 2022, alongside the new 27" iMac (Pro?). Will Apple call it a Pro or will we see the "iMac Pro" moniker reserved for a 32" iMac with multiple M1 Max SoCs? And if Apple does saddle the 27" iMac with the "Pro" suffix, will there not be a larger multi SoC model?
Tune in next year...! ;^p
Soap... Heh...
Actually thanks to Apple's refurb program (the Macs there can be as much as 4 years old) you can push that to 2027 (4 year old 2020 Intel refurb + Apple Care 3-year support contract). So programmers and business will have 6 years to get their act together.
Why wouldn't they keep the the top end Intels around? Anybody that depended on those was going to wait for the new technology to settle down and for their software to get upgraded or replacement options to become available.
Nevermind, it had only been 13 month earlier the previous Intel system Catalina 10.15 got rid of 32-bit MacOS code and from what Go64 (a tool to check programs) and the various reports were saying that broke a lot. Anything that had taken the lazy route and used WINE stopped working. The M1s couldn't run anything less then Big Sur (11.0) so everybody using 32-bit code was stuck on old hardware and some 40% of people appear to have been in that boat when Big Sur dropped with the M1s.
Yet the bank did something that stupid.
The problem is the architecture of Intel and M1 are so different that they don't really compare that way: MacBook Pro M1 Max is "FASTEST GPU EVER TESTED" - Affinity, Apple M1 Max GPU beats $6,000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X in Affinity benchmark. Also that DDR4 is limited by the CPU's bandwidth and the fact the Intel CPU has to play hen-chicken-fox with whatever the GPU is doing. The new M1 Max can send 400GB/s to its unified memory.
A fully blinged out to the gills 14‑inch MacBook Pro (Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine; 64GB unified memory; 8TB SSD storage) is only US$5,899.00. If that is what a laptop can do what do you think a M1 Max desktop is going to do?
Also Intel NEEDS this to go well... shows that the old way of figuring how RAM works just went out the window...Windows 11 that is
Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm misreading the tone, but I think we're saying the same things with respect to the M1 and Intels co-existing as the Space Grey ones had been marked out as "Pro" and the M1 wouldn't fill that need. However, I don't think Apple would care about people needing 32 bit as they'd been sign-posting it for a long time.
I'd be interested to see if any of the Intel offerings remain on the main store when they have Apple Silicon offerings at every level. I think we'll see the the Pro and Max chips in the mini, but there's unlikely to be any performance differences from the MBPs (maybe with the exception of thermals). If Jade 2 and 4C-Die leaks are true, they're likely bound for the Mac Pro or iMac Pro, although I'd love to see them in a smaller box.