I was just using that as a rough guess about what Apple might charge for a 32GB Mini or a M1 Pro mini. Certainly AS and Intel are different systems.
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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming
- Thread starter GabrieleR
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Remember, this is the company that still sells the Watch Series 3, with a different processor and different screen size than any other watch and it has been over 4 years since they first started selling that Series 3. Also, anyone buying one has to go through a multi-hour backup, upgrade, wipe, and restore process to apply any Watch OS patch.
I would imagine that studio/pro is for creator and mini is for consumer.
Yes, but somewhere in between are a lot of “prosumers”. Customers don’t always fit so neatly into simple buckets. It’s better to give them step by step upgrade options so they can find their maximum price point. If you artificially limit the choices, customer can get stuck in a lower price product without any easy way to afford something just a little more. Apple end up leaving money on the table.
I'm sorta in that category - currently a mac pro 6,1 user, don't like the studio, I just want a mini with 32gb memory and 4x usb-c. That doesn't seem like too much to ask for, right? On the other hand there's no reason I can't stick with my current machine until it dies, I just like new shiny things.
Not only that, but there are an awful lot of pros using the Mac mini, but who want a little more.
Price-wise, the Mac Studio is not “a little more”. It’s a lot more.
Apple is (in)famous for successfully finding the highest possible price points for their products. :-D
Which means they have more room to go higher with the Apple Silicon Mac mini.
Speculation is that the Intel model is still sticking around for the time being because it is sells well enough to data centers (like Mac mini Colo).
I suppose there is a part of the market willing to spend over twice as much money for a Mac Studio because they need more power than an M1 SoC or they must have 32GB for their workflow and therefore the Mac mini just is not an option for them. But I expect that market is not that large, considering.
So offering a 32GB option for M2 and an M2 Pro option for the next Mac mini refresh likely is not going to steal a lot of customers from the Mac Studio. I expect the most-likely outcome is a fair number of people will upgrade an M2 Mac mini to 32GB because they just feel "gotta have it" and that's going to be a lot of $400 upgrades with huge margins so it might actually end up making Apple more money than depending on the folks who will pay $1000 more for Mac Studio after you factor in all the higher production costs of the parts in a Mac Studio.
The base M1 uses LPDDR4X while the Pro/Max use LPDDR5 (there was a thread asking if it supported on chip ECC) so comparing the cost of the M1 Ultra to machines with DDR4 DIMM upgrade options makes no sense.
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Looking at the current delivery times for the Mac Studio, I’m not sure that its market is as small as you assume. The Studio is very popular and the question is whether an M1Pro mini would generate more upsells to the Studio or whether it would indeed cannibalize the Studio market.
I understand that some people in this thread would like to have an option between the M1 mini and the Studio, but I’m not sure if that would be a viable market for Apple. I trust Apple to have the best insights to existing and potential markets.
No M1Pro in neither mini nor Studio at this point in time could have multiple reasons. But if the next mini refresh (fall?) won’t bring an M1Pro option, then I guess the market is too small for Apple to really bother.
That would be true if Apple didn't sit around for 6 years letting its old Pro machine rot then release a machine that is out of reach for most independents.
I had a 2010 Pro and switched to an 2018 i7 Mini. I might grab an iMac Pro while they're hitting the bargain bin.
The Studio is one of the most affordable pro machines Apple has ever released unless you need the Xeon or GPU cards of a full Mac Pro.
But Apple lived quite happily for years with a big hole where the mythical xMac was placed. Only when the 27" iMac has seemingly been despatched has the headless box market suddenly become interesting - but the form factor of the Mac Studio doesn't look like it lends itself well to Co-Location on size and bulk grounds.
If we figure in a sales order from the Co-Location guys who don't want to have to reconfigure their data centres for life without the current Mini form factor how about this:
Mac mini goes M1 Pro only, retains existing form factor - gets 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, more than the 2 Thunderbolt ports the M1 Mini has - keeps 2 USB-A ports, Ethernet, and the HDMI 2.0 port. Yes the bluetooth and wifi issues remain but Colo guys don't care.
16Gb/512Gb/M1 Pro spec starts at $1299 (which values the M1 Pro uplift at $200). And this uplift would simply raise the average selling price of the Mini for the people who can't quite stretch to the Mac Studio.
The usual options from the MacBook Pro 14" apply but for an extra $500 anyone who wants the display, keyboard, and battery gets the laptop.
I would argue that M1 Max BTO options may not be allowed for the Mini for heat reasons and to stop people from trying to spec up a Mac Studio on the cheap.
This frees up space for a Nano to be launched with the M2 CPU on its own schedule with 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2 USB-A and the HDMI as seen before. As usual, prices from $699 with 8Gb RAM and 256Gb storage. Because it's a new product, Apple could then do something 'clever' like remove the Ethernet port on board to save space (maybe go with the iMac 24 PSU arrangement?).
It splinters the desktop line much more but gets away from Apple having to explain the differences between out of sync processors.
Not to imply that the Mac Studio is not popular, but the scale of the delivery delays could be impacted by parts shortages for the M1 Max and, especially, M1 Ultra.
It took Apple a significant period of time to start catching up with orders for M1 Max-equipped MacBook Pros and we might be seeing that here, as well.
Indeed.
Well let us also not forget that the "X-Mac" was supposed to offer Mac Pro flexibility and upgradeability, but just using i5s and i7s instead of Xeons so it was half the price (or less). And if they had offered that, they would have mostly cut Mac Pro off at the knees as well as moving effectively their entire desktop user-base to decade-long replacement cycles (as people just continuously upgraded the components in the case with off-the-shelf parts).
Mac Studio is a "sealed box" like the mini and iMac so it will still drive replacement (if on a longer time-scale due to the inherent power available).
Yes on both counts - even if Max will work in a mini enclosure, I do not see Apple offering it since it would directly impact the Mac Studio (plus it would likely cost as much, if not more, than the Studio with Apple's BTO pricing).
Apple did make some questionable parts choices where Xeon CPUs were concerned. They didn't use all the 'features' of the Xeon range and yet the users were made to shoulder the excessive prices from the various Mac Pro and iMac Pro products which were seemingly picked just because they offered the required number of PCIe lanes directly off the CPU when certain motherboards offered PCIe lanes which could have been used for Thunderbolt.
Disappointingly they just priced the Xeon Mac Pros right out of the range of people who thought the G5 was pricey enough.
The sealed box implementation is sufficient if people can build a Thunderbolt external array for additional storage or rely on a NAS.
Definitely one for pricing I think but Linus Tech Tips suggests that the M1 Ultra runs at 140w peak power draw, therefore the M1 Max alone should be 70w (maybe 65w?) which is potentially at the very limit of the cooling capability of the Mini - and may be stretching the power supply too.
The big heat sink in the Mac Studio ought to have been a big clue about the M1 Max CPU in a desktop so I can't see Apple annoying customers by going back to a heat and noise compromised Mac Mini which has a certain percentage of owners complaining about wifi and bluetooth issues too.
Apple obviously want people who need M1 Max to upsell themselves to the Mac Studio, but an M1 Pro Mini would make that unit a massively affordable machine in comparison.
By introducing an high end M1 Pro SKU into the existing Mac mini they expect most folks to buy that mini - making increased profits likely - and that's the important thing for Apple.
IIRC the i7 in the mini was a 45W TDP CPU. So the Max would overload the existing infrastructure for sure.
Today I saw the Studio right next to the mini in an Apple Store. In direct comparison, the mini looks too thin, actually.
I mean, from the 95+ Centigrades that I can reach easily with my 2018 i7 mini, I already knew that the machine is a bit too small for the components it houses.
But the comparison to the Studio was clearly visualizing it: That old mini housing is simply too anemic for today’s high-end components. Probably even the M1Pro would already be a stretch.
…tells us nothing, since we have no idea how constrained the supply is.
Only Apple knows
Apple has Mac mini power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information and you can see how much of a wattage/kilojoule cut the Mini got:
Mac mini (2018) 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 64GB 2666MHz DDR4, 2TB SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 630: 19.9 W; 122 W; 68 BTU/h; 417 BTU/h
Mac mini (M1, 2020) Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 2TB SSD: 6.8 W; 39 W; 23.2 BTU/h; 133 BTU/h
To put that in prospective: "The M1 Ultra also delivers all this power from an advertised power consumption of 60 watts" - First Apple M1 Ultra benchmarks show off awesome power
Some part is missing in the puzzle here.
If the Ultra has a(n advertised) power consumption of 60 Watts and the current i7 consumes about twice that (Thanks Maximara, for collecting the numbers!) - why did Apple go to great lengths to develop that massive cooling system for the Studio, including a dedicated copper heat sink for the Ultra variant?
With those numbers, even the Ultra could have been easily cooled with the existing mini cooling system in the existing housing and supplied with the existing PSU (assuming the 370W of the Studio is “only” needed to supply all 4-6 TB4 ports with power). Even under load, the current i7 mini does not get really loud.
Are the AS chips more delicate when it comes to heat, so Apple could not maintain the high temperature profile with 90-100 Centigrades under load?! Is the huge cooling system required mainly for the bigger PSU rather than M1Max/Ultra? Or do the small structures of M1 lead to the heat concentrating in a way smaller spot that needs more extensive cooling to operate properly? Is it all about the peak power consumption being way higher than the average numbers?
Am I overlooking some relevant detail?!
If the Ultra has a(n advertised) power consumption of 60 Watts and the current i7 consumes about twice that (Thanks Maximara, for collecting the numbers!) - why did Apple go to great lengths to develop that massive cooling system for the Studio, including a dedicated copper heat sink for the Ultra variant?
With those numbers, even the Ultra could have been easily cooled with the existing mini cooling system in the existing housing and supplied with the existing PSU (assuming the 370W of the Studio is “only” needed to supply all 4-6 TB4 ports with power). Even under load, the current i7 mini does not get really loud.
Are the AS chips more delicate when it comes to heat, so Apple could not maintain the high temperature profile with 90-100 Centigrades under load?! Is the huge cooling system required mainly for the bigger PSU rather than M1Max/Ultra? Or do the small structures of M1 lead to the heat concentrating in a way smaller spot that needs more extensive cooling to operate properly? Is it all about the peak power consumption being way higher than the average numbers?
Am I overlooking some relevant detail?!
? According to others, the i7 Mac mini sounds like a vacuum cleaner at full load. eg. Check out the reports with Pro Tools 2021. Plus it throttles.
BTW, not a recent Mac mini but I bought a 2017 i7 iMac and decided in the first week to return it, specifically because of fan noise.
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While affordable it isn't without its downsides, the main one being ARM. The reason I continue to work on my Intel Mini is because I don't see the point in switching to ARM when a good portion of my software, plugins, and utilities are still Intel based. I also don't see the point in losing all my 32-bit software either but that is only somewhat related to the Studio.
Someone in the main front page thread on the Studio was trying to teach me how fast the Studio and the M series computers are. Speed is nothing if it cannot connect to the devices or mediums you need it to.
I'm in pretty much the same place. But I also use Windows 10 in a Parallels VM and it works really well on my 2018 i7 Mini. Am running some pretty expensive GIS software and don't want an unsupported ARM version of Windows that isn't officially available from Microsoft. Furthermore, I run Mountain Lion and Sierra MacOS VM's that work really well with some very expensive legacy Mac software.
Before I retired, and for awhile afterwards, I was doing a lot of work with video in Final Cut Pro and audio in Logic Pro. Today.... not so much and my Intel Mini is more than adequate for that. The M1 machines would be a great choice is I still had those needs.
I will say however, the Studio does look like a good value and someday I may upgrade to one. Got my top-spec 2018 Mini from the refurb store in 2020, but it would have cost $3500 new. That would buy a pretty nice configuration of the Studio today.
Before I retired, and for awhile afterwards, I was doing a lot of work with video in Final Cut Pro and audio in Logic Pro. Today.... not so much and my Intel Mini is more than adequate for that. The M1 machines would be a great choice is I still had those needs.
I will say however, the Studio does look like a good value and someday I may upgrade to one. Got my top-spec 2018 Mini from the refurb store in 2020, but it would have cost $3500 new. That would buy a pretty nice configuration of the Studio today.