It was one thing for Apple to rip you off with ram when you could replace it yourself but now it really sucks. If you want a Mac that will last a long time you have to pay a fortune up front.
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What I think Apple will do to the Mac Mini in 2016
- Thread starter Zackmd1
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It was one thing for Apple to rip you off with ram when you could replace it yourself but now it really sucks. If you want a Mac that will last a long time you have to pay a fortune up front.
Hold on, I gotta fire up my horse and buggy and get into town. Now, where can I get a new buggy whip, as I lost mine? Wait, not enough time to go to town today as my computer is so slow with Apple's spinner that the stores are now closed.
No worries, I'll just get a new Apple Buggy Whip for $700. Thanks for the help Apple!
Point: Spinners are out, SSD are in. Get with the program Apple and stop the nonsense! Spinner is bad enough, but a 5400rpm spinner? They think we are idiots.
No worries, I'll just get a new Apple Buggy Whip for $700. Thanks for the help Apple!
Point: Spinners are out, SSD are in. Get with the program Apple and stop the nonsense! Spinner is bad enough, but a 5400rpm spinner? They think we are idiots.
Spare me the free market spiel. Nobody is saying that Apple is forcing us to buy their stuff. Let's not strawman the whole way down the yellow brick road.
Everyone knows price gouging is wrong, and the way Apple makes things more and more difficult to circumvent their price gouging makes it a bigger problem than need be. Selling a desktop computer with dual core laptop-grade CPU, on-board graphics, and a single drive for $1000-$2000 seems an unfair price.
Apple has branded itself as the company you can trust to handle all the technical stuff so you can focus on what you need to do. The "typical user" these days really doesn't know much about computers and doesn't know what upgrades they need or how much they cost -- they trust Apple not to gouge them.
Would you retain your argument if the Mini suddenly cost $5000 and had the internals of a first gen iPad? It would be just as applicable but just as much of a strawman. Nobody is saying Apple is forcing anyone to pay their prices or buy their stuff -- but that is their goal, to sell, and that means the prices should be reasonable/competitive/fair.
Why would people continue to buy a new Mac Mini if every new version is less powerful than the last? Going from quad core to dual core made it less capable for some. Going from dual core to Core M would make it the least powerful Mini in years.
How many of the people who buy the dual-core Minis actually know what a dual-core CPU is? Again, people have trusted Apple to take care of the technical stuff for years. Those who don't know much about computers (what you call "the typical user") would just assume the new Mini to be the best one yet in all respects -- computers typically get more capable each year.
I had a 2010 Mini -- but regardless, how in the world would buying a Mini with a spinner be needed to know that the HDD is slow on it? It's the same as my 2010 had only the OS is now even more bloated. It's not some "hypothetical point of view" to know that an SSD would vastly outperform the HDD in the Mini. Everyone knows it to be a matter of fact.
Mac Mini lifespan could be an issue with a Core M processor and all-soldered components. They already struggle a bit in the rMB, but at least that's forgivable since the primary goal of the device is to be ultra portable. If they make a Core M, it's unlikely they will also offer the Core i series since the design of the rest of the computer will be so different.
Do your machines normally get under memory pressure? Is there a reason why you don't think you should add enough memory to your computer to avoid being under memory pressure? (I guess you might be one of those folks who has a machine with soldered RAM...)
Yes, an SSD is much, much better than a magnetic drive if you are suffering from swapping. But avoiding swapping is even better, as RAM is much, much faster than an SSD!
Love to see some hard data on that. Random access sure, but serial data just isn't that big of a win for SSDs.
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Good for you.
Sure, the first time. After that, they are always cached. (Header files are tiny!)
Ok, maybe we've got a definitions problem here. The term "thrashing", as defined in computer science, is when a computer uses up all available RAM and must start paging data out to long-term storage. So, if you are "thrashing", then RAM is an issue. If RAM is not an issue, then you are not "thrashing".
So long as you have enough RAM, you can have as many different threads of compilation running, and as many CPU cores tasked as you like, and you won't be putting any significant stress on your long-term storage.
I do medium sized Unity3d based projects. Switching to SSD was the best move I ever made. Before SSD switching build targets and re-importing the thousands of art files involved would give me time to make dinner, now I just have time to boil the kettle for a cuppa. Build time before each run? Not much difference as Unity is very efficient at managing C# projects. Building an Android APK? About twice as fast, mainly CPU bound as the java tools seem to be single core only.
Would I go back to HD? Never.
Would I go back to HD? Never.
Yes! Absolutely, if you're dealing with a large database (or set of files) involving items that are accessed out-of-order, and can't easily be cached in RAM, you're hitting the SSD sweet spot. Large image databases are probably the best way to show off the power of an SSD compared to an HD, as the random-access nature of the data causes magnetic drives to re-seek on practically every request...
Yes, I do understand the concept of Fusion Drive.
The second paragraph in your first post is all about 500 GB HDD and 128 GB SSD. In the first you suggest that SSD is superior to Fusion Drive.
Yes, there is all sorts of nice to have stuff, but bear in mind that folks have different needs and budgets. A Mac Mini owner since 2005, on an income of less than $1,000 a month (and my second Mac Mini), I am more interested in a decent amount of cost effective on board storage than having the fastest boot, app, and file opening times on the block.
To suggest that every Mac should have this, that or the other is arrant arrogant nonsense.
Having a reasonably priced SSD upgrade on the base model (say $100 for a 128 GB) wouldn't be detrimental to you and your needs.
Having a 7200 RPM base HDD, ideally with 1TB of storage, would be better than the 500 GB 5400 RPM, no?
With such a tight operating budget, surely you can understand why more reasonably priced options would be good all around. Nobody is trying to take away your reasonably priced storage, but in all fairness, you can get a 500 GB USB 3 drive for under $50 which would also give you some added flexibility (such as not being computer-specific, a bit more secure, etc).
We all just want to get more value for the money. The Mini gets really expensive very quickly and doesn't even really have that much to show for it.
I'm suggesting that Apple suck up the small cost involved. They can afford it. You would just get a better experience for the same $$.
Are you arguing against having a better computer?
No, they typically don't, but even if you aren't under memory pressure you still need to get data in and out of RAM.
You can throw RAM at the machine all you want, your system RAM is still going to be a tiny portion of the total amount of data your machines deals with and it is volatile; getting that data off storage and into/out of RAM as fast as possible is the biggest performance improvement you can make for most people.
Most apps these days are not CPU bound, they are either GPU or storage IO bound.
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http://www.computerworld.com/articl...e-new-macbook-literally-is-twice-as-fast.html
Typical 7200 RPM hybrid drive like my 750 GB momentus XT gets about 120-150 megabytes per second on that test. That test is serial data - to determine if your storage can keep up with HD/UHD raw video.
Caching (and plentiful RAM) is all well and good but the data still needs to be written to disk at some point, and still needs to be read from disk into RAM. You can hide spikes in IO with cache but only for so long. Unless all you're doing with your content in RAM is viewing it, changes need to get saved.
It's not 2010 any more. Serial data is also massively faster on PCIe or M2 SSD now. Even SATA2 or Sata3 connected SSD is now way faster than any hard drive these days - up to 10+ times faster at serialized IO, and hundreds of times faster at random.
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True. But how often you need to get that data into and out of RAM is very dependent on what you are doing and how you use your machine. If you are switching your machine on and off multiple times a day, or closing and reopening apps constantly, then sure, you'll be hitting long-term storage a whole lot.
A lot of folks I know mostly use their computers for E-mail and web browsing. These apps do not require a lot of long-term storage use. They can use their machines for hours without hitting the HD at all.
And I myself mostly live in the edit-compile-test loop, which (unless I screw up somehow) can be run pretty much out of the cache most of the time.
So, I'm not entirely sure that "most people" really will find optimizing long-term storage to be their biggest performance improvement. (It seems to me that, in fact, a lot of folks here could use more RAM, as many of them seem to be swapping at least some of the time...)
Hmm. The only GPU-bound apps I use are games (and none of mine really hit the HD while running). I think the only IO-bound apps I've got are media managers; and yeah, for small-size media like pictures, an SSD is a huge win.
But for the most part, when I'm writing & compiling code, or editing documents, or browsing the web, I'm using apps that I load into RAM and leave there. My machine has enough RAM to keep all my common apps in memory. So an SSD just doesn't make a significant difference in my life.
Cool! So, maybe a 5x speedup potentially even in the worst case for SSDs compared to HDs. Very nice.
But, how much does a 750 GB SSD cost compared to a 750 GB HD? (And 750 GBs sounds kinda small these days; all my HDs are in the multi-terabyte range today.) Again, the speedup is nice, but I'm not spending my entire day reading and writing data to long-term storage; so, I'm not sure I really want to eat the cost of an SSD even if it could provide a 5x speedup.
(And this is another reason why I really like Apple's use of "fusion" drives -- you get a little bit of SSD speed for the stuff you load/save most, and a lot of inexpensive HD storage for everything else. Kinda the best of both worlds. But I digress.
)Yeah, I'm so glad that it isn't 2010 any more, I absolutely wasn't able to get any work at all done on 2010 machines. They were completely useless. A 2010 machine was only good for use as a doorstop.
Look, I'm not trying to say SSDs are of no value. Of course they are faster than HDs. But they are not "life-changing" for everybody. And a machine with a simple HD is not worthless, and for many uses is not even all that much different than a machine with an SSD. You can use one and still get useful work done just fine.
Hold on, I gotta take a ride into town in my car that does not have air conditioning because it would cost the manufacturer a couple of dollars. Nope, it is 2016 and I am not even sure you could find a car without air. Should be the same with spinners. SSD's all the way. One less item to worry about sourcing. Drop spinners Apple, you kind of owe it to us, your customer. We have treated you well, have we not?
I am not even suggesting Apple do it for free. Up the price if you need to, I just think it would be more honest to consumers if they sold a product that was not sluggish from the get go. Many of them (as has been said before) are not necessarily tech-savvy, and will just trust that an expensive Apple computer will run well and serve them for a few years. I am thinking of a friend of my mum's who recently bought a stock iMac from the Apple Store, and compared to my 2013 MBA does that thing feel slow.. I am only talking about browsing the internet, nothing at all taxing.
If you cannot trust Apple to give a fair value and representation of modern tech, who the heck can you trust? If you get a $200 Chrome box yes, you can expect it will not win any races. But a Mac Mini that is slow? Apple is just shooting themselves in the foot. And, ironically, the darn Chrome Box at least has solid state storage, albeit not much
Now go try to find a dealer that has one!
Nope, I am arguing for making the most of what one can afford, and not whinging about not being able to have what one can't afford.
I ride into town on my bicycle, and have a small motorcycle for high days and holidaze.
I'm not whinging about what I can't afford; I'm lucky in that I could buy a new Mac if I chose to. [I actually buy 2nd hand or refurb]
I'm annoyed at Apple turning into a greedy, penny-pinching goliath that is far removed from their 'customer/experience first' origins. Its a slippery slope that they don't need to step on. Tim's not the leader they need.
Nope.
Worst case (disk getting hammered with work), on random 4k IO (i.e., on sector per read) a 7200 rpm disk will get maybe 75-100 IOPs (due to rotational seek latency - the 100 is being extremely generous, and that's taking into account reasonable cache hit rate; for fully random not-cachable we're talking 75). Or say 300-400 kilobytes per second (100 x 4kB IOs).
i.e., if your machine is seeking the disk a lot looking for small files and/or commiting them to disk at the same time, the IO pattern will tend to be random. ditto if you are multitasking or say, an AV scanner or whatever fires off in the background.
Very conservative ratings for SSD IOPs are in the 5,000 to 8,000 range. Some quote up to 90,000 IOPs, but i suspect those are under benchmark conditions and not realistic. So lets take the low end figure, used by enterprise storage array nerds as conservative...
Either way, if we take the low end figure of 5000, and use the worst case IO size of 4k IOs (one block per IO) the SSD is pulling 20 megabytes per second. WORST CASE.
Over 50x faster on worst case random IO (assuming we're a bit generous with the IO number for 7200 rpm SATA drives).
So you're talking worst case (for the SSD's benefit - Sequential data) about 10x improvement with a PCIe SSD, and best case (in terms of improvement) 50x plus.
It's not even close.
http://www.eprich.com/tools/simple-raid-group-calculator
SSDs really are a game changer. They make things like sleep painless - close lid and the machine hibernates (and wakes) pretty instantly. Apps open instantly. Data is written to disk instantly. Copying from the network or to the network is gigabit ethernet limited - and you can still flog the crap out of the machine while doing so.
Unless your data set fits entirely in RAM (and if you're dealing with HD or 4k video for example, it won't) the spinning disk in your machine is a massive bottleneck. And even if your data set DOES fit in ram, you still need to get it into RAM in the first place and commit the results when done.
I'm not saying you should use SSD for mass storage, but 250-500 GB of SSD, for the performance benefit it provides (along with providing a reasonable 'Work' area) is peanuts.
You could spend that 200-400 dollars on RAM, and the machine that had the money spent on SSD will smoke it in all but the most selective of edge cases.
It really is a game changer in many ways. A lot of the work I do (SOE development) is WAY faster to do on my laptop with SSD these days than an array with 2 shelves of SAS drives in it.
You really should try your workload on SSD, i think you'll be surprised. Use a NAS for bulk storage.
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Car™
Cool. I'll go ahead and grant you your figures.
For certain games, sure. But not everybody is playing the same game. Your examples:
Is sleep really painful with an HD? (Actually, I wouldn't know -- I leave all my machines on 24/7, as most of them are usually doing server duties of one sort or another.)
Is app opening time really that painful? (Again, I rarely open apps; the ones I use most frequently I open when the machine turns on, and I leave them open. And since I only turn my machines on about every 2-3 months on average, that doesn't happen a lot...)
All modern operating systems cache writes, so all interaction with long-term storage takes place in the background (again, assuming you've provided your computer sufficient RAM). So again, I don't find this painful; unless your work is truly IO-bound, I don't think you often find yourself twiddling your fingers and waiting for writes to the disk. (But I guess I don't often deal with massive amounts of data, outside of some media files and a few games.)
Ok, here's where my world really does conflict with yours; I've always been able to get my working data to fit entirely within available RAM (although, I have needed to increase the RAM on my computers at times). I'm not working with 4k video. I honestly don't know anybody who actually works with raw 4k video, and very few with any data that comes close to that sort of size. Most folks I know are using their machines for word processing, or spreadsheets, or just email and web needs. Even the highest-end games load themselves entirely into RAM, if you've got a decent gaming rig.
Of course, my previous job was at a database company, so I can't say that I don't know anybody who is working with large data.
(But none of their databases are small enough to actually fit onto a single SSD.)I will agree that for some folks, SSDs really are life-changing. But not everybody spends all their time interacting with their long-term storage device.
Very true. But, as I've noted above, that doesn't necessarily happen very often. I'll generally load my data at the start of a work session, and work on it for several hours at a time before saving and closing it. (Interim results will indeed get stored, but as that happens in the background, I'm generally unaware of how long it takes.) In short, while the SSD would provide a boost, given my work habits, it isn't a boost I would notice as much as you do.
tl;dr: Yay, SSDs are great! But for some (most?) folks, they aren't a life-changing event; they're just another tool in the toolbox, to be used or not used in the appropriate circumstances.
I can see Intel Kaby Lake, Cannon Lake processors still shipping in a Mac Mini in 2016, and 2017 but still with 4Gb soldered ram and a 5400rpm spinning disk.
But in my dreams, it would be interesting is if they made the Mac Mini into a flash based, graphics capable VR platform, given that with a Rift style headset there is less need for an integrated screen (imac).
But in my dreams, it would be interesting is if they made the Mac Mini into a flash based, graphics capable VR platform, given that with a Rift style headset there is less need for an integrated screen (imac).