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Apple launched the M2 Pro and the M2 Max
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UnknownSouljer
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Standard x times faster and splashy presentations as per usual. We'll see how they actually stack up in the wild. I'm not expecting any major upsets.
DukenukemX
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So Apple claims M2 Pro is 20% faster than M1 Pro, but AMD claims their new mobile Ryzen are 30% faster than the M1 Pro. Apple with 22 hours and AMD with 30 hours. We got ourselves a fight.
Red Falcon
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NattyKathy
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Damn, Apples iGPUs are getting w i d e
If I'm calculating it right, 19 "Cores" in the Pro = 4864 ALU and 38 in the Max = 9728 ALU. Only around 700Mhz it looks like but a slow and wide GPU is good for power consumption!
If I'm calculating it right, 19 "Cores" in the Pro = 4864 ALU and 38 in the Max = 9728 ALU. Only around 700Mhz it looks like but a slow and wide GPU is good for power consumption!
KazeoHin
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20% more cores, 20% more performance 🤔🤔🤔
scottypippin
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Always good to see Apple products paired against that "best selling Windows desktop" 
However.....$599 for base model Mac Mini? I'm relatively impressed with that. Seems like a decent option for average people who are married to MacOS but who are in dire need of current gen hardware on a budget. I know at least 3 of those people, and am related to 2 of them. Hate that it is a $200 price increase to configure 16GB of RAM cause that 8GB will gimp it in a year or two....
However.....$599 for base model Mac Mini? I'm relatively impressed with that. Seems like a decent option for average people who are married to MacOS but who are in dire need of current gen hardware on a budget. I know at least 3 of those people, and am related to 2 of them. Hate that it is a $200 price increase to configure 16GB of RAM cause that 8GB will gimp it in a year or two....
DukenukemX
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Seems the M2 Pro is still on 5nm. Which is odd since AMD's new chips have moved onto 4nm. Also Apple is one of the companies that canceled their TSMC orders.
Goes well with the Apple user needing to use an iphone to activate Apple TV.
Why does Apple even offer 8GB in 2023?
Is there any company that does not ? I would imagine it is in part because it is quite costly ram and it exist a significant portion of the population that does very little usage of their Laptop.
UnknownSouljer
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A macOS device won't work. I don't really agree with you often in matters regarding Apple's platform(s), but on this we agree. I expect it to get corrected but until then this is a bad president.
Also, this is why we get thread lockups. This is off-topic.
The same reason why literally every other OEM also offers 8GB in 2023?
Spending 5 seconds to look up Intel's NUC as just one exmaple shows dozens of offerings with 8GB. I am 100% sure I could find options from HP, Dell, and every other desktop OEM that still has 8GB models.
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On top of what others have said about other vendors, I'd expect as much from a $599 compact desktop with this general feature set. That and 8GB on a modern Mac is generally more forgiving than it is on Windows. I do think Apple needs to bring 16GB to more configs the next time around, though.
DukenukemX
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There's companies that do but that's because they're for the budget minded person. Apple is not for budget consumers.
For $549 you can find a Intel Nuc with 16GB of ram. Get this, you can actually upgrade it, and the SSD too, and it won't cost $200 extra. 16GB of DDR4 is like what, $50?
https://www.amazon.com/NUC11PAHi5-C...fos.2b70bf2b-6730-4ccf-ab97-eb60747b8daf&th=1
The $1250 Canadian Dell XPS 13:
https://www.dell.com/en-ca/shop/cty/xps-13-laptop/spd/xps-13-9315-laptop
Come with 8 gig of expensive LPRDD5 ram, 8 gig is still quite common even in the expensive Laptop space.
UnknownSouljer
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While Apple makes premium products, that doesn't mean they don't also have a product stack that is for a wide range of consumers.
In fact the actual discussion is about a complete computer that costs $600 that could fulfill basically every roll for an office/browser/media consumption computer. So it's absurd to slap this label on a company when talking about a product like this.
And that is ignoring other major parts of Apple's product stack. Such as the fact that they offer lower priced iPhone models starting at $429. And iPads that are $329. It would be incredibly hard to find a new competitor device in either of those categories that performs nearly as well, especially for the amount of years/longevity/support, and have metal chassis, better displays, and a snappy interface. I would say the same thing about this new M2 baselevel Mac Mini.
It's not a direct comparison and you know this. Apple's extreme competitive advantage here is the fact that the RAM is on the die. There isn't an Intel consumer level machine/processor with RAM on the die. Call me back when they do.
The SSD is another story, but it's not as though you're forced into Apple's option. You could just as easily buy a TB or USB-C enclosure with an NVME drive and bypass any conversation you have to say about internal cost.
However as we've discussed MANY times in many threads, general users do not upgrade their internal hardware. It's only tech enthusiasts that do. And you will see just as much price gouging by Intel with their NUC, as well as HP/Dell on their pricing for RAM and SSD's despite their RAM being a particular example as not being nearly as special as Apple's.
Apple is needlessly specialized on their SSD's, but it at least gives them the advantage of completely encrypted and secure drives and essentially makes all of their computers not worth stealing. As soon as the device is logged in for the first time, without the password it's unlockable. You've stolen a brick you can't do anything with. There is no access to the device nor the data. In this Intel NUC example, Intel charges your more for their SSD's without any advantage for doing so and also without any particularly specialized part.
Also, that NUC would be decimated by the Mini. A 4 core Intel 11th gen in 2023? I would take the base level Mac Mini M2 over that NUC which charges $550 for it's base and $859 for 32GB+1Tb. They have a 12core 12th gen processor variant in there, which starts at $850 barbones, and scales to $1069 for 32+1TB.
Dollar for dollar I'd pick the Apple solution here every time when talking about buying a fully pre-built computer from an OEM. Regardless of if we're talking the 4 core or the 12 core solution.
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Honestly if all you are doing is email, web browsing, and shopping on Amazon, 8 is fine. Sure a few things may take a second or two longer as things swap around which isn’t ideal but it’s fine.
If you are doing any sort of regular work with it editing photos, spreadsheets, presentations, and such then no 8 is wildly anemic but somebody who uses their computer for work would know that.
Put 8 gigs of ram in a Mac mini and it’s considered too little, but put it in an iPad and people are all, why so much?
If you are doing any sort of regular work with it editing photos, spreadsheets, presentations, and such then no 8 is wildly anemic but somebody who uses their computer for work would know that.
Put 8 gigs of ram in a Mac mini and it’s considered too little, but put it in an iPad and people are all, why so much?
Thunderdolt
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Looks like yet another company with ray tracing capabilities that leave AMD stuck in 2005.
That sounds a smidge harsh… The new AMD and Intel mobile platforms are very similar in design to the Apple SoC, there are inherent efficiency and performance gains to be made using this approach. The downside of course is upgraded options exponentially dwindle.
Apple is for sure doing great strides with their GPU tech, but where AMD and Nvidia take a very generalized approach to their functions Apple instead focuses on specific tasks and use cases. It makes them incredibly powerful for what they do but your options decrease as you stray from the path Apple has laid out for you.
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I both love and hate this aspect, Apple has excellent MDM options and they internally track everything. Kid sets a random PIN code on your iPad and locks you out, if you have the receipt and it shows the serial number you can fill out some forms and they can remotely unlock it, but your data is gone in the process. So you aren’t left with a paperweight, but you need to keep proof the device is yours or you’re done.
But yeah there is absolutely no market for stolen Apple devices at this point, it makes them a low priority for actual thieves leaving only the opportunity thieves and those (in our case) are usually recoverable with a well placed FB post as they ping home when the would be thief tries to connect them to the internet. Public library contacts me a few times a year for one of our iPads ending up in their public drop box.
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scottypippin
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Hadn't seen that story...yikes.....that is a new level of obtuse. Is Samsung gonna start requiring me to use a Galaxy to accept the terms on their TVs?
They sort of do... I like that the newer Samsung TV's with the Tizen OS have seamless AppleTV functionality, which makes great for wireless presentation, but to get in to really do anything with the TVs you require a Samsung account and they require 2-factor, so you must at the very least provide them with a cellphone number. Also, most of the functions built in want you to sign in on your phone so when you start a service like Netflix, instead of bringing up the sign-in page as normal it launches a QR code that authenticates against the information saved for Netflix on your phone.
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DukenukemX
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Just cause Dell did it too, doesn't make it OK. Also, that machine has twice as much storage as the 13 inch Macbook Pro M2. I'm not a fan of this LPRDD5 junk and having a SSD soldered onto your motherboard.
Tablet standards are low, but prices are high, much like the people who buy them.
Competition is good and forces companies like Apple to price competitively. Also it might suggest Apple sales aren't as hot if prices have gone down.
I don't want this? I want to be able to upgrade and replace the ram. Most people should want this too.
There maybe another reason why nobody wants to steel a Mac.
Except the Intel Nuc can do many things beyond the Mac Mini, including running software older than 5 years.
The more you 20%, the more you 20%!
scottypippin
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I 100% agree that requiring an "account" for a feature that already exists on what you bought is garbage.
Yeah, I've seen sign ins like that before (NewEgg, Steam), but I'd argue that's different than what happened in the article. Thankfully, per the discussion under the article, it seems like you can get around this tvOS issue by just signing out and back in, so likely it was just a UI bug that someone never tested. But imagine if this was the ONLY intended entry method.....that'd be unreasonable.
(It sounds like you would agree, but for the sake of brevity, I'll state what I meant)
Where it changes, is when you remove the other usual options (signing in with a browser) and ONLY allow signing in with "our special app" - that's getting draconian. Further, it is another animal entirely to expect someone to have a specific piece of hardware (specifically a Samsung Galaxy phone) to use another piece of hardware you purchased (a Samsung TV), and making that the de facto method of usage instead of leaving other options open. I'm not saying they can't do it, they just can't do it without being called stupid for it
I dunno...did I miss what you meant?
My point is the iPad Pro's using the M1 chip uses the exact same configuration only downclocked for heat and battery life as the Mac Mini basic model, and you would be hard-pressed to say that 8 gigs of ram there isn't sufficient. If you are doing basic computer things and dabbling with heavier workloads then 8GB is sufficient, not ideal but it will get the job done.
Should 16 be the current minimum, yes, I know I wouldn't use nor inflict 8GB on somebody willingly at this stage but I expect them to work on those machines, for casual usage 8 is the bare minimum you need to make things work, and to hit specific price points that means they have to make options available with the bare minimums.
I find this discussion kind of funny considering I just picked up a 1235-U NUC with 32GB of RAM.
I noticed Apple doesn't seem to offer a 16GB M2 unless you get the Pro, at least not as the top-line choices. That's obnoxious.
Close enough, and the article is missing a few key details like they chose to click the option to "auto setup" which works by transferring account details and info from an already setup iOS device, its a feature on all Apple products, the other is the iCloud changes which if you click OK you can proceed and if you go into device settings you can then go to iCloud settings and accept the ToC there or sign out and prevent it from happening further. And while it's not listed you can just use a web browser and sign into iCloud and accept them there, you don't have to do it through the app. The fact they get that prompt means they are already signed into iCloud on the device so they already have an account, they could do it from whatever device they were using to post the problem from.I 100% agree that requiring an "account" for a feature that already exists on what you bought is garbage.
Yeah, I've seen sign ins like that before (NewEgg, Steam), but I'd argue that's different than what happened in the article. Thankfully, per the discussion under the article, it seems like you can get around this tvOS issue by just signing out and back in, so likely it was just a UI bug that someone never tested. But imagine if this was the ONLY intended entry method.....that'd be unreasonable.
(It sounds like you would agree, but for the sake of brevity, I'll state what I meant)
Where it changes, is when you remove the other usual options (signing in with a browser) and ONLY allow signing in with "our special app" - that's getting draconian. Further, it is another animal entirely to expect someone to have a specific piece of hardware (specifically a Samsung Galaxy phone) to use another piece of hardware you purchased (a Samsung TV), and making that the de facto method of usage instead of leaving other options open. I'm not saying they can't do it, they just can't do it without being called stupid for it
I dunno...did I miss what you meant?
I've got like 30 AppleTV's and it's not nearly the issue that article is pretending it to be.
It turns out if you click through, you have multiple options for more RAM & SSD, so I stand corrected. But the first page should have *some* indication you have more than three bare choices, like having the button say "select and configure" instead of just "select".
Would you know that if this were your first iDevice, though?
I would think that it's pretty clear, the description of the text above the button is very detailed and reads along the lines of "Automatically transfer your account details and settings from an already configured iOS device", with the other button reading "setup manually".
But the wonderful thing about the world of consumer electronics is no matter how clear you think a description or process is, there will always be somebody out there who can surprise you.
What about whatever led you to this screen?
That's the thing you can click OK and it continues into tvOS as normal and will only bring you back there when you try to open iCloud or access something stored in iCloud, I have gotten that one at home and I opted to just sign out of iCloud because I don't need it on my apple TV, problem solved. For all the ones I have at work, the TOS updates are sent to me through the Apple School Manager website, and deal with the review and acceptance there. But in the Twitter comments section, Apple does respond to him and probably walked him through it, a lot of users there tell him what to do as well.
DukenukemX
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Realistically 8GB is fine for like majority of tasks. 4GB is also still fine so long as you're using a light OS and light tasks. The problem is that you'll end up thrashing the crap out of your SSD, because you'll just end up doing a lot more swap to keep things working fast. My desktop has 16GB and in Linux Mint I had it set to 4GB swap, which was fine until I had dozens of tabs open in FireFox while playing WoW and discord and suddenly my system would crawl to a stop. I had to increase the swap to 16GB to avoid this problem but that just means more wear on my SSD. I would never build a PC today with anything less than 16GB, mostly because ram is cheap so long as you stick with DDR4. DDR5 though 🫳. Things like 8GB of ram and 256 SSD are just Apple being cheap. None of my laptops from 10 years ago have a 256 SSD, because storage is cheap. LPDDR5 is just cost cutting.
Yeah but somebody who is buying a barebones MacMini is not doing that, I agree that if you underestimate your usage you will use up the SSD faster and shorten its lifespan, but a casual user who is just doing light usage will still age out the device before they wear it out unless their usage pattern drastically changes. I'm not disagreeing with you at all on this, Apple is a "premium" product and they should know and do better, I just think it's one of those edge cases you're not likely to encounter in the wild, not on a Mac Mini at least, but there should absolutely be no SKU of a MBP with less than 16 gigs that is just asking for a future problem.
I genuinely do not give a crap about not being able to open up and upgrade stuff in my M1 MBP. It does everything I need it to do with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.
UnknownSouljer
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Apple is a publicly traded company. It's very easy to see what of theirs is hot and not. Apple has more reportage than any other company; every time there's a stock holders call every tech site has coverage about it. If you wanted any financial/sales information it's laid out extensively.
However my point was about product stack. Which you didn't address at all. Apple has a wider product stack than apparently you perceive.
Do you also want to replace the RAM on your graphics card too? Maybe they should stop putting RAM on GPU's and just use the RAM on the motherboard. Cut costs on the graphics card and have another user replaceable component.
If you have brains in your head and you’re a thief, you don’t care what you ‘steal’. You care about the value of the item and how easily you can flip it. No thief steals diamonds because they want or like diamonds. Like has nothing to do with it.
If Macs/iPads/iPhones could be unlocked easily, they are definitely way more resellable than any PC equivalent and for larger dollar amounts on the secondary market.
You bring this up all the time, but again, the user base doesn't care. If they did, they would actually buy a NUC instead of a Mac Mini, but they aren't. I would take the Vegas odds on which has a greater install base, NUC's vs Mac Mini's. It's not even a hard call.
Directly to the point though, the Mini is capable of doing things the NUC can't. A NUC will never be able to outperform a Mini in video editing tasks. Multi-track 4k ProRes with fusion effects, and a color grade on top with perfectly smooth playback in realtime is possible on the Mini. Want 128 audio tracks all with discrete filtering and side chains? The Mini can do that, the NUC is going to have problems. That ain't happening on the NUC regardless of how much RAM you stick in there or the 12-core processor. There is a functional speed difference in actual tasks. That's what users actually care about, not whether outdated software can be run: they need to do work from jobs using software from today, and do it quickly. I get the feeling that all computing devices for you are simply to run 10+ year old software, because that's the only use case you ever bring up.
Like all of your commentary on Apple products, everything here is just your preferences.
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So shiny!!!!
I don't know about the numbers of NUCs vs. Mac Mini. Anyways there are a hell a lot of NUCs being used in all of our plants for manufacturing data point recording plus normal day to day business type work loads. In the vast majority of business environments, how many would actually use a Mac Mini? Seems like the two are really meant for different use scenario's. Mac Mini is more for the Consumer while the Nuc is more for businesses.
Apple is a publicly traded company. It's very easy to see what of theirs is hot and not. Apple has more reportage than any other company; every time there's a stock holders call every tech site has coverage about it. If you wanted any financial/sales information it's laid out extensively.
However my point was about product stack. Which you didn't address at all. Apple has a wider product stack than apparently you perceive.
Do you also want to replace the RAM on your graphics card too? Maybe they should stop putting RAM on GPU's and just use the RAM on the motherboard. Cut costs on the graphics card and have another user replaceable component.
If you have brains in your head and you’re a thief, you don’t care what you ‘steal’. You care about the value of the item and how easily you can flip it. No thief steals diamonds because they want or like diamonds. Like has nothing to do with it.
If Macs/iPads/iPhones could be unlocked easily, they are definitely way more resellable than any PC equivalent and for larger dollar amounts on the secondary market too.
You bring this up all the time, but again, the user base doesn't care. If they did, they would actually buy a NUC instead of a Mac Mini, but they aren't. I would take the Vegas odds on which has a greater install base, NUC's vs Mac Mini's. It's not even a hard call.
Directly to the point though, the Mini is capable of doing things the NUC can't. A NUC will never be able to outperform a Mini in video editing tasks. Multi-track 4k ProRes with fusion effects, and a color grade on top with perfectly smooth playback in realtime is possible on the Mini. Want 128 audio tracks all with discrete filtering and side chains? The Mini can do that, the NUC is going to have problems. That ain't happening on the NUC regardless of how much RAM you stick in there or the 12-core processor. There is a functional speed difference in actual tasks. That's what users actually care about, not whether outdated software can be run: they need to do work from jobs using software from today, and do it quickly. I get the feeling that all computing devices for you are simply to run 10+ year old software, because that's the only use case you ever bring up.
Like all of your commentary on Apple products, everything here is just your preferences.
UnknownSouljer
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What you’re saying is true, at least what the Mini is designed for. However it has long found itself in office, educational, and server environments.
That “image” of all of those minis hanging out in the background of the presentation? That’s not for show. The Mini has been used as a "low cost" way to create clusters or used as low cost dedicated servers. There's even a company that specializes in deployment of these, though I would imagine most people in the IT space would simply do all of this work themselves.
https://www.macminivault.com/services/custom/
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