I love the 180° turn in Mac design. Maybe I'm living in the reality distortion field, but the last few Mac hardware updates seem much more substantial. I love seeing them move their T chip technology through the Mac line. One could argue that the most likely Mac to leave off the T chip is the Mini—its (traditionally) such minimalist Mac. Putting a T chip in the Mini sends a signal that this is a core component fo the Mac platform moving forward.
When Intel leaves Apple with no significantly new tech for years, Apple has gotten resourceful and developed some great supporting technology. Best part about it is no other vendor can just order T chips from Intel to make equivalent secure machines. Apple is designing they own differentiating tech and they don't have to share it. Apple has been crafting a PR story about privacy and security for years. Now they have that strategy baked into silicon that will soon be shipping in every Mac.
Puling in a tangential story: The way the iPad Pro is evolving points to a possible future where Macs and iOS devices are less separate systems designed to communicate with each other and become planets orbiting the binary star of MacOS & iOS. Some devices are close in to their host star (Macs, iPhones) some will orbit both as a binary system (iPad Pro). As time & tech move forward, it seems likely that more devices will jump to the higher orbit. Longer term, perhaps the distinction between MacOS & iOS will become insignificant for all but the most technical users.
To sum up: It appears to me that Apple is navigating its own path and developing its own technology to get it where it's going. I'm happy to be on board the platform that makes it's own OS's, develops almost all its own processing chips and isn't afraid to charge what the resulting products are worth, ensuring viability of the platform long-term.
I see a connection between Apple moving into its new headquarters, and how much smoother Mac OS hardware operations are moving forward.
Correlation is not causation, but if it is, we have a monster 2019 to look forward to.
Does anyone else feel that $4200 is a bit too much for a Mac Mini?
What's your suggestion for Apple? Don't offer a 2 GB SSD, 64 GiB RAM, or 10GigE so that the highest possible price is thousands less?.
The markup on both their RAM and storage is just a hair more than double market rate. Not cheap RAM, either, the good stuff.
IMO silly to milk consumers on this kind of thing, but it's the way it’s always been and at least now we're back to user-replaceable parts… which PS bodes really well for the 2019 Mac Pro…
If the RAM is socketed and right at the bottom of the case when you open it up can we really say that Apple is milking customers on RAM if they can add their own 3rd-party SO-DIMMs?
Woah, if THAT got bumped from the show today, I'm looking forward to what they do present when they get on stage.
EDIT: Wait I just found that the event started already. Thought the times were pacific, not eastern. So this was not bumped from the show, the show;s half over already. Well, so much for watching it.
How much space does the new OS take up? I had been running my 2008 Mac Pro with a 64GB SSD until 2013 or so but then I ran over that with the boot partition. I switched back to a spinning drive for my boot partition after that. I swore I'd get a bigger SSD but I never have (so far). My user space, 1TB or so, has been on one of the other drives for a long time. So I know I can't boot the Mac Mini on 64GB, but what about 256GB? Is that really tight if my user drive is external? Are we talking 128GB of OS? Or 192GB? Thanks! I already ordered a i7-6 core/8GB/256GB and I'm pondering whether I need to cancel and re-order with 512GB.
Also.. what should i be ordering 3rd party (link please?) to upgrade the RAM to 32GB ? Thanks.
This would hold my user-disk space, iTunes, photos, movie projects and whatnot.
My plan is to boot the Mac Mini from the internal Flash drive and then put everything else on spinning disks in the external drive cage. One of the slots holds a TimeMachine 8TB disk. The other 3 slots have smaller drives. These are all going to be transferred from my 2008 Mac Pro.
If I find out the SSD is upgradable before order is fulfilled, I may cancel and downgrade to the 128 GB SSD and then upgrade in future myself... but I think it’s unlikely [but I wasn’t expecting a 6 core i7 and socketed RAM before today, so who knows...]
SSD is soldered down. They're saying it is PCIe FLASH so really really fast, like Mac Pro fast.
I had ordered 256GB. I just got nervous and cancelled and re-ordered with 512GB.
Hmm, I think highest spec CPU, the little SSD and min RAM (upgrade myself), once someone produces a matching enclosure case for the Mac mini I can connect with TB3 to do decent storage at a non raping price. No doubt the enclosure and SSD would still be cheaper than Apple’s Extortion.
Hmm, I think highest spec CPU, the little SSD and min RAM (upgrade myself), once someone produces a matching enclosure case for the Mac mini I can connect with TB3 to do decent storage at a non raping price. No doubt the enclosure and SSD would still be cheaper than Apple’s Extortion.
Hmm, I think highest spec CPU, the little SSD and min RAM (upgrade myself), once someone produces a matching enclosure case for the Mac mini I can connect with TB3 to do decent storage at a non raping price. No doubt the enclosure and SSD would still be cheaper than Apple’s Extortion.
I think that is exactly the kind of thing I am thinking. I can wait and see if they manufacture one that exactly matches the fit and finish of the new mini. I can imagine eGPU enclosures as well, with the whole thing in an attractive stack.
Apple definitely got the ports right - all current users should be able to swap one of these in without much hassle.
Except of course they ditched the SD Card slot. We photographers will have to add a dongle.
No we don't. Firstly because my prosumer gear uses CF, not consumer SD cards. Second, because I've never needed a "dongle", I've used a cable which plugs into my reader on my desk. That hasn't changed, except now it's a USB-C cable. Using a cable is not a dongle.
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Correlation is not causation, but if it is, we have a monster 2019 to look forward to.
And yes, you can put on an eGPU for many, many more monitors.
1) Tim didn't present the mini, Tom did.
2) Tom didn't say that. ....but nice job making something up and passing it off as real.