brianm

webweasel said:

ExFAT is an ancient format. There really ought to be something better. I used to use HFS+ with MacDrive on the PC which worked fine

ExFAT was released in 2006 - not really ancient (APFS was introduced in 2016).  It was specifically developed for Flash memory like USB sticks.  Microsoft even published the full specification in 2019

Maybe you are thinking FAT32? (which was 1996, itself based on the earlier FAT16, FAT12, etc...)

HFS+ was introduced 1998, and was an expansion/improvement on HFS introduced in 1985. wouldn't call it new either.

Geekbench performance for the M4's are showing up now.

Not as dramatic as the Estimates on your charts, but still good improvements.  It will be a very capable system.
M4 3700-4000 single core, around 15,000 multi-core is close.
metal score of around 58,000

M4 Pro Multi-core hits around 22,000 and Metal it hits around 110,000

Of course, those are just benchmarks, and not real-world apps.  So with some real-world tasks, maybe they hit closer to the 2-3x claims Apple has.

I just finished testing the i3, i5 and i7 versions of the Mac mini with a variety of tests including power & heat generation. These were all tested stock 8 GB ram, all with 256 GB storage - not opened, no change in thermal paste.

 I found that with the i7 during a first test, or beginning of a long CPU intensive task starts off fast and got a result of about 1200 in Cinebench, then with additional tests (or continued long run) it scales down power usage from peaks up to around 150 watts to in the 90 watt range when Cinebench scores dropped as low as 1173 - but after 30-60 seconds the fan ramps up, and the performance goes back up - along with electricity usage where it climbs back up to 110-120 watt range and performance to match. I actually had the highest Cinebench score after the CPU was hot, and the fun was running at high speed when it hit reliably in the 1200 range with a peak of 1228. It does pump out quite a bit of heat.
The i3 in the testing I was doing did not seem to have much of a change at all between tests, and even after running for a while I could barely hear the fan with barely warm air coming out.
The i5 had a little bit of a variance, more than the i3, but not nearly as much as the i7 - it did generate more heat than the i3, no where near as much as the i7 - fan also barely audible. Running the same tests with the old 2012 quad-i7 it's fans were for sure the loudest - even the base 2018 i3 is faster than the 2012 quad-i7 in all tests, with the GPU scores being over 4x faster in CineBench & GeekBench.

 The Cinebench GPU test was also faster on the i7 where it reliably gets 44fps while the i3 & i5 were only getting around 41 fps. It is strange with all of them having the same integrated video, I even went back and re-tested to verify when I noticed it. (running a more advanced 3D app like Unigine Heaven or Valley it was only around 4fps so useless for gaming without an eGPU - I did test the BlackMagic eGPU with Radeon Pro 580 it jumped the same Heaven & Valley tests to around 36 fps with Ultra or Extreme settings - over 60fps with medium settings. while using around 130 watts of total power for Mac mini plus eGPU. Heaven in particular did get a slightly higher frame rate with Ultra settings on the i7 with eGPU than the i3 or i5 models which were only getting 29 fps)
A better eGPU with an Nvidia card like 1080Ti or newer should be very usable not only for games, but things like video rendering with Premiere.

benji888 said:

This is bogus:

1) the person trying to steal your passwords has to first have access to your Mac.
2) he then ran some app to get your passwords...I’m guessing all this app does is enter your Mac’s password for the keychain items automatically and then extracts them and displays them all in a list, so, again, back to 1).
3) you can also lock keychain so that it has to be opened with a password, so they’d need not only your Mac’s password, but keychain’s password...this is not the default for keychain.

1&2) It can be chained with other exploits - zero-day, or known for older MacOS versions which this exploit affects. 3) try this, and see how long you can run with keychain staying locked, especially while browsing sites that require logins, apps during startup, etc...

Some of us only update once every 3-4 years - in my case I've been on a 4 year path - iPhone 4 to iPhone 6 to having ordered the iPhone XS (hopefully .5 to 1.5 weeks to arrive now after pre-ordering it last Friday morning)

sflocal said:

timmillea said:

The article is full of comments and opinions that will be out of date extremely soon. 

Apple subsidised the CD-ROM optical drive market before PC users knew of their existence and discontinued them just as PC users expected them as standard. Thunderbolt 5 is another forward-thinking but transitory spec. 

The Mac Studio has always been a hideous monstrosity and the kindest thing would be to end it. The new Mac mini, finally relieved in terms of historic size requirements to accommodate an optical drive is the way to go. The Mac Studio was half marketing and half a cover-up over the lack of a new Mac Pro. Apple have made plenty of missteps with Mac over the last five or so years. They make their money from iPhone and 'services' now and appear to have betrayed their core DNA. 

While I do believe the Mac Studio was a Mac Pro replacement, I don't see how a footprint the size of the Mac mini will handle the higher thermal temps of the Max/Ultra chips.  I see the Mac Studio continuing with the higher-tier chips.

Apple will have to do something groundbreaking to continue with the Mac Pro.   

Having done a fair bit of testing of the M4 and M4 Pro mini's, you are correct.  Even with High Performance on with the M4 Pro where it is an option to get the aggressive fan (which gets audible) - the M4 Pro still gets hot  to the touch (and internal temperatures) under sustained usage.
The hot to touch is likely because the power supply is directly under the top surface, and it has also picked up the M4/M4 Pro heat (from CPU, GPU or both) that then combines with the power supply heat before getting directed out the bottom back.

By comparison, even under sustained load the M2 Max in a Mac Studio barely needs to raise fan speeds to keep the chips running at a steady temperature - the air coming out the back barely gets warm, the Ultra gets a bit warmer and the fans go a bit faster to keep it steady - but fans still not audible in any sustained performance testing I've done if you are in anything other than a completely quiet room. (I'd suspect they designed for the Ultra, then found they could use the cheaper aluminum heatsink for the Max to save money and still was more than needed to keep it cool - also avoiding the problem with the 2013 Mac Pro where the central cooling system was pretty much at it's thermal limit with the chips at the time - so couldn't scale to more powerful GPUs or CPUs as their power requirements kept climbing)

The Mac Studio general design is a good system for those that need the Chip/ram performance of the Pro tower, without the need of PCIe cards. - at a cheaper price.  When upgrading my own home system, I opted for almost the base model M2 Max Studio instead of an upgraded M2 Pro Mac mini - more performance for around the same price, and it had better cooling. especially when I found a refurb of the specs I wanted in the Studio to save more.

Geekbench's Metal scores on the M4 and M4 Pro don't do justice to its actual 3D performance in several 3D rendering tests and games I've run.  They are a pretty dramatic improvement.
You should also include some actual Power usage info.  In expensive electrical areas, it could be a fair bit saved.

The M1 Max Mac Studio idles at around 10 Watts of power, Typical use is 12-18 watts or so, Peak CPU about 44 Watts running all 10 cores at 100%, running a 3D render (GPU render) that power seems to average 45-50 Watts with peak over 55.  The M1 Max with 24 Core GPU that I have access to scores a 3790 in Cinebench R24 GPU (a 32 Core GPU M1 Max hits around a 4330)

M4 completes the GPU render faster (and in tests like Cinebench R24 it gets a higher score (approx 4100) than the M1 Max 24 Core GPU, and is close to the 32 Core GPU Max. - it idles at 3 watts (under half the M2 Mac mini used at idle), typical usage is 4-9 watts (web/productivity), peak CPU power usage was 36.5 Watts using all cores at 100%,  and in 3D renders/games it averages maybe 25-30 watts of power under load with a peak of 35.5 I was able to hit in a game.  

M4 Pro idle is slightly higher at 3.5 watts, typical use was around 5-13 watts, and peak power during 3D renders or gaming was 61.5watts (all CPU cores at 100% did hit a peak of 71.2 watts). Most of the time it uses less power than the Mac Studio.  in 3D the M4 Pro performance is beyond the M1 Ultra and using Cinebench as an example past the RTX 2070 as well hitting 7762 score (in the range of the GTX 3060, or Radeon 6700-6800) - other rendering software had similar pretty high performance especially when Mesh Shading and Ray Tracing was involved.  Gaming saw similar massive improvements - if Ray Tracing was involved, it had over double the performance of the M1 Max with 24 GPU cores.

To me it looks like if you compare on TDP that the new AMD processor should be compared against the M2 Pro rather than the plain M2 (at least a couple sources I found put the M2 Pro at about the same 28 Watts maximum) - and then the performance is more comparable as well.

HP Pricing on 1.5 TB of ram is $46,080 USD for the HP Z8 - Apple looks downright cheap at $25,000 for 1.5 TB - and had to configure it with 2 "M" model processors to get any ram options over 384GB - so that increases the price of the HP unit. (either 2x10 core or 2x24 core appear to be the only ones that allow the over 384GB of ram options to appear)
With a couple of high-end video cards, 8 TB of NVMe storage (that appear to rate slightly under the single GPU Radeon Pro Vega II) - was able to hit around $90,000 USD with holiday "sales" bringing it down from $111,000 or so. And that wasn't even all of the options that could be installed that would bring the price to it's maximum.

These are some nice additions - I know several people with low-vision that will like the larger icons and larger text for sure.