dewme

I still prefer the second generation Magic Mouse over the first generation Magic Mouse. The battery runtime on the first gen MM was atrocious. Using two sets of good rechargeable AA batteries like the Eneloop ones ensured you always had charged batteries available but it felt like I was constantly swapping batteries. 

Not surprising at all. To make the best use of parallel processing you need to have an application or problem to solve that benefits from parallelization, I.e., very low demands for synchronization. Sync points and communication constructs like unmarshalling out of order packets can create a big hit on the potential speed up of parallel processing. When synchronization is needed on a single machine it’s typically handled within the same physical memory space or shared memory, and at the thread or process level. When synchronization is required between multiple machines it involves the IO and communication subsystems which are much slower, especially on a network like Ethernet. 

appleinsideruser said:

Any M-series iMac users, what are your feelings about the external power supply brick?

The external power supply with integrated Ethernet connector is an excellent feature if you want to limit the number of wires/cables going from underneath the desk to the top of the desk. My wife loves it.

Nice write up. One fly in the ointment right now is the Time Machine unattended backups are having a problem completing since the release of macOS 15.1.  I’ve encountered the issue backing up to directly connected external drives and the Apple Time Capsule. I’ve walked through the issue and provided log files to Apple and they are still investigating. Once I log into the machines in question the backups do complete. But if you’re counting on Time Machine working when you’re not at your Mac, you may have an issue with incomplete backups.  I also found that Microsoft Defender real time protection has a devastating impact on Time Machine performance. Backups that should finish in minutes are estimated to take hours or even days. I’ve reported this to Microsoft as well but for now I just turned it all off.

Thankfully Carbon Copy Cloner still works perfectly. Having more than one backup method makes sense to me.

This is a rather odd choice for a company that prides itself on usability and user experience. I leave my computers on all of the time plugged into an UPS and just let them sleep as needed so this wouldn’t bother me too much. The only time I have to power them up is when I have a protracted power outage, which is very infrequent.

Where this may be a bigger concern is if you want to use a mounting fixture that allows you to mount the Mac mini on the back of a monitor that has a VESA mount. However, I’m pretty sure that makers of special mounting adapters will find a way to accommodate the strange placement of the power button. I fully expect that third parties will come up with some interesting mounts to get the new mini up off the desktop, which would once and for all suppress some of the “Where’s my new 27” iMac”” grumblings. Who knows, maybe Apple’s next Studio Display will incorporate something to make this happen? I’m not holding my breath.

Personally, the fact that the new Mac mini does not have a big honking external power supply (like the NUC and most Mini PCs have) more than offsets the wonkiness of the power button location. I’m very impressed with the new mini and only wish that it had arrived earlier.