Penzi

I had earlier Mac minis and then the atrocious dual core version of 2014 spiked them for me until Apple Silicon versions were released. I picked up a fully loaded M1 mini but unfortunately it was insufficiently powerful for my wants and needs, so it was replaced with a mildly less than fully loaded M1Max MBPro. That has served me well indeed (the Pro chips are probably sufficient to my needs… but not my wants/longevity). Now that Macs have Thunderbolt 5 I await the release of monitors taking advantage of the bandwidth and will then plunge headlong back into desktops.

Long way to say that I will not miss the Intel Mac mini… 

Is there a reason one would want to turn off the indexing? Saving space seems low hanging fruit elsewhere. Remove a single unused app, for example…

The Ultra chips have always been an odd duck, if you’re a consumer or photography professional. Even video has few things that genuinely benefit from the dual Max chip setup. The M1Ultra was worse than the M1Max at certain tasks as well, although I assume that was software needing to catch up to the new chip design for Mac. Even when you had noticeable benefits, the Ultra performance scaled nowhere near linearly. But there are benefits and they are tangible if your field takes advantage of them. That’s the nature of pro hardware: use case. I’ll paraphrase… “if you have to ask, you won’t take advantage of it”

I’m very glad that Apple produces the Ultra but the Max chip is the one for me. It actually exceeds my present use case requirements but the Pro chips bump up along my limits, so Max it is. With the MBPros and Mac Studios now sporting Thunderbolt 5, my hardware requirements for an upgrade are met. But since the point of said upgrade rests on monitors that don’t really exist yet, I will wait for their release before I truly struggle with “desktop or laptop?!” once again… I am optimistic that this will occur with the M5 generation APUs.

@Blastdoor I, also, am intrigued by your use case where, I assume, you wire two Mac minis together (Ethernet? Thunderbolt?) and also as to why, for the exact same price, having the exact same number of CPU cores make the mini more interesting than the Studio to you. Straight up that they are the faster M4 cores? I know that in AI neither Ethernet nor Thunderbolt has sufficient bandwidth to make two minis as efficient/competent as one Studio but I’d love to learn more!

My wife and I wouldn’t be together had Skype not existed. It has definitely been abused and undermined in the hands of MS. Fare thee well, old friend! You’re but a shadow of what made you an anchor in my life for years…

This depends heavily on whether you consider a computer with any NPU to be an “AI PC” or whether, like Microsoft, you have put a baseline down. If you use Microsoft’s requirement for 40 TOPs, you get Apple selling exactly zero capable AI PCs… there is so much conflation and chest thumping going on in ML at the moment that it’s hard to get an idea of who makes what and whether (and how much) it matters.