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Apple Announces Redesigned Mac Mini With M4 and M4 Pro Chips, Two Front USB-C Ports, and More
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I have not heard delayed audio on any videos for years, best I can tell they calculate the BT latency and delay the video stream by the corresponding amount?
But if you are trying to play music in sync with audio (or play games) BT is still a problem.
Also, apparently iCloud Sync can't use anything but the built in SSD, which is really frustrating as many of us have a lot of data in iCloud (Photos & Docs, etc)
It sort of negates the whole idea of "buy a base storage model & add external storage" if you can't force Apple Photos to use it at least (for me that's nearly 1/2 a TB)
This is one of several reasons I'm looking to figure out a different Photo sync/backup solution using my NAS instead of iCloud
I switched to Adobe Lightroom (the Cloud version) for this. About a year ago IIRC it gained the ability to use local folders. I've got my photo folders on the Synology, and manage them from my PC. You lose various features doing it this way (you can't create albums, for example), but I'm fine with just offloading photos of events into folders and leaving it at that. Keeps it simple, and makes it easy to move to a different photo management app in future. Anything that stores within a database is a pain to migrate (at least if you'd like edits to be retained...). I use a "YYYY.MM.DD - Event Name" folder naming system, so folders can list alphabetically.
You could use Lightroom Classic instead of course, with all the usual features, but I couldn't stomach the dated interface. It's also clearly on borrowed time, until the main Lightroom has total feature parity, and I couldn't be bothered to move to that, then have to move again later.
iCloud actually has a bonus when using it on a PC. Apple's minimal integration with PC is a benefit here, as it just syncs with a folder in Explorer. This means iCloud Photos on your computer doesn't need to sync your entire library. I've enabled iCloud photo syncing on my iPhone, iPad and PC; it effectively just syncs whatever I've taken on my phone to the PC and iPad. Essentially behaving like the old (much missed) Photo Stream.
I've also got Synology Photos pointing at my photo library. I then sideloaded the Synology Photos Android app on my Firestick, so I can browse the library on TV. The app's designed for tablets, but works fine on a TV (most Android tablets are 16:9 anyway).
As usual, Apple stingily places a high price on any storage above 256 GB. 500GB would have been a more reasonable base.
Apple today announced fully redesigned Mac mini models featuring the M4 and M4 Pro chips, a considerably smaller casing, two front-facing USB-C ports, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and more.
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The product refresh marks the first time the Mac mini has been redesigned in over a decade. The enclosure now measures just five by five inches and contains a new thermal architecture where air is guided up through the device's foot to different levels of the system.
The new Mac mini can be configured with either the M4 or M4 Pro chip, with the latter allowing for a 14-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, and up to 64GB of memory. The Mac mini with the M4 chip features a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and now starts with 16GB of unified memory as standard. The M4 Pro features 273GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple says that the M4 Mac mini is up to 1.8x faster in CPU performance and 2.2x faster in GPU performance than the M1 model from 2020. With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro's GPU is said to be up to twice as powerful as the GPU in the standard M4. Both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini for the first time, alongside a considerably more powerful Neural Engine.
The M4 Pro model offers two USB-C ports on the front and three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back. This is the first time a Mac has featured Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, which delivers up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds—more than doubling the throughput of Thunderbolt 4. The M4 model continues to have Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The new machine is also Apple's first carbon-neutral Mac. The M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini is available to pre-order today with a starting price of $599, with launch set to take place on November 8.
Article Link: Apple Announces Redesigned Mac Mini With M4 and M4 Pro Chips, Two Front USB-C Ports, and More
I guess a light bulb finally wen off in the engineering department 🤣
512 gig should be bare minimum, I really think for the price they should be at 1TB. Apple is a premium product, you pay a premium price tag for machines that are non upgradeable landfill machines, would be nice to just give a generous amount of storage as a base to keep them usable longer.
It should as I could do that with every Mini although the ports were in the rear.
If it’s like the Mac Studio then they’ll be good for charging things like iPhone etc - this is what I do with mine at home and works like a charm.
I run PS/LR and FCP. It's also my main machine working from home. I also run ThinkorSwim, browers, Excel, BBedit, MailMate, VLC, etc. during the day.
I have three 2TB drives in Acasis TBU 405 enclosures. One drive is my dedicated photo/video archive storage. One drive is dedicated to FCP projects. The third drive is my "home" directory.
My FCP projects are pretty simple. I pull in 4K GroPro footage and exports 4k videos. Maybe a a few extra tracks of audio/video along with titles.
HTH.
I guess that's one thing I'll give the Australian government, much as the GST (Goods and Services Tax) was seen in a negative light by a lot of people when it was introduced 24 years ago - it standardised a great many taxes across the country.
Ok, for those going PRO, please could you rationalise your RAM decisions?
My Late 2015 5K iMac has 16GB (on a i5 3.3 and 1TB SSD). It's served me very well, but it's starting to show it's age and no longer supported for the latest OS.
I buy with a balance of £ v longevity, so I'll certainly be going Pro, but I'm struggling to think I'll ever need 48GB over the next 5-10years, yet at the same time I worry 24GB might not be enough.
Usage is HEAVY multiple tab web applications, heavy excel and powerpoint, and productivity such as Slack etc. No media/video editing, but my photos library is near 500GB and I use that heavily.
32GB is where in my head would like to be, but of course Apple won't have that, so if I want min 32GB I'd need to shell out another £400 to get the 48GB, which is quite a chunk of cash.
Decisions decisions...
My Late 2015 5K iMac has 16GB (on a i5 3.3 and 1TB SSD). It's served me very well, but it's starting to show it's age and no longer supported for the latest OS.
I buy with a balance of £ v longevity, so I'll certainly be going Pro, but I'm struggling to think I'll ever need 48GB over the next 5-10years, yet at the same time I worry 24GB might not be enough.
Usage is HEAVY multiple tab web applications, heavy excel and powerpoint, and productivity such as Slack etc. No media/video editing, but my photos library is near 500GB and I use that heavily.
32GB is where in my head would like to be, but of course Apple won't have that, so if I want min 32GB I'd need to shell out another £400 to get the 48GB, which is quite a chunk of cash.
Decisions decisions...
I always had high end iMacs with 48-64gb of ram. The hard drive in my 2017 was going last year so I started using my m2 base Mac mini media server as my main computer… I had planned to replace it with a full spec Mac Studio m3 this summer but obviously apple messed up my plans… but… honestly that base Mac mini M2 does just about anything I throw at it fast… and I’m a graphic designer , the only major issue is batch editing raw photos. I used to edit hundreds at a time and this chokes on a couple dozen… but if I wasn’t a photographer with a high megapixel camera I’d honestly prob be fine . You’d prob be fine with any ram config based on what you said here.
The base model is so popular, I'm wondering if it will sell out and be on backorder soon.
He says, credit card in hand...
He says, credit card in hand...
Especially more so with a 17% discount I get from my education discount.
This seems like it could actually replace my 5k iMac...but of course I will also need to purchase the other accessories like webcam and speakers.
Yeah, Mac storage has been stuck forever in this weird pocket of the space-time continuum where time stands still while all other things Apple progress at dizzying speeds.
When I bought my old MacBook Pro 15" in November 2014, 10 years ago, 256/8 was base config and 512/16 was 'the one you want'. At that time the base config was 16 GB on the brand new iPhone 6.
Today they throw in 128 GB storage as base config on the regular iPhone 16, but the goddamn 256 GB Macs still live on -- yes the MBP has now been bumped to 512 GB base config, but it took until the M3 in 2023 -- the base MBP M2 still only had 256 GB.
So while baseline iPhone storage has increased by 8x in these 10 years, it took them 8 of those years to very, very, very reluctantly bumping baseline Mac storage by 2x.
Criminal indeed.
The iMac is so large then so many people are Anjali baby my stuff and people still find fault it’s just not worth the hassle
I’m not buying one so I don’t actually care, and frankly, even if I was, I don’t turn my computer off enough for it to ever be a problem in general use cases. It’s still a stupid place to put it.
Do you have DaisyDisk or equivalent? Good for breaking down the contents of a disk, including hidden OS stuff.
It’s not really a thin client - it’s a powerful little machine, and can run almost anything you’d need it to locally.
More like a ‘thick client’, despite its physical size.