Flip Flopping between macOS and Windows

[pshufd]

I suspect the base M4 mini is similarly sold out in other MicroCenter stores. What I'm seeing is that they get inventory and it hits their website late in the evening and they get about 15-20 units. These are sold out in the morning by customers reserving the units and then going into the store to buy them the next morning. I would like to buy one of these for testing. My analysis says that these are slower than my i7-10700 Windows PC but it would be nice to actually have data on this as I'm just doing a linear extrapolation.

What I'd like to do is use the local Best Buy to see if they will price match the Microcenter price but Microcenter would have to have them in stock and they aren't in-stock during the day. What I've heard at Best Buy is that you get the manager to approve the price match.

Alternately, if someone here has an account at Fidelity Investments and an M4 Mac, I'd appreciate it if they could run a test for me on it. The use case would be to use the M4 mini for the specific x86 program on it and run my other stuff on the Studio due to the mini's other limitations. If the M4 were enough, I could just replace the M1 Max Studio with the M4 Max Studio and I wouldn't need the Windows PC.

 

[maflynn]

View attachment 2591088

For giggles, I built out an upper mid-range PC and the price wasn't terrible, thanks to the bundling deals.
Just under 1,800 before taxes

Build included details: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, ASUS X870E-PLUS TUF GAMING motherboard, G.Skill 32gig of DDR5-6000 ram. 1 TB of Samsung storage, Asus RTX 5070 gpu (and assorted components to flesh out the build).

 

[eltoslightfoot]

For giggles, I built out an upper mid-range PC and the price wasn't terrible, thanks to the bundling deals.
Just under 1,800 before taxes

Build included details: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, ASUS X870E-PLUS TUF GAMING motherboard, G.Skill 32gig of DDR5-6000 ram. 1 TB of Samsung storage, Asus RTX 5070 gpu (and assorted components to flesh out the build).

I got my wife that exact same PC--except it's a 9700X instead of a 7800X3D. It was a prebuilt MSI PC, and it was $1300 on Black Friday. Really nice PC.

It's on sale again! https://www.bestbuy.com/product/ace...ia-geforce-rtx-5070-1-tb-ssd-black/JX5V2XG2LW

 

[LiE_]

I feel myself wavering. I'm burnt out on the current game I've been playing since building a new machine and my friends have moved onto path of exile 2, which I played for a little, and didn't gel with.

I picked up Expedition 33 and it's a beautifully presented game, but I don't have the desire or time to learn all these new mechanics. So I find myself again with no desire to play. I could easily sell the desktop and go back to a Mac Mini, mainly due to RAM prices going nuts.

Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.

For now I'll just take a break.

 

[maflynn]

Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.

I've been using GFN and its been pretty good, I think if you go with the Mini, GFN is your best bet even over crossover. I found Crossover inadequate on the M4 Pro mini, never mind the base model

 

[eltoslightfoot]

I feel myself wavering. I'm burnt out on the current game I've been playing since building a new machine and my friends have moved onto path of exile 2, which I played for a little, and didn't gel with.

I picked up Expedition 33 and it's a beautifully presented game, but I don't have the desire or time to learn all these new mechanics. So I find myself again with no desire to play. I could easily sell the desktop and go back to a Mac Mini, mainly due to RAM prices going nuts.

Starting to think the Mac Mini with GeForce Now was the sweet spot.

For now I'll just take a break.

Man, y'all must have some amazing internets. I would rather have my gameage locally.

 

[maflynn]

Man, y'all must have some amazing internets. I would rather have my gameage locally.

I have 900 Mbs on my internet and that's generally satisfactory for most of the games I'm playing. I don't think that's overly fast. With that said, my preference is to play locally, and so I rely heavily on Crossover which does a great job

 

[eltoslightfoot]

I have 900 Mbs on my internet and that's generally satisfactory for most of the games I'm playing. I don't think that's overly fast. With that said, my preference is to play locally, and so I rely heavily on Crossover which does a great job

900 Mbps is insanely fast for large swaths of the world LOL. I was on Centurylink DSL right near the fiber hub and was only getting 100 Mbps. Now with Starlink I get 300 to 400 Mbps. So definitely glad I go with local it sounds like.

Then again, I have a Jellyfin server and don't like cloud based services anyway. If my kids weren't addicted to Apple Music, I wouldn't even have that LOL.