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Kuo: 2023 Mac Mini to Retain Same Design as Current Model
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Not gonna happen. These are cleary different products, made for different price segments. I would like to see a few more options in the M1/2 and future Mac Minis though, like being able to get at least 4tb of SSD and 64gb of RAM. Hopefully the base versions of M2 and M3 will have less limitations with RAM.
M chip systems still have issues and while Apple might wave a banner of innovation - honesty would tell us that unified memory has been around before as has shared memory with graphics. Apple had an opportunity to develop a new path for computers but decided as always, to withhold some, charge Apple tax, and see how they can make their own systems outdated in 3-4 years to push people to buy a newer system. The Studio should be no different given that nothing inside is upgradable nor can external graphics be added (at this time).
Candidly, if they were all that state of the art they would have had a similar size case, use another type of cooling system for the board and use the additional space so some may add additional SSD or specialty cards that might be perhaps proprietary but none the less, available (think audio or "effects" graphic cards etc.). Instead, we got a Mini Pro as this Studio is a glorified Mini in design. There is nothing similar to the present Mac Pro or the Trash Can. I'm okay with a Mini Pro but would prefer Apple be a bit more honest and at least up the RAM specs without adding ridiculous Apple Tax.
Candidly, if they were all that state of the art they would have had a similar size case, use another type of cooling system for the board and use the additional space so some may add additional SSD or specialty cards that might be perhaps proprietary but none the less, available (think audio or "effects" graphic cards etc.). Instead, we got a Mini Pro as this Studio is a glorified Mini in design. There is nothing similar to the present Mac Pro or the Trash Can. I'm okay with a Mini Pro but would prefer Apple be a bit more honest and at least up the RAM specs without adding ridiculous Apple Tax.
You know I get where you are coming from. I really do. I would love to have a normal-person-affordable and at the same time user-upgradable Mac. I would love to not have to consider if I need 32 or 64 gigs of ram but just get the 64 gig variant because the difference is just two hundred bucks and not worry about it. I would love to run everything under the sun from my steam library when I get the time to play a game for once. I really get this. I feel you.
But:
Where is the competition?
Where are the user-friendly operating systems that don't break every other update and require me to reinstall my entire system every year or so? I didn't even have this with my hackintosh in 4 years, but my windows installation just broke every once in a while. My Gentoo never broke, fine, but it forced so much work on me to get normal things running that I just couldn't justify it any more, plus as great as Wine might be, there are hard limits to what it can run, and it is sometimes even worse than running non-native things on Mac.
Where are the affordable PC systems that are small, efficient and silent, just bring everything and don't eat into my ears and my electricity bill like a hacksaw? And also don't look like either a bleeding unicorn or like I stole them from them from behind the post office counter? You could build those solutions with the right hardware, such as with chips AMD sells in the PS5 or Xbox.... whatevertheycallit. But they don't sell it for the PC market - because if they would such a thing would cost way north of a thousand dollars if it had the same specs and build quality as a competitive Mac. And nobody is selling such systems, period, and I'm too old and lazy to bother with thermal paste application, air flow optimization, bios updates and hardware compatibility lists just to get something I'm still not really happy with.
Where are the affordable high DPI, color accurate, factory calibrated monitors that don't look like garbage and break apart when looking the wrong way at them, and that also come with a decent level of system integration? The literally only one there was was basically an iMac without the Mac baked into a plastic shell of doom that came with a variety of issues. There are no monitors that even try to compete with these features in the PC space.
Where is the high level integration of the several devices a person owns without having to fiddle around with them and troubleshoot for a weekend so I get them to work together so-so? There is no Windows or Linux or any computer that just works with my AirPods the way they work with my Mac. And there are no wireless earbuds that work as seamless with anything. My Mac just knows when I get a call on my phone - I didn't even set that up. I can paste text from my Phone on my Mac and not even think about that. Where do I get that if not from Apple?
You see: I absolutely think Apple could make their devices more customer friendly. I absolutely think Apple could sell them for a lot less money and still make a healthy if not absurd profit. I absolutely think Apple is making anti-customer choices fully aware that they are making them because they are also fully aware that they are getting away with them. Because at the end of the day .... There is no competition.
And I really dare the Dells and Lenovos and Samsungs and Microsofts and Intels and AMDs and whatnots to actually up their game and offer products that can compete. I don't think they can. Maybe they can in few years, and I'd be happy about that - because I'm neither team Apple nor team Microsoft, I am team Wallet and team "I need to get stuff done" - but until they do ... I'll keep paying the Apple Tax. Begrudged, salty, sometimes even angry, but knowing that I don't pay it for nothing, and apparently I feel like it's worth it.
Apple's share of computers is not that large. Apple seems content to be a smaller player and rely on phones and other sales. There have been past discussions on how committed (or not) Apple is to capturing a larger share of the desktop/laptop market. Majority of buyers who go to get a computer are unaware of the pitfalls of Windows and they continue that route usually once they have made their initial purchase. As for me, worst case scenario would be again a VM of Windows if required for some target purpose otherwise I'll stay with MacOS and Linux. I would love to see some distro of Linux designed specifically for older Mac laptops (Intel) so they continue to have a good life.
Agreed, and I think with how Asahi Linux is progressing I think we'll eventually get one better and have a stable and performant Linux distribution that also runs on ARM Macs.
As for them actively trying to capture a bigger part of the PC market: I think they do, in a very specific niche. Apple historically was the go to choice for media editors and they have been putting a lot of effort into recapturing that space as of late. They lead the desktop category on amazon with the Mac Mini, and they have a healthy second with the MacBook Air in the laptop segment.
But mainly I guess Apple views the Mac as an accessory to their iPhone eco system. In a different place I noted how distraught I am that Apple squarely targets social media creators with their phone, pretty much letting everything else let fall by the wayside. It's just camera, video editing and battery life. Everything is kinda secondary. Now the Mac is squarely aimed to give those people a powerful platform to edit their photos and footage, with their iPhone as their main if not only recording device.
And it kinda works since when all the social media people use your products to edit their content you will get a lot of positive coverage from those people. And if you look at what the new ARM Macs really excel at it shows: basically all you see is how great they are Final Cut and rendering ProRes, which people seem to forget is a proprietary codec, and far from the industry standard.
Still, thanks to homebrew and a lot of effort from other parts of the open source community, for me as a developer MacOS is the perfect blend of a stable and easy to use OS that runs all the Zooms and Microsoft Offices natively, while offering a Unix system that allows me to do Unix things. My only worry is that Apple will eventually close that off in their effort to make MacOS a more "cohesive", meaning closed down system. Most people think iPadOS is moving towards MacOS, but I feel like the endgame looks like pretty much the opposite.
I'm just holding my breath until the amazingly talented Alyssa Rosenzweig (really, this person is twice the developer I'll ever be at half the age .... mind blowing) finally cracks the M1 GPU end gives us a fully working GL/Vulkan driver. I highly recommend her blog (https://rosenzweig.io/) for some fascinating insights into how Apple made the M1 GPU, and how it is working very differently from what we've known so far in the PC space. After all, it's probably somewhat an offspring of the venerable PowerVR architecture, but it's still fascinating how they cut out a lot of legacy fixed function hardware and do it in software to make more room on the silicon for actual shaders. Also explains why the M1 GPU is really fast in general, but dogshoot slow doing other, seemingly mundane things like Anti-Aliasing. I guess Apple figured out that if you use screens with north of 200 dpi Anti-Aliasing really doesn't matter that much anyways.
If they then also figure out x86 emulation at close to what Apple does on MacOS (because, technically, the secret sauce is there in the CPU) you might be looking at something really enticing, possibly even dual-booting Asahi to run x86 games via Proton.
All that being said it's one of the things I really like Apple for these days. They actually had the guts (admittedly, with nigh unlimited funds) to break away from existing standards, looked at what they wanted their computers to do, and purpose-built one on an architecture two years ago most people would have deemed utterly insufficient for desktop computing. It's not even funny anymore how far ahead their ARM architecture is ahead of literally everyone else in the field, and even more mind-boggling how on a performance-per-watt basis they absolutely stomp x86. If Apple wanted, which they probably won't after their xServe desaster, their hardware would make some exciting web and cloud servers.
The future never looked so..... interesting ?
Now you see I feel uncomfortable as you are forcing me to defend Windows which I don't really feel like doing.
I use Windows daily since 3.0 and what you said was kinda accurate from Windows 95 to about Windows XP.
But from Vista onwards it's not really an issue according to my experience. I don't remember how many different Windows computers I owned over the last 15 years since I got Vista 64, but perhaps they were about 8. Till 2014 one after the other and the last 7 years, four at about the same time. Vista 64, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10.
Two or three times over these 15 years I had to use system restore. I never had to do a clean re installation of windows. I don't know how you use your Windows computers, but I install on most of them several programs I use (ie "serious software") and games. Also usually about a dozen small programs which I find helpful. I never had my systems "break" or reinstall my system every year or so. Ever. (since Vista).
My point is, perhaps it's you, either because you do something wrong, or perhaps you do this reinstallation because of something that messes up and you think you have to do the Windows reinstallation.
Me either. The Windows tropes about unreliability and needing "clean re-installation" from time to time are very inaccurate and tired at this point.
I also think it works and looks better with scaled resolutions. Apple has, understandably, focused most of their efforts there on making perfect 2x scaling be "the thing" -- I'm always using scaled resolutions and I find Windows 11 handles that beautifully (and things all look very sharp and crisp no matter the choice of scale)
The fact that I am called upon by multiple people each year that manage to ruin their windows installation is reason enough for me to believe that this is still accurate. The point is: a not well verse user should not be able to navigate themselves so much into a corner that even recovery fails. You should not have to walk on eggshells to prevent such things. Although, granted, these things have improved a lot over time.