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Late 2014 Mac Mini Benchmarks Indicate Decreased Multi-Core Performance

schopaia said:
You seem very passionate about the topic but if you're serious about renderings (and particularly if you base your business on that) you'd be much better served by a computer with a modern nvidia gpu. Not a mac mini with intel "graphics".
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Adobe has supported rendering on the GPU with OpenCL (Intel Iris, AMD Radeon, NVIDIA) for a long time now: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html
I went to SIGGRAPH and saw little boxes editing 4K video in Premier quite happily.

Two things though:
1. You need the $699 Mac Mini with Intel Iris graphics
2. I'm assuming the spec is Intel Iris 5100, it doesn't actually say 5100 or 5200 anywhere?!? Pretty sure it must be 5100.

The $499 Mac Mini only has Intel HD 5000, this might be OK at 1080p but if say you are looking to edit 4K video you need the Intel Iris so Adobe uses the GPU. Oh and lots of RAM is nice too for things like editing 4K video, 8GB works, 16GB good, 32GB even better.
 
Like I said before, I think the reason why Apple is doing this is clear: They don't want the Mac Mini to compete with the iMac and the Macbook Pro in any market segment. Previously, they had three Macs which were overlapping partially in terms of performance. I assume the Apple marketing department considers that bad business, so they removed the Mac Mini from that segment.

That implies that if someone wants to buy a Mac in that segment, they are forced to buy an iMac or a Macbook Pro - whether they need a display or not - whether they need a notebook or not. The Mac Mini is now being positioned purely as the second entry point to the Mac (next to the Macbook Air) for people who currently have a PC with a monitor and who want to keep the monitor while exchanging the PC for a Mac.

And yes, there are people here who claim "It has always been that way." Bizarre, because that's simply not true. Otherwise, Apple never would have offered a quad core Mini to begin with. Now that Apple is pushing the Mac Mini back into entry level territory, people are seriously claiming that it was never intended for anything else - rewriting history. There was a quad core i7 Mac Mini in Mid 2011 already. The performance overlap between Mac Mini and iMac is not a new thing, but apparently something that Apple doesn't like anymore.

I don't know where that preference for the iMac at Apple marketing comes from. Is it because it looks cool? Is it because everyone who enters the room immediately sees that there's a Mac at work, while the Mac Mini can be hidden behind a monitor or under a desk? If they want Apple hardware front and center, perhaps they should not have given up on the Thunderbolt Display. It it actually my feeling that if Apple wants to offer a desktop entry level Mac, it should be an All-in-One, not the displayless version.
 
Vodka said:
Seriously, i was in love with apple products for a few years, but this Mac Mini and iPad mini release feels like a slap in the face..
Hopefully they'll get back on the track with next release
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Yep, I was a drooling fanboy for a while, I admit. But the veil has certainly been lifted lately. Planned obsolescence and soldered in/non-repairable hardware is quite frustrating. You'd think with their walled in software/hardware configurations that it'd actually be a lot EASIER for them to support older hardware, but instead you're basically forced to buy a new Mac every few years. Before, at the very least, you could upgrade your RAM or drive for increased performance, but now that's out of the equation for most of their product line. At least OWC makes the proprietary drives for these new Macs, but it's still ridiculous. And what if your RAM goes bad? It's soldered in. You WILL have to send it to Apple and you WILL have to wait for a replacement. Before you could just swap in a new set in 5 minutes or less and be done with it. And now the new kext signing in Yosemite is pissing off a lot of developers. Just to get TRIM Enabler to work with a non-Apple SSD, they had to add in a feature to turn off this kext signing. The fence in the walled garden is getting increasingly bigger every day. And they keep adding in more demanding graphical UIs so that older hardware feels sluggish ... with no options to "turn down" graphics settings to increase performance like you can in Windows. :confused:



RedBanana said:
Adobe has supported rendering on the GPU with OpenCL (Intel Iris, AMD Radeon, NVIDIA) for a long time now: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html
I went to SIGGRAPH and saw little boxes editing 4K video in Premier quite happily.

Two things though:
1. You need the $699 Mac Mini with Intel Iris graphics
2. I'm assuming the spec is Intel Iris 5100, it doesn't actually say 5100 or 5200 anywhere?!? Pretty sure it must be 5100.

The $499 Mac Mini only has Intel HD 5000, this might be OK at 1080p but if say you are looking to edit 4K video you need the Intel Iris so Adobe uses the GPU. Oh and lots of RAM is nice too for things like editing 4K video, 8GB works, 16GB good, 32GB even better.
Click to expand...
Have you ever tried rendering 1080p and above video on anything other than a dedicated GPU with decent RAM? It's not fun.
 
Analog Kid said:
They wanted to hit <$500, and they did.
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Yes. But that's not the issue. People are not complaining about the performance of the lowest-end Mac Mini, but about the fact that they cut the highest-end Mac Minis out of the product line-up. They could sell Core 2 Duo Mac Minis with 1GB of RAM for $200 for all I care, as long as there's a Core i7 quad core option available.
It's a Mini, not a Mac SemiPro.
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Sure. But the problem is that there is no "Mac SemiPro" in the Apple product line-up unless you are willing to buy an all-in-one or a notebook. There's a gap between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, and Apple is widening that gap.
 
HishamAkhtar said:
Tim thinks everyone is a CEO. He doesn't need a Mac to write up a document or make a presentation because his employees do that for him.
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no, he is smarter than that. but i am almost certain now that apple is phasing out the mac.

he is doing a lot of work to transition the whole world to ipad.

http://9to5mac.com/2014/07/17/apple...rcent-of-their-work-on-an-ipad-just-like-him/

“There’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t be like that. Imagine enterprise apps being as simple as the consumer apps that we’ve all gotten used to. That’s the way it should be” …

tim-ibm.jpg
 
MentalFloss said:
Like I said before, I think the reason why Apple is doing this is clear: They don't want the Mac Mini to compete with the iMac and the Macbook Pro in any market segment. Previously, they had three Macs which were overlapping partially in terms of performance. I assume the Apple marketing department considers that bad business, so they removed the Mac Mini from that segment.
Click to expand...

And in underspeccing the Mac Mini in this way they are essentially making it redundant.

If you want to make an entry-level product then make it at an entry level price (Window's PC's and laptops have this market sewn up), if you want to make it a premium product (Apple's "core" market, pun intended) then make it perform as such. All this year's Apple products are starting to smack more and more of milking the consumer of cash... Entry level iPads with 16gb of RAM? :D
 
MentalFloss said:
Like I said before, I think the reason why Apple is doing this is clear: They don't want the Mac Mini to compete with the iMac and the Macbook Pro in any market segment.
Click to expand...

The problem is that neither the iMac or the MacBook can compete on the segments where the MacMini was really good at. So, it just means losing these market segments.
The two market segments where I have seen the Mini shine are :
  • low-end imaging stations that need high-end displays. For instance, the shop where I print my photos use Mac Minis connected to 2k€ Eizo displays. They don't need much power because the computer is only used to display photos and do global adjustments or conversions and send the result to printers. The iMac can't compete because the screen is only average. The MacBook would make no sense.
  • Cheap stackable low-consumption servers. Some companies have made a business of using hundreds of MacMini as servers, because they don't need a lot of power, they're cheap and they're very small. No business is going to run iMacs or MacBooks as servers... Having dual-core instead of quad-core means that it's twice as expensive to have this kind of setup...
 
Did anyone else get the impression Phil Schiller almost seemed like he was going to burst into tears during the keynote.
 
MentalFloss said:
Yes. But that's not the issue. People are not complaining about the performance of the lowest-end Mac Mini, but about the fact that they cut the highest-end Mac Minis out of the product line-up. They could sell Core 2 Duo Mac Minis with 1GB of RAM for $200 for all I care, as long as there's a Core i7 quad core option available.

Sure. But the problem is that there is no "Mac SemiPro" in the Apple product line-up unless you are willing to buy an all-in-one or a notebook. There's a gap between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, and Apple is widening that gap.
Click to expand...

I bought a nNP because of this gap - I needed something with at least 32GB RAM, ideally 64GB. I don't however need dual workstation graphics cards, a Xeon CPU, ECC RAM or ISV certification. I'd be happy with a core i7 Extreme, a desktop GPU and regular RAM. While the nMP is a very nice machine, in 3-4 years time when I replace it I will probably be looking on eBay for a good Z820 or Dell Precision or something similar for a fraction of the price of the Mac.

Also I recently replaced a rMBP with a Dell M4800. Yes it's ugly and heavy, but again it enables me to have 32GB, multiple SSD's, a matt screen and an ethernet port.

While I love OS X I'm feeling the hardware is nowhere near as good as the software. It's too limited, even at the high-end. And Apple, I hate all-in-one computers with glossy screens!
 
AppleFan115 said:
"We've designed the new Mac Mini to be slower, so you can enjoy your content better. These days, we are in such a hurry that we fail to slowdown and appreciate what we're seeing. The new Mac Mini is about making the personal computer...personal again." - Jony

Image
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Comment of the year!
 
\-V-/ said:
Yep, I was a drooling fanboy for a while, I admit. But the veil has certainly been lifted lately. Planned obsolescence and soldered in/non-repairable hardware is quite frustrating. You'd think with their walled in software/hardware configurations that it'd actually be a lot EASIER for them to support older hardware, but instead you're basically forced to buy a new Mac every few years. Before, at the very least, you could upgrade your RAM or drive for increased performance, but now that's out of the equation for most of their product line. At least OWC makes the proprietary drives for these new Macs, but it's still ridiculous. And what if your RAM goes bad? It's soldered in. You WILL have to send it to Apple and you WILL have to wait for a replacement. Before you could just swap in a new set in 5 minutes or less and be done with it. And now the new kext signing in Yosemite is pissing off a lot of developers. Just to get TRIM Enabler to work with a non-Apple SSD, they had to add in a feature to turn off this kext signing. The fence in the walled garden is getting increasingly bigger every day. And they keep adding in more demanding graphical UIs so that older hardware feels sluggish ... with no options to "turn down" graphics settings to increase performance like you can in Windows. :confused:
Click to expand...

You nailed it, every part of it. I think the worst example of their behaviour occured recently. When yosemite beta's were out, some bright folk decided to upgrade the bluetooth cards in their 2010/2011 MBP's to bluetooth cards of the same footprint/format that support bluetooth 4.0LE (required for handoff/continuity), taken from later MBP's.

It all worked great, and allowed people to continue using their laptops with these new features for a longer period of time. But some Apple staff, who seemed to have nothing better to do than read rumour forums caught onto this, and purposely coded a check in the relevant kernel extension to see if the bluetooth card in the laptop was what originally came with that model laptop - if not the kernel extention would not load.

I have so many issues with this. The fact they would purposely stop a small percentage of users keeping their laptops useful for a greater period of time, its beyond me. Are they hoping to push planned obsolence on us in this way? They hoping these people would run out and buy a 2014 rMBP?

They can, and do, go out of their way to screw us over for a few dollars. Ironically the old "You will know them by their fruit" quote fits Apple perfectly.
 
This is all to do with not allowing the Mac Mini to compete with the Mac Pro.
It's a cynical move by Apple in the face of customers' wishes.
Apple's cool is evaporating.
 
AdonisSMU said:
No one in my family has ever had a Windows Machine last for more than a year. I would bet that Apple considered the scenario you presented already and still decided that this mini release was more important given their future plans if any for the mini.
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I don't know which computer they bought, but i guess it wasn't a good one.
My wife bought her dell xps15 laptop 3 years ago, and it will outperform the new Mac Mini with its i7 quad core processor. That's exactly the thing - when you buy a computer, you don't want to replace it every year. You shouldn't. When you buy a computer, what you should get is a product that will last for 4-5 years at least, and will perform good on the tasks you usually do today. A dual core computer will probably be ok for 2-3 years, but it wouldn't last as much as it should as a main desktop computer at home. You know what, my mid 2012 rMBP is two year old, and it is still powerful than most computers out there. I don't even see the beginning of its end. I don't see a reason why it wouldn't last for another 3 years. It is still way more powerful than the new Mac Mini.
 
flat five said:
huh? clock speed is way more important for many (most) professional (and nonprofessional) apps.. it's definitely the thing that's going to make your time physically sitting at the computer go by more efficiently..

the part of the workload that can max out all cores- well, you're doing other things during those times.. like sleeping.

----------



it's not necessarily that they aren't multithreaded 'very well'... it's that most processes can't run in parallel.. multicore is moreorless a myth which happened when the clock race stopped.

a single 24ghz cpu is a zillion times better than 8@3
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Not for audio apps like Pro Tools. A Mini with 4-cores @2Ghz would be more useful for mixing than a dual-core @3Ghz imao. It utilizes all of the cores
 
flat five said:
ok.. if you say so.

but you at least have to realize you're talking to people that also use computers.. for me personally, i use 3.. a 2core laptop, a quad, and a 6core computer.. and i'm telling you, there is no difference with those three when browsing email.

maybe i'm not power_using mail.app or something? i'm not a serious enough emailer to notice the effects of more cores?
Click to expand...

You have 3 computers, with 2, 4, and 6 cores and you don't notice the difference? What are you doing with them?
 
I prefer a low-power SoC but useful for my daily tasks (browsing, mail, watching streams and YouTube content, multimedia and some low-power games).

And like i said in other threads, i would go to base version without extras. Its good for my needs, OSX is efficient, and its a silent computer with fresh thermal dissipation and low-power consumption, which i don't need to power-off all time.

For who needs more from CPU, i seriously suggest waiting some several time for new Intel chips or go to another solutions, with or without OSX.
Its sad not having quad-cores and more said the no-friendly RAM upgrade.
 
I guess the REAL question might be...

...how many of us have wished that Apple would have just left the thing alone rather than replace a very capable machine with something slower and less accessible, albeit cheaper? It's a backward step. All together now: "Steve wouldn't have..."
 
If they had reduced the mini in size by half then we wouldn't really be overly bothered. However, it's in the same case that supported quad cores. So people are rightfully miffed, especially when the faster quad core haswell chips are cheaper than the ultra low power dual cores intended for ultrabooks.
 
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