Yes, that's a good option to go down this route "Hackintoshes" with PC hardware - cheaper and easy to replace the parts when required.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac mini 2018 Reviews Roundup: Long-Awaited Update Should Impress Fans and Pro Users, But Upgrade Options Can Get Pricey
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes, that's a good option to go down this route "Hackintoshes" with PC hardware - cheaper and easy to replace the parts when required.
Intel is cutting edge? Really? Seriously? Carrying around the cruft of x86 compatibility like an albatross around their necks. Their greatest asset is also their greatest burden. It is also the stick that they beat Microsoft to death with in order to keep Windows from moving to something that would strangle Intel's profit to death. How I wish Microsoft had some courage right about now.
As for real cutting edge, Apple is shipping a 7nm SoC today, not promising 10nm for holiday 2019, maybe. AMD just announced their 7nm node today, along with Zen 2, EPYC Rome w/PCIe 4.0 and 7nm Vega Instinct GPUs while Intel continues to struggle over 10nm two years after it was promised, with all indications that it may actually never see the light of day, the Core i3-8121U not withstanding.
The same Intel that panicked after the debut and success of AMD's Ryzen and was forced to move up their timetable for adding cores to their consumer CPUs because the performance gains from new microarchitectures are now practically non-existent.
The same Intel that had to be brow beaten by Steve Jobs to really start considering performance per watt which lead to a mini-Renaissance for Intel and benefitted all personal computer users.
The same Intel that made its own GPU engineers lobby for space on the die in order to give us the Iris Pro Graphics 5200, an integrated GPU that could hold its own against the GeForce GT650M, a discrete GPU - https://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested - and then squandered that talent while it chases NVIDIA trying to keep them away from its juicy Enterprise customers.
The same Intel who with a seemingly endless portfolio of Xeon CPUs seems to be losing mindshare to AMD's EPYC.
The same Intel that is too stubborn to integrate an LPDDR4/x memory controller on its 14nm CPUs (at least mobile) leaving PC OEMs to use DDR4 and Apple twisting in the wind so much so that they had to relent and allow DDR4 on the 15" MacBook Pro motherboard to try and appease customers while Intel blew through their 10nm promises.
None of that sounds cutting edge to me, but I digress.
As for GPUs, you can have your NVIDIA GPUs...I dislike NVIDIA as a company and although I empathize with others who must use them day to day because of CUDA, that is as far as it goes for me. The 20x0-Series offers a modest increase (~20%) in performance over the 10x0-Series GPUs and that is great, but until developers embrace ray-tracing technology, it is all still a work in progress and leadership is subject to change hands on any given day.
I have in this 9" x 8" x 3" chassis an i5-7500, Geforce GTX1050Ti, 2.5" SSD plus a PCI-E slot for an NVMe drive. Max temp on CPU and GPU is low-60C's when stressed, 30-40C during normal use. It cost me $550 complete to put together. No it's not as pretty as the Mac Mini and it doesn't (natively) run MacOS, but please stop making excuses for Apple.
I don't use Mac often but always like to have one around. Obvious choice for me is to do hackintosh but I just don't like to fiddle with it when an update breaks something. I was going to buy the base new Mac Mini provided that I can install my own 2.5" drive in it. Sadly it doesn't look like it will be the case.
I'm going back to building my own PCs, it was always the case that Macs were a little overpriced, but now they're like 4 times over priced lol.
Technically everything is cheap inside part but incredible expensive outside of the finished product with the wow factor.
I'd consider that Apple is a pure luxury brand Only if the electronics parts were made in Japan.
If it was me, I'd go for the Razer Core X eGPU (£265) and the Vega 64 AMD card (£449). This combo would set you back £714 (in the UK). Not cheap, but when you consider the Blackmagic eGPU Pro is £1199, contains the lower end Vega 56 GPU and is not upgradeable, it would seem a bit of a bargain by comparison.
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/raz...8EJgrZvE16586uOnuihyhvfsSdFa728xoCUvoQAvD_BwE
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...hbm2-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-19n-gi.html
////////
How many feel 128 GB is just fine for a hard drive??? two usb.....the Stock Market investors are NOT impressed as the stock price is crashing since the announcement....Who needs Thunderbolt ports?? Very few people....not the mainstream of users...I will be keeping my Mac Mini..
How about they make them in the US? Stop pretending to be about the people, all they care about is max profits.
I guess I really should compare them by making it equal in that the Core i7/32GB DRAM/1TB SSD/10GbE would be the closer analog to the base iMac Pro and that BTO config would be $2,499.00, which is as you say, half the price of the base iMac Pro. You can get high quality third party DRAM and cut the cost down to $2149.00.
Outfitting the iMac Pro to match more closely (8-Core/64GB/2TB SSD/Vega 56 BTO), the iMac Pro would be $6,599.00, with the maxed out mini costing $4,199.00 which means the iMac Pro is 57% more expensive in the same relative configuration.
Well, I stand chastised thusly!!!
[doublepost=1541537365][/doublepost]
I am pretty sure that was the most ineloquent and ignorant thing I have seen posted here in quite a while, and I have seen some doozies.
------
You don't get it....all companies do everything to maximize profits, apple is not in business for you, they are in business for the stock holders...as is every company...that is the nature of Capitalism.
Except... The value is in the form factor, the tight integration between the software & hardware, and MacOS itself.
That's not innovation, that is expected evolution of a four year old product incorporating updates from other recent Macs. Only thing not a direct upgrade is that it uses a desktop class processor.
Apple wants to get things done cheaply as much possible to drive maximum profitability hence China is only the option they have. The US will be expensive due higher labour charged that’s the problems - I think with a clever business model I think it can be done in the USA.
I agree that if you’re going to go egpu and a 5k and all the other upgrades, the iMac pro probably makes more sense.
My point was more that there are a lot of uses for the mini where it can be optimised/configured for the task better than the iMac Pro (anything that isn’t graphics intensive really)
While I can appreciate the ask for less complaints, the Mac Mini has always been Apple’s low/lower end device. I think the minimal configuration certainly qualifies as a “budget” computer.
You are ignoring the opportunity cost. The time you spend doing that is time you can no longer use to do something else. so whether it is ridiculous or not depends on how long it takes you to make the swap yourself, and what your time is worth to you. For example... if the time u spend to swap (including time spent purchasing, swapping, etc) is three hours... then you are valuing your time at $10/hour. If there is anything at all else in the world that you would choose to do with your time that making that amount per hour, then it is a bad choice.
edit: I'm not saying someone making that choice is ridiculous... to each his own.
If you introduce a new form factor, yes, Apple could have done a lot of things differently to cater to different users such as yourself. My statement was framed within the context of the existing form factor - which has never featured a 65W TDP processor before.
My goal here is not to debate whether Apple should or shouldn't have done something from a marketing or sales point of view - that's above my pay grade. I'm just chiming in to clarify some of the engineering aspects.
If we keep the form factor constant, then I do take issue with the idea that Apple could have easily (translation: cheaply without significantly reducing margin and raising the noise floor) put even a middling dGPU in there without cutting cores.
If you are willing to sacrifice the 6-core beast for a lower clocked 4-core, then yes, the RX Vega M GL CPU would have been ideal for you. I was actually hoping the 2018 Mini refresh would feature the Vega M as an option myself. But I also would have been torn between it and the 6-core monster, so from a selfish POV I'm actually kind of glad they didn't offer the Vega M
--
As an aside, for those folks looking at the 2018 MBP with its dGPU and saying Apple could have done the same with the Mini - again, I don't want to argue over whether Apple should have changed the Mini's form factor or simply stuck the MBP configuration into the existing form factor. I just want to point out that putting the MBP's GPU AND the 6-core CPU that the i7 Mini has into the existing form factor is not a valid comparison - the 2018 MBP, besides having an 87W sustained total power budget (per its *external* power supply) does not run even remotely close to the max speed of the 45W TDP CPU with all cores loaded:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...les-firmware-update-led-to-a-big-improvement/
That's 3.5GHz all cores loaded with minimal GPU usage. The i7-8700 in the 2018 Mini should clock at 4.3GHz with all cores loaded assuming Apple follows Intel's default Turbo Boost 2.0 specifications (and there's no real reason to assume they wouldn't, certainly the preliminary Geekbench scores don't indicate otherwise).
--
TL;DR: I shed a short tear that the 2018 Mini doesn't have an RX Vega M option, then I quickly realized the 6-core option gives me even more future proofing until the next major refresh (i.e. when Intel finally gets to 10nm or Apple exits the x86 architecture altogether). Keep in mind ATI/AMD has yet to release any sort of counter for NVIDIA's new RTX GPUs.
And it's a market I don't think Apple should be going after. In business school parlance they called it "racing to the bottom." A company can choose to differentiate in different ways. One way is by price, and trying to underprice their competitors. One is by quality of product... offering something their competitors cannot offer. There are plenty of computer makers making rock-bottom price computers. But guess what, they’re making next to nothing in profit. I would personally much rather see them go after market share that’s more profitable, and allow them to do well so I can be confident that they’ll still exist five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. As a long-term ecosystem, I wanted to know they will still be there.
They're quoting Apple there. Apple doesn't consider the RAM to be user upgradable.
Wait for the iFixit tear down to see how difficult it is.
Not exactly. USB-C is the port / connector, Thunderbolt 3 is a protocol that uses the USB-C port.
However, all Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports are backwards compatible with USB 3.1.
For comparison, I built a comparable machine to the base Mac mini and ended up at $814.16 - https://pcpartpicker.com/user/ZDigital2018/saved/GLzCbv - none of the parts are exactly high end or custom as the Mac mini is, but it replicates the functionality as closely as possible to what Apple is providing to the user at $799.00.
Were you to upgrade your 2.5" SSD to an NVMe drive, you have about another $60 to your cost minus how much the 2.5" SSD cost you, but neither your SSD nor the NVMe drive I specced is as fast as what Apple provides. My build lacks three Thunderbolt 3 ports, yours lacks, well, all 4 of them. The Mac mini fully supports macOS, any of these PC builds needs a lot of TLC to run macOS and keep it running. I can think of at least 50 separate activities I would rather be doing than maintaining a Hackintosh every time a point release update drops from Apple.
We can play the "How cheap can we build a PC" all day, but at the end of the day, a decent Dell or HP (if there is such a thing) cost roughly the same for the equivalent specs as the Mac mini and a DIY build is going to be + or - $100 with an equivalent level of equipment and functionality. Sure, I can get a dGPU in there if I wait for a holiday or Black Friday, but its still a big tower that mostly just collects dust. And still runs Windows 10.
The last Core i3 (i3-6100) box I built with a dGPU (eVGA GTX960 FTW refurb), 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-3200 DRAM, NZXT Source 530, Corsair RM750x, Gigabyte Z170 Ultra Gaming and Samsung 850 EVO 512GB cost me about $750, but it still only runs Windows 10.
I am not making excuses for Apple...they sell what they sell at the price they sell it at, which you or I can choose to purchase or not, but at the end of the day, their prices are not as out of whack as people here think they are. Truth be told, there is a lot of wish fulfillment and fantasies about what Apple was going to introduce that was unrealistic, bordering on lunacy.
It is what it is...
I don’t think it’s as close as you propose. The iMac Pro has a 500W cooling system. The mini will be 65W at best. The iMac Pro uses workstation-class hardware in Xeon CPUs and ECC RAM. And while the mini thankfully has RAM slots again, it’s sounds like it’s a full tear-down to get to the slots.
While I don’t argue that what you propose is possible with the new mini, it is certainly not the normal market condition for this product. No, Apple still needs to provide a proper Mac Pro and not let its users take an elegant device and peripheral the heck out of it.