I was explaining why I bought a Mac Mini, a desktop, and not a laptop, and that I am not "...significantly more tech savvy, and are very unlikely to not be able to understand the difference between an M6 and an M5 Pro, and not know which one is right for them." Oh, and did I mention how much I hate laptops?
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Next Mac Mini Will Reportedly Have Mismatched M6 and M5 Pro Chips
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I was explaining why I bought a Mac Mini, a desktop, and not a laptop, and that I am not "...significantly more tech savvy, and are very unlikely to not be able to understand the difference between an M6 and an M5 Pro, and not know which one is right for them." Oh, and did I mention how much I hate laptops?
Tagbert
macrumors 604
I recently bought a 2018 intel mini as a file and backup server and to run some VMs that I don’t want to fill up my laptop with.
BC2009
macrumors 68020
true story… in 1990 or 1991 my high school purchased a bunch of Mac II FX desktops for a computer lab. they retailed at close to $10,000 each. adjust for inflation and macs are downright cheap today. they used to be incredibly unaffordable. only the monochrome mac SE and mac SE 30 were vaguely affordable.
go ahead and google “what was the retail price of the macintosh II FX in 1990”
UPDATE: these were the days when Apple would give Apple IIe computers to schools for free so I am pretty sure the school did not pay anywhere close to retail price for those computers if anything at all.
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Electronics are significantly cheaper, inflation adjusted, than decades ago. But housing costs, both to buy and rent, have far outstripped inflation.
Boil
macrumors 68040
Except you are literally posting this comment on a Mac rumors website on an article about speculation for the next 18 months of Mac computers.
Rather you’d like to admit it or not, that’s not something people who aren’t tech savvy do.
The lead times are three months, but if you actually order one it can be a lot shorter, perhaps depending on the configuration; my parents' M4 Pro (14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 24GB unified memory and 1TB SSD storage) arrived less than three weeks after the order went in.
Avenged110
macrumors 6502a
Interesting, that's encouraging to hear. I just ordered a 14-core/24GB/512GB/10Gbps model last week and Apple told me it would arrive around the middle of October.
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
Third party memory? I'm sure if you hunted it down, you could buy it, but realistically, what would you do with the chips when you bought them?
Unless you have both the proper equipment and the proper expertise, I don't think it's advisable to detach the memory chips and solder on the new chips, expecting it to be comparable to slotting out and in RAM modules.
It's not a viable solution to the majority of Mac mini and Mac Studio owners. Even with storage, it's the realm of YouTubers to recommended open up a Mini or Studio and swopping in a third party storage module - it's the Mac fanboy equivalent ion watching cookery programmes, not cooking itself.
Get a thunderbolt or USB4 external enclosure for storage. It is less expensive and the user is far less likely to damage their Mac.
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
As do I.
But the payoff is performance and reliability. ( for the user ).
I love opening up machines, cleaning, modifying and repairing them. But I've ended up dividing machines into work machines and hobby machines.
From the point of a hobbyist, my Mac mini M2 Pro and Mac Studio M2 Max are the most mindnumbingly boring Macs I've ver owned. I've never opened them up because there's no reason to. But they're work machines and very, very reliable.
My favourite Macs hands-down are my Mac Pro 5,1 and MacBook Pro 2009, especially t he 5,1, for the amount of reconfuginf and repurposing, and general tinkering you can do with them. On the flip side though, for business use, I very glad I'm not relying on them anymore as daily machines to earn my income.
Pros and cons of both. But simply, I don't need work machines to be interesting (Although it'd be fun if they were). And I end up buying older Apple gear cheap second-hand, often broken, and Frankenstein them back into life or just I can play with.
Using a car analogy. You could buy a vintage Jaguar, and it'd be a thing of beauty, and you could spend hours a week getting it just right. But it'd be a pain to rely on it for daily transport. For going to the supermarket, you want a boring, reliable, fuel-efficient vehicle
The current state of the tech industry really annoys me, as the price of SSDs and even spinning disk hard drives have also gone through the roof, so I can pick up cheap Macs to play with, but I can't afford to source upgraded internals inti them. :-(
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
Yeah, this is the downside of the M* naming scheme. In a way, having less "consumer friendly" designations for chips ( as intel did and does ) avoids people getting hung up simply on branding.
People just want the higher number, irrespective of whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
To give an example, on many metrics, an M4 chip and an M2 Pro chip will give you the sam performance. So the M5 Pro chip will be more powerful than the M6 chip.
But people will say "yuk, older generation". But say, if they just renamed the M5 pro chip as the MXX 5000 chip, wierdly, people would be happier.
It's nothing to do with actual real-world use, it's simply that people want "number go up" an higher synthetic benchmarks scores, irrespective of what they use those chips for.
UrfinJuice
macrumors newbie
Very true. My parents wanted an M4 Pro just because; my argument that for their use case an M4 would be more than sufficient and would likely last them many years was unsuccessful. Human nature I guess; there is a reason the marketing and nomenclature work.
Things happen for reasons & things change in a year.
If I recall correctly, the 13" Core 2 Duo used a NVIDIA chipset with the GPU integrated into the northbridge. That was faster than the Intel integrated graphics on the original Core i series (which killed off support for third party chipsets). The 15" MBPs had discrete NVIDIA GPUs and benefitted from the Core i. Of course, those NVIDIA chipsets never saw an update becuase Core i killed them, so, a year or so down the line, things were different.
Except even third party SSD modules cost a fortune now so it's not really feasible to upgrade them anymore.
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
They can't, unless they want to delay release of all new varients of the new generation of chip by almost a year: TMSC does not magically produce chips on order instantaneously.
They stagger the release of products with the new generation of chip because they literally do not have enough either of each variants and of all variants.
Like it or not, Apple is dependant on TMSC's timeline.
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
Yep, Intel Mac minis are getting cheap, and, for a "headless" small server, they're perfect. They also offer far more possibility for user upgrading.
Just because AS Macs are great as laptops and desktops, there's no reason to overlook Intel Macs as an affordable solution for these types of use cases.
switz
Contributor
I had one of those $10,000+ IIfx units back in the early 1990s. My Adobe Photoshop version 1.3 was on several 3.5" Apple discs. The Radion color monitor took two people to carry it and of course there was a Radion interface card plugged into the the IIfx backplane. This was quite the powerhouse in the day.
TouchMint.com
macrumors 68000
CWallace
macrumors G5
I agree that I think Apple is going to be "wafer constrained" for this first round of 2nm production. From what I have read, NVidia is getting the largest share of wafers so makes sense to me that Apple would prioritize A20 production for iPhones and M6 for iPad Pros, (base) MacBook Pro and Mac mini since it takes up less die space than the Pro and Max SoCs.
Accidental Tech Podcast mentioned they heard from an anonymous source that the chiplet architecture that the M6 Pro and M6 Max would use (and as introduced with the M5 Pro and M5 Max) was experiencing fabrication issues, so Apple decided they did not want to risk wasting any of their wafers and instead push that to M7 (when both the fabrication yields should be better and because M7 has internal updates that benefit Pro and Max workloads).
Happy_John
macrumors 68000
It doesn’t, but it also doesn’t play to Apple’s technical strengths.
Apple have gotten good at building iPhone logic boards, and they brought that expertise to iPads and then Macs.
Yes, it’s profit driven, but the non-upgradable machines that Apple now builds are impressive, in terms of efficiency and performance. And some of that edge envy and performances comes from their design and building SoCs on non-upgradable logic boards.
Same thing with an iMac. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to benchmark an M6 chip with a base 15-core M5 Pro.
Populus
macrumors 604
I’ll have to agree with all the people who said that the next Mac mini would come with the M6 instead…
However, I expect them to release an M7 & M7 Pro Mac mini eventually.
Even though I’ve already bought a specced up MacBook Air, I don’t discard getting an M7 Mac mini eventually…
However, I expect them to release an M7 & M7 Pro Mac mini eventually.
Even though I’ve already bought a specced up MacBook Air, I don’t discard getting an M7 Mac mini eventually…
I’d guess the M6 edges it out by 10-20% in raw CPU speed thanks to the 2nm process and higher memory bandwidth (up to 200 GB/s versus the M5’s 153), but the M5 Pro’s extra cores and higher power budget i could keep it ahead in sustained multi-core tasks. For GPU or heavy AI work, the M6 might pull further ahead with its redesigned graphics, though.
The M6 could make the base model punch above its weight in single core and power-limited stuff, but the M5 Pro’s extra cores and higher TDP give it the edge in sustained multi-core or GPU heavy work.
Based on rumors, the M7 is what Apple is working in to blow both of these away in every aspect.