The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming

[masterbaron]

Macrumors keeps showing this photo. Maybe it's the new Mac Mini, to be dual external CPU powered - just connect your iPhone and iPad.

No... No ... No - that's the new modular MacPro for $5000 - fan-less - head-less - gpu-less for more or less!

"Apple knows a thing or two - because they've removed a thing or two!"

 

[navaira]

COURAGE.

(Starting at $1999 with 2xA11 CPUs and 2 GB RAM)

 

[masterbaron]

Everywhere you look ... things are being made more (for lack of a better word) superficial, as in another layer of interface that is more basic, composite and more of a covering like your car bumper - not really good at doing what it was supposed to do but looking a lot cooler at doing nothing. Access to parts is a diminishing attribute especially where electronic components are involved - things are being unitized under a chip and made inaccessible by hand and only reachable through code - in turn, manufacturers are obliged to remove access all together ... computers and cars (computers on wheels) are prime for this as there are so many parts that are interdependent at some level.

"Things are a changin" and the "old head" approach is relegated to niche and hobby and very costly to feed. Unless you can code the chip you won't be tweaking much at all going forward - so, high hopes for Apple modularity because that will be your tweak as time goes by.

Further down the road access to many things and functions will be delved by some robotic, AI or AR interface so at long last we can sit back and become blobs totally incapable of dexterity and motivation.

I feel better already!
[doublepost=1526170222][/doublepost]It's a rainy Saturday nite here .. I'm going to go off-topic yet again ... I'm always touting "just stay legacy if you want it to continue working" -

this week I needed to scan a doc for my wife ... nooo problem I told her .. slam the top down on the platen - push scan - set destination and no Mac anywhere to be seen.

turns out ... 10.13.4 breaks Canon software with no planned upgrade from Canon - "No longer supported" this fine multi-function printer is now 1/3 useless .... could it be the transition to 64-bit will destroy the rest of my kingdom?

This process has become a process of self--ucking and I know it now. I keep telling myself - when you bought electronic gear in the past it did the same things the last day it worked that it did the first day and life was wonderful.

Stop The Madness!!

Conversely ... I couldn't believe it - you can buy a damn good mf-printer for under $100.00 - let's see that's how many ink cartridges and how many calls to customer support?

 

[Easttime]

I suppose everybody has seen this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/1...ably-getting-trounced-by-cheap-intel-hardware

Still loving my 2014 Mini. It’s my daily desktop. Perfectly adequate, though I would be happy with an upgrade. Love the peripherals flexibility.

 

[sublunar]

Everywhere you look ... things are being made more (for lack of a better word) superficial, as in another layer of interface that is more basic, composite and more of a covering like your car bumper - not really good at doing what it was supposed to do but looking a lot cooler at doing nothing. Access to parts is a diminishing attribute especially where electronic components are involved - things are being unitized under a chip and made inaccessible by hand and only reachable through code - in turn, manufacturers are obliged to remove access all together ... computers and cars (computers on wheels) are prime for this as there are so many parts that are interdependent at some level.

"Things are a changin" and the "old head" approach is relegated to niche and hobby and very costly to feed. Unless you can code the chip you won't be tweaking much at all going forward - so, high hopes for Apple modularity because that will be your tweak as time goes by.

Further down the road access to many things and functions will be delved by some robotic, AI or AR interface so at long last we can sit back and become blobs totally incapable of dexterity and motivation.

I feel better already!
[doublepost=1526170222][/doublepost]It's a rainy Saturday nite here .. I'm going to go off-topic yet again ... I'm always touting "just stay legacy if you want it to continue working" -

this week I needed to scan a doc for my wife ... nooo problem I told her .. slam the top down on the platen - push scan - set destination and no Mac anywhere to be seen.

turns out ... 10.13.4 breaks Canon software with no planned upgrade from Canon - "No longer supported" this fine multi-function printer is now 1/3 useless .... could it be the transition to 64-bit will destroy the rest of my kingdom?

This process has become a process of self--ucking and I know it now. I keep telling myself - when you bought electronic gear in the past it did the same things the last day it worked that it did the first day and life was wonderful.

Stop The Madness!!

Conversely ... I couldn't believe it - you can buy a damn good mf-printer for under $100.00 - let's see that's how many ink cartridges and how many calls to customer support?

Doesn't Image Capture work? I had that problem with an Epson Scanner.
[doublepost=1526208681][/doublepost]

I suppose everybody has seen this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/1...ably-getting-trounced-by-cheap-intel-hardware

Still loving my 2014 Mini. It’s my daily desktop. Perfectly adequate, though I would be happy with an upgrade. Love the peripherals flexibility.

I think at the moment on the basis of the old 2014 philosophy of just one motherboard (and CPU socket) for the entire range Apple have to decide between 15w CPU or 28w CPU across the board. And it has to be something that Apple can gain economy of scale off.

The 15w choice is probably the quad core i5-8250u but that's yet to end up in anything else. The lowest SKU iMac currently carries an i5-7260u CPU from the MacBook Pro 13" non touch bar (with Iris Plus Graphics 640) which doesn't currently have a Coffee Lake equivalent. If Apple were going to use that they would have given us a 2017 Mini last June when the MacBook Pros came out.

The 28w choice would be the i5-8259u with Iris Plus Graphics 655 but that's likely to go into the Touch Bar MacBook Pro 13" making a low end Mac Mini very difficult to achieve.

If Apple were splitting the difference they'd use the i3-8109u on the assumption that the 2018 non touch bar MacBook Pro 13" continues with that CPU and there's no i5 15w Iris Plus Graphics planned going forward.

That i3 is 28w with good Iris Plus Graphics 655, but not as many cores as the Touch Bar MacBook Pro would get - just 2 cores, 4 threads but with a base frequency of 3GHz.

Headless Mac Mini users would conceivably get a unit they could plug into an eGPU for graphics performance without threatening any iMac. If they wanted to allow soldered on DDR4-2400 RAM the Mini could achieve 32Gb RAM too.

 

[masterbaron]

Doesn't Image Capture work? I had that problem with an Epson Scanner.

Thanks - tried that ... the "scan" button remains unhighlighted so ... no it doesn't work either. It's loathsome because they also have a separate scan utility that also does not include the MX860 which has been great for almost 9-years ... when I consider that $100-$180 isn't bad for a replacement the same thing will happen in 5 years from now.

 

[Count Blah]

There are a couple simple facts that we have to be aware of, when it comes to the sea of perfectly usable CPUs, when it comes to Apple’s decisions...

• Apple doesn’t care about advancing the mini
• Tim will favor higher margins over satisfying the customer
• Tim is a slave to the supply chain philosophy
• The RICHEST company in the world, under Tim, will not branch out from a single motherboard, for the lowly mini
• The mini will NEVER take away a sale of a single MBP, iMac, MP after the disaster(in Apple’s mind) of the quad core 2012 Mini
• The mini must be kept in line with the power of a MP or MBAir, lest it lose sales of a higher margin Macs
• TB3 Mini would definitely impact the sales of iMacs, so is their any wonder that they are absent from the lineup

That’s just shooting from the hip, but it perfectly explains exactly what we’ve seen for the last 4 years

 

[masterbaron]

The mini will NEVER take away a sale of a single MBP, iMac, MP after the disaster(in Apple’s mind) of the quad core 2012 Mini

That's it exactly... it was an efficient spin-off that eclipsed Apple's new mantra under Tim - our gain was their loss - so now they want you to forget that. They will almost certainly eliminate the Mini concept and invoke modularity in the new MacPro that will eclipse our budgets.

 

[Partron22]

I paid near $2500 for my original Mac. It came with 128k ram.
That's like a zillion 2018 dollars.
Mac minis are cheap, even if they are all 5 years out of date.
When they come out I'll probably be able to get a Pro for around $2500, presuming I haven't given up on Apple in disgust by then.

 

[twalk]

There are a couple simple facts that we have to be aware of, when it comes to the sea of perfectly usable CPUs, when it comes to Apple’s decisions...

• Apple doesn’t care about advancing the mini
• Tim will favor higher margins over satisfying the customer
• Tim is a slave to the supply chain philosophy
• The RICHEST company in the world, under Tim, will not branch out from a single motherboard, for the lowly mini
• The mini will NEVER take away a sale of a single MBP, iMac, MP after the disaster(in Apple’s mind) of the quad core 2012 Mini
• The mini must be kept in line with the power of a MP or MBAir, lest it lose sales of a higher margin Macs
• TB3 Mini would definitely impact the sales of iMacs, so is their any wonder that they are absent from the lineup

That’s just shooting from the hip, but it perfectly explains exactly what we’ve seen for the last 4 years

One big thing to add is the business strategy aspect. The situation in which you have an older, higher capability, more expensive, smaller customer base ecosystem Vs a newer, lower capability, less expensive, larger customer base, with significant capability overlap ecosystem is something that has been extensively studied. The real-world results show that you almost always push the new stuff heavily. With the older stuff you significantly cut expenses, reduce the product lineup, and milk it heavily for profit until the newer stuff can kill it off

Sound familiar? Also note that MS is also seeing this, because the CEO himself has recently said that Windows isn't #1 at MS anymore (it's now #4) and it's obvious that MS is cutting expenses in that area

What does this mean for the entire Mac lineup? Not much good, long term

So what does that mean for an ARM based Mac? No idea. That said, that kind of move has had very little success in the past, so I wouldn't bet any money on it. Why would Apple do it? When you have a still mostly fanatical customer base, you can sometimes pull this kind of thing off

 

[Boyd01]

I paid near $2500 for my original Mac. It came with 128k ram. That's like a zillion 2018 dollars.

What model was that? Sounds very expensive for a 128k Mac. I have the order form for my first Mac system right here, dated 11/5/1985. I got educational pricing because I was on the faculty at SUNY, but I think that only saved a few hundred dollars.

$1649.00 512k Macintosh M2512
$1014.00 Hard Disk 20 M2600
$ 437.50 Imagewriter II M2555

Including tax, that system cost me $3259.52 - phew! According to the government inflation calculator, that would be $7,462.63 today.... enough for a mid-range iMac Pro I guess, but the system above was the best that Apple offered at that time.

But the original 128k Mac was only $1475 on that order form. That would be $3,376.99, adjusted for inflation.... Falls a little short of "like a zillion 2018 dollars".

 

[Partron22]

What model was that?

Original Macintosh, retail. Bought on about day three after they came out. No student discounts back then.
I did get $800 or so for my Apple III trade in.
Within I week I broke the warranty by upgrading Ram to 512K. That made copying the 400K disks a lot easier.

If you'd waited a couple months, you could've bought a Mac Plus for $2599, minus student discount. It came with 800K disk drives and a MB of RAM.

 

[Boyd01]

If you'd waited a couple months, you could've bought a Mac Plus for $2599, minus student discount.

Yeah, we got one for the office. But I was quite happy with my 512 and hard drive. I sent it back to Apple and got it upgraded to a "512k enhanced" (512ke). I don't recall the specifics, but I think it had something to do with supporting the external hard drive. I stayed with that system until I got a Mac IIcx which was quite expensive. I had to get the Apple monochrome monitor because I couldn't afford the color one!

Again, if I had waited a little longer I could have gotten a Mac IIci which was even faster. But that is pretty much always the case with Macs (except for the mini).

 

[jasnw]

Thanks - tried that ... the "scan" button remains unhighlighted so ... no it doesn't work either. It's loathsome because they also have a separate scan utility that also does not include the MX860 which has been great for almost 9-years ... when I consider that $100-$180 isn't bad for a replacement the same thing will happen in 5 years from now.

I'm in exactly the same place with an MX860. Works fine, but it's driven by a 32bit app which won't be updated to 64bit by Canon. Yes, I can buy a replacement, a less-well-built replacement, but WHY? Just because Apple decides that 32bit apps put a harsh on their mellow? I haven't seen any explanation that's more substantive than that for why 32bit apps are being dropped, or de-efficientized, or whatever is going to happen to them post-HS.

 

[Boyd01]

This just seems like business as usual to me. I have about $6,000 worth of legacy software for CAD, 3d modelling, video, etc. and it doesn't work properly with newer versions of MacOS. I'm retired now and it wouldn't make sense to replace all that software, although I still need it from time to time. That's why I kept 10.8.5 installed on the internal SSD of my 2012 quad mini (with Sierra on a 1tb external SSD). The old software still works fine this way. If your scanner is so important, you could do the same thing (or just don't upgrade to the newest OS).

 

[masterbaron]

This is just one of those crossing points but since a mfp is low-cost we can make excuses for not saying "NO!!"

The same debacle awaits for more expensive and personalized investments - being pushed along vs taking strides when we decide. The whole "cult" mentality is at play here and gone are the days when you had a plethora of choices for how to customize your rig - in essence the same control over desktop software customization has been transferred to hardware customization ... your choices are seriously limited now vs in the past.

All of these moves across product-lines minimize cost, inventory and software roll-out considerations. If I were a stockholder ... now that the "thrill" is gone let's make mad money!
[doublepost=1526239648][/doublepost]

This just seems like business as usual to me.

The true definition of "old head" ... sure you're right and that's the thing ... at a time when the turntable is returning and tube amps have never left ... we can't seem to garner the same satisfaction with computers ... but you know what ... we have - the 2012 Mini as an example of "proud legacy" that still rocks in my house ... as long as I can quickly ramp-on and off the web - rock my music - design my website and watch terrible movies I'm good!

But in truth, a silo'd system makes perfect sense.

 

[Partron22]

it's driven by a 32bit app which won't be updated to 64bit by Canon.

I finally got so annoyed with Canon support, that I bought an Epson. Current drivers for Mac and Win (latest vers). Haven't looked for Linux yet, but I'm so glad to have gotten away from scanning under 10.8.5, then X-ferring to a real Mac. Not all the software is up to 64 bit yet, but I can scan 64, and it looks like dev is current on the OCR etc.

 

[toke lahti]

I'm in exactly the same place with an MX860. Works fine, but it's driven by a 32bit app which won't be updated to 64bit by Canon. Yes, I can buy a replacement, a less-well-built replacement, but WHY? Just because Apple decides that 32bit apps put a harsh on their mellow? I haven't seen any explanation that's more substantive than that for why 32bit apps are being dropped, or de-efficientized, or whatever is going to happen to them post-HS.

I use my old epson AIO with virtual box & 10.6.
I was waiting for decent priced A3 scanner with photo scan quality on par with my over a decade old AIO, 2400dpi & good Dmax. Another thing that will never come. I’m pretty sad that you can get mediocre brother AIO with A3 scanner with a fraction of price of any A3 scanner. I need to start looking some compact repro bed for dslr...

 

[malsan]

"...great ideas come from a restless refusal to accept things as they are, and those principles still guide us at Apple today," that is unless you are the Mac mini, and in that case, well, we think mid grade 2014 tech is all we can be bothered to do. Freaking visionary Tim.

 

[Boyd01]

at a time when the turntable is returning and tube amps have never left ... we can't seem to garner the same satisfaction with computers

Well there's always this if you want to run some of the original Mac apps in your browser https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_mac

 

[DesertSurfer]

Inaction speaks louder than words.

 

[DeepIn2U]

I paid near $2500 for my original Mac. It came with 128k ram.
That's like a zillion 2018 dollars.
Mac minis are cheap, even if they are all 5 years out of date.
When they come out I'll probably be able to get a Pro for around $2500, presuming I haven't given up on Apple in disgust by then.

I sincerely doubt you paid $2500US/CAN for the original Mac when it debuted. I was but 8yrs old then but I can honestly tell you computers started at a minimum $4-5K CAN at best deals. So you may have purchased your Mac about 3yrs or more later (1987-88; considering in 1984 the Macintosh didn't ship).
[doublepost=1526255080][/doublepost]BTW ... I'm not sure what the real joke is with Apple anymore ...

The mac mini or Siri?
Is the Mac Mini the joke and Siri the punchline to us the Apple user/fan?

 

[Partron22]

Certainly not Can, US. You too young to remember? Introduced January 1984 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
I was out of grad school by 87. Got a Mac plus, then a IIci then a 7500. IMac in 99; one of the bulbous ones.

Likely Apple charged more in Canada, plus exchange rate.

 

[Santabean2000]

I sincerely doubt you paid $2500US/CAN for the original Mac when it debuted. I was but 8yrs old then but I can honestly tell you computers started at a minimum $4-5K CAN at best deals. So you may have purchased your Mac about 3yrs or more later (1987-88; considering in 1984 the Macintosh didn't ship).
[doublepost=1526255080][/doublepost]BTW ... I'm not sure what the real joke is with Apple anymore ...

The mac mini or Siri?
Is the Mac Mini the joke and Siri the punchline to us the Apple user/fan?

The joke. Yes. If only it were funny...

I love the mini. Had an '09 mini. Then the 2011 with dGPU (which just died some ways back...). Holding on to my 2012 dual core, (damn, should have bought the quad!), until the end. [I have a home brew fusion setup, (500 GB SSD + 2Tb HDD). Should be ok for some time yet. Hopefully...]

 

[JoeG4]

Thanks - tried that ... the "scan" button remains unhighlighted so ... no it doesn't work either. It's loathsome because they also have a separate scan utility that also does not include the MX860 which has been great for almost 9-years ... when I consider that $100-$180 isn't bad for a replacement the same thing will happen in 5 years from now.

*high fives* I also have an MX860 and I forgot when exactly I bought it! .. except that I traded in a similarly ancient Canon for it. A friend of mine bought the model that replaced it, and it was a dud after a couple of years. Apparently they cheaped out on those machines and haven't made one of the same quality since.

Sounds about right to me. I got a free printer with a computer I bought my brother and I replaced the MX860 with it when I ran out of ink for the MX860. About 2 years later, when I was about to throw out the MX860, the newer printer broke... so I put the MX860 back into operation lol.

So my MX860 outlived its replacement. Fantastic printer.