Apple Introduces New MacBook Air and Mac Mini

[8ankH]

Well guys, I just placed my order for a Mini. Fully loaded, except for the RAM, which I'll upgrade myself. I'll be getting an eGPU enclosure asap and tossing the RX580 in it.

I don't think this is the end for me here though, as I'm a tinkerer, and I love being a part of this community. I can't believe how much I've learned from everyone here...It's actually astonishing.

I'm in the same boat. my hack is six or seven years old and starting to wear. I've had a few issues with it but have always managed to get it back up and running. I'm not racing on the order, might wait for refurbs, but I think this will be a solid upgrade and within reason to what I spent originally on my hackintosh.

 

[b.kind]

I'm in the same boat. my hack is six or seven years old and starting to wear. I've had a few issues with it but have always managed to get it back up and running. I'm not racing on the order, might wait for refurbs, but I think this will be a solid upgrade and within reason to what I spent originally on my hackintosh.

I recommend waiting for the user reviews. It's only a week.
ifixit.com will have a great teardown.

You never can tell what they Apple do.
I mean, they once had the perfect laptop keyboard design.
Who would ever have guessed that they would mess it up?

I expect the new minis to run hotter.
Supposedly using regular chips, not mobile chips from the MBPs.
Apple says "don't worry, we fixed the airflow".
OK. We'll see.

 

[davidbryne]

I’m most excited about working on a new build that will have native coffee lake support for the smbios.

How long will it be for clover to add these new machines as new options for smbios? With intel 8xxx and amd gpu, is this the closest we can get to native Mac with Hackintosh in 2018? That’s exciting to me.

 

[xmark]

When I saw the Mini reveal the other night ... I was desirous of one, but not the price.

I recently built my hack on 8th-Gen i5 and a Z370N WiFi board ... and with 10.14.1 the glitches I had seem to be fixed. This is very good. I basically have the new Mac Mini.

I used the 18.1 Smbios def so the iMac model is not right, but now the processor is correctly identified. Everything is sweet!

Yes, re: the T2, it seems that they'll cut off the Hackintosh option. I'll keep installing upgrades until that happens!

 

[ed_co]

I am wondering what is the chipset that Mac mini has... h370?

 

[BjornSkjaerpe]

When I built my first hack, the reason I sold my Mac mini was it couldn’t handle quad displays. Today, I’m using quad 4k.

Hey AnAppleADay, how do you use your 4 displays? My current setup is 3 (one Apple Cinema 27 + two 24" Dells in vertical format on the left and right sides), and I tried four, but I found I didn't use 4th display at all. Maybe if place it below the cinema, would be a place there, but I don't really need it. Just curious, maybe you found a usage for it. I do video editing, coding, it's super comfortable. Even regular usage is comfortable as well.

 

[BjornSkjaerpe]

I'm speculating out of my ass.. but Apple is going forward with Apple-chip-Hybrid-Intel for the immediate future, and obviously back-support the older standard intel hardware. But your concerns are starting to add weight as it appears Apple is leveraging more controls in their low-power T2 chips. For the Apple customer, this is a benefit. For the hackintosh scene - immediately not a problem.. but.. who knows? I'd say they'd need a good few years of T2(and whatever succeeds it) in all products to drop intel-only macOS support. macOS 10.18 maybe? They have set the precedent in the past for dropping old hardware (32bit EFI GPU, non-metal-compatible GPU's).

My two extra cents would be that there must be hacks, say, installing the T2 out of the broken Mac mini or something. Not sure, maybe that’s a very difficult task to do and not for everyone. I think the end of our era will be when Apple will go their own homebrewed processors, so there won’t be an alternative.

Also it's clear they create a huge mechanism for recycling (very good for the planet), so in that paradigm they will advertise it as ‘don’t be worried over the upgrading every single year, we’ll recycle everything back again, giving you the very best† of the hardware every time’.

† I think it’s a very clever business move to buy outdated 8th generation, so they can be one step behind, winning themselves extra margins for cheaper (last generation) processors.

 

[BjornSkjaerpe]

You know, we've all mentioned the high price of the new Mac Mini here, but it has just occurred to me, hey it's cheaper than most new iPhones! And seriously, I like iPhones but if push came to shove I'd prefer an Apple desktop to an Apple mobile phone.

Yeah, recently dawned on me as well, in $1,000+ iPhones times a modern desktop computer in an extra small size (and extra small footprint for power usage, keeping horsepower in mind)… feels like a joke, no way, at least ‘almost as an iPhone’!

 

[pastrychef]

† I think it’s a very clever business move to buy outdated 8th generation, so they can be one step behind, winning themselves extra margins for cheaper (last generation) processors.

I don't think using 8th gen CPUs has anything to do with margins. The added costs would just be passed on to the consumers anyway.

The fact is, there's no way the 9th gen CPUs can be adequately cooled in a Mac Mini. All 3 CPUs are 95W TDP and that's a very conservative figure.

 

[trs96]

The fact is, there's no way the 9th gen CPUs can be adequately cooled in a Mac Mini. All 3 CPUs are 95W TDP and that's a very conservative figure.

I'm just happy they finally switched to desktop CPUs.