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New Apple Silicon Macs for 2021: Redesigned iMac and a Mac Pro mini

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pastrychef said:
When I put together my NAS a few years ago, I went with a CPU with a TDP of 15W. Even by today's standards, that's pretty efficient and it serves as my Plex server just fine.

If the hardware your current NAS is running on is very power hungry, it may be a good plan.
Click to expand...

It's not so much a power thing for me, as opening up other options beyond Plex.

If I were running Plex and my RAID setup on macOS, it'd be trivial to do backblaze cloud backup of some of the key things I have on my FreeNAS.

Remote file access would also be much simpler.

I could also setup a permanent family share of my iTunes library there.
 
trs96 said:
There were some very steep discounts on these last December, as much as $300 off retail. I'm sure we'll even see bigger discounts later on. They still work OK for general use like internet surfing and email, chat etc. That's about it.
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Yeah, it's just a tough sell on the lower end in particular.

Compared to a pre-owned/refurb/EDU base M1 MBA (for like $850-900), an Intel one would have to be like $400 to even peak my interest, particularly if one wants to keep it for many years and have great support.

Intel + Apple is all well and fine at the moment, but 6 years from now?
By then I'd bet these initial M1 MBA's are doing just fine and fully supported and the Intel's are stuck on an older macOS.
 
TurbineSeaplane said:
Yeah, it's just a tough sell on the lower end in particular.

Compared to a pre-owned/refurb/EDU base M1 MBA (for like $850-900), an Intel one would have to be like $400 to even peak my interest, particularly if one wants to keep it for many years and have great support.

Intel + Apple is all well and fine at the moment, but 6 years from now?
By then I'd bet these initial M1 MBA's are doing just fine and fully supported and the Intel's are stuck on an older macOS.
Click to expand...

My problem with the current M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is RAM. On one of my hackbooks, even with 16GB, I see a lot of paging and I hate that.

There's no way I can live with a MacBook with just 16GB of RAM for long.
 
pastrychef said:
My problem with the current M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is RAM. On one of my hackbooks, even with 16GB, I see a lot of paging and I hate that.

There's no way I can live with a MacBook with just 16GB of RAM for long.
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It's interesting.
I have to say I've not done anything on the in-house M1 MBA or the M1 Mini I had for a couple weeks that made me even notice RAM limitations (and I wasn't even on 16GB).

I do share your general concern about it though.
I'm not really sure if I should or not?
 
What they do with the iMac I think is going to be SO indicative of the future overall.

If they go all in on in-house GPUs, up and down the iMac line...

It's massive "get out" time, especially for Hack folks, but really for all Intel Mac people (that care about value of their hardware and options and being on the latest, etc).

I say that because if all that's left on dGPUs is the Mac Pro, it's scary. The type of roll their own GPU integration they might do on the very high end niche (Mac Pro) could very easily exclude anything the Hack user base could take advantage of.

Also, with how ASi is looking so far, I won't be surprised at all if that 2019 Mac Pro never gets updated.
Everyone says that's a crazy take, but I think it's very in character for Apple.

When they got focused on the new hotness, they move to it faster than anticipated.
 
TurbineSeaplane said:
It's interesting.
I have to say I've not done anything on the in-house M1 MBA or the M1 Mini I had for a couple weeks that made me even notice RAM limitations (and I wasn't even on 16GB).

I do share your general concern about it though.
I'm not really sure if I should or not?
Click to expand...

Some of it is my own fault... I have a tendency to not do any reboots until there's a macOS update and the longer my systems stay on, the more RAM they seem to chew up.



TurbineSeaplane said:
What they do with the iMac I think is going to be SO indicative of the future overall.

If they go all in on in-house GPUs, up and down the iMac line...

It's massive "get out" time, especially for Hack folks, but really for all Intel Mac people (that care about value of their hardware and options and being on the latest, etc).

I say that because if all that's left on dGPUs is the Mac Pro, it's scary. The type of roll their own GPU integration they might do on the very high end niche (Mac Pro) could very easily exclude anything the Hack user base could take advantage of.

Also, with how ASi is looking so far, I won't be surprised at all if that 2019 Mac Pro never gets updated.
Everyone says that's a crazy take, but I think it's very in character for Apple.

When they got focused on the new hotness, they move to it faster than anticipated.
Click to expand...

My guess is that they will be going it all alone and I feel pretty strongly about this.

Even in the current M1, GPU performance is already on par with RX 560. That's pretty impressive for a chip designed to go in mobile systems. Without the space, power, and heat limitations of a laptop, Apple can easily scale up.

Also, Apple has a new deal with Imagination Technologies...
venturebeat.com

Apple’s Imagination Technologies deal is all about ray tracing and AR

Apple and GPU designer Imagination Technologies forged a mysterious new multi-year agreement, almost certainly to bring ray tracing to Apple devices.
venturebeat.com venturebeat.com
 
Well - I've taken step one of enacting my plan.

I bought one of those Apple refurb M1 Mini's (base model).

It will arrive tomorrow.
 
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