Archive for October 29, 2024

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Mac mini 2024

Apple today unveiled the all-new Mac mini powered by the M4 and new M4 Pro chips, and redesigned around Apple silicon to pack an incredible amount of performance into an even smaller form of just 5 by 5 inches.

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For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.

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Mac mini with M4 features a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and now starts with 16GB of unified memory.

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For users who want pro-level performance, Mac mini with M4 Pro features the world’s fastest CPU core with lightning-fast single-threaded performance. With up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, M4 Pro also provides phenomenal multithreaded performance. With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU in M4, and both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini for the first time. The Neural Engine in M4 Pro is also over 3x faster than in Mac mini with M1, so on-device Apple Intelligence models run at blazing speed. M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth — twice as much bandwidth as any AI PC chip — for accelerating AI workloads.

They kept HDMI but dropped a Thunderbolt port. The version with the Pro processor starts at $1,399 instead of $1,299 with the previous model, but it includes 24 GB of RAM, up from 16 GB.

Dan Moren (post):

Apparently you cannot spec the new M4 Pro Mac mini with 32GB of RAM—it’s the standard 24GB or you have to pay $400 to double that to 48GB? (I have 32GB on my M2 Pro Mac mini…so I’d have to downgrade or pay wayyyy more.)

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Since people always ask this: a base model Mac mini is a perfectly fine computer for developing iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro apps comfortably. I’ve never had to worry about performance or RAM usage on my M1 — it’s fast, stable, and reliable.
(But I also do not use Slack or Chrome, or any of the other worst offenders, so weigh that appropriately)

Jason Snell:

And keep in mind, the Mac mini was never updated to the M3—its last update was to the M2 in early 2023. So if you’re just looking at the Mac mini, the model-to-model speed boosts will be even more impressive than the gains between this chip generation and the last.

Mr. Macintosh:

A lot of people are talking about the new M4 Mac mini power button location.

Apple decided to put it on the bottom. While the bottom vent raises the height, you will still have to tip it up to reach the power button.

Miguel Arroz:

The new Mac Mini internal architecture is reminiscent of the Apple TVs. Fan on the bottom (some Apple TVs have it), logic board in the middle, power supply on top. This way, heat generated from the power supply doesn’t go up to the SoC. Quite cool (no pun intended)!

Christian Selig:

Damn, new Mac mini is (I believe?) the first Mac with DisplayPort 2.1 support. That means a theoretical maximum monitor support of 8K at 240Hz (!!) with HDR and DSC.

Previously:

Update (2024-10-30): John Gruber:

The new Mini form factor sports a dramatically smaller footprint, but because it’s taller (which ought to be better for thermals), the difference isn’t as great by volume[…]

[…]

No cheating either: the power supply remains inside the Mac Mini case. (But as shown above, the Mac Mini remains quite a bit larger than an Apple TV 4K.)

Hartley Charlton:

There are now two desktop Macs and four Apple silicon chip options for users who do not need the expandability of the Mac Pro. The Mac Studio starts at $1,999, overshadowing the $599 starting price of the M4 Mac mini and even the $1,399 starting price of the M4 Pro Mac mini, so do you need the performance of the Mac Studio , or is the humble Mac mini sufficient for your needs? Our guide helps to answer the question of how to decide which of these two desktop Macs is best for you.

John Voorhees:

The new Mac mini is exactly the Mac I wanted when I got the Mac Studio. It doesn’t support as much memory or storage as a Studio, but you can build a real beast of a Mac around this tiny computer including with Thunderbolt 5.

Juli Clover:

The Mac mini is Apple’s first carbon neutral Mac to date, and it joins the carbon neutral Series 10 Apple Watch models.

However, this was possible through “high-quality carbon credits.”

Adam Tow:

In this article, I’m going to talk about my experience with Mac mini over the years, and how I see myself potentially using the new M4-powered Mac mini in the future.

Ezekiel Elin:

I’ve just ordered a new base model to replace my M2 base model. Double the RAM and M2->M4 for just $240 after trade-in made this an easy swap.

iMac 2024

Apple (Hacker News, Slashdot):

With M4, iMac is up to 1.7x faster for daily productivity, and up to 2.1x faster for demanding workflows like photo editing and gaming, compared to iMac with M1. With the Neural Engine in M4, iMac is the world’s best all-in-one for AI and is built for Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that transforms how users work, communicate, and express themselves, while protecting their privacy. The new iMac is available in an array of beautiful new colors, and the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display offers a new nano-texture glass option. iMac features a new 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and color-matched accessories that include USB-C. Starting at just $1,299, now with 16GB of unified memory, the new iMac is available to pre-order today, with availability beginning Friday, November 8.

This seems good as far as it goes, but there are no models with Pro processors or larger displays. It still has a lower RAM ceiling and fewer ports than the Intel-based iMacs. The SD Card slot is back on the MacBook Pros, but not here.

Christina Warren:

Apple might finally be forced to ship computers with 16GB of RAM as default (2016 called and it’s laughing) but glad to see the dedication to charging truly obscene amounts of money for storage is still alive and well. $600 upcharge for 2TB is a war crime.

My bad — it’s actually worse! The upcharge from 256GB on the base model iMac to 2TB is $800. That’s 2/3 the price of the computer.

Samsung, a top brand, is currently selling external 2 TB SSDs for $150.

Benjamin Mayo:

now they need to do a studio display update featuring the new iMac’s upgraded camera

I don’t know—the Studio Display’s camera is also described as 12MP. So I wonder whether they actually made the iMac’s camera worse by using better hardware but coupling it with Center Stage.

Juli Clover:

For the M4 iMac models with 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, all four of the USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4 transfer speeds of up to 40Gb/s. The prior-generation M3 iMac with four ports had two Thunderbolt 3 ports and two USB-3 ports.

The 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU models only have two ports, but both of those are Thunderbolt 4.

Hartley Charlton:

First introduced with the Pro Display XDR in 2019, nano-texture glass is etched at a nanometer scale, which is meant to preserve image quality while scattering ambient light to cut down on glare. It is the most matte display type that Apple makes, and Apple claims that it is useful for high-end, color-managed workflows or demanding ambient lighting environments.
The 2020 27-inch Intel-based iMac was available with a nano-texture display option prior to its discontinuation, so the new iMac marks the first time that the feature has been available with the Apple silicon version of the device. The new iMac ‘s nano-texture glass is a build-to-order option that costs $200, configurable at the point of purchase.

Scott:

No Target Display Mode… when do we start holding @Apple to account on their PR narratives, in this case e-waste and environmental sustainability?

Hartley Charlton:

The M4 chip debuted in the iPad Pro earlier this year, promising around 20% faster performance than the M3 chip in both single and multi-core tasks. All of the key differences between the two chip generations are listed below[…]

Dan Moren:

While the colors remain the same—blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and silver—Apple has tweaked the backs of the computer with more vibrant versions of most of the colors.

John Gruber:

The new colors don’t seem all that different from the old ones, except for green, which seems much more just-plain-green green. The old iMac green was more like teal? It also seems like maybe the new colors are a bit less saturated on the back?

Previously:

Update (2024-10-30): Rob Mathers:

It used to be that the egregious SSD prices at least got you better performance. Nowadays they’re well behind the best NVMe speeds and even more out of whack with pricing.

Hartley Charlton:

Apple’s third Apple silicon iMac gains the M4 chip alongside a range of other small but notable improvements, so how does the new machine compare to its two predecessors?

John Gruber:

One difference: the entry-priced $1,300 2-port model, which has an 8-core CPU (rather than 10-core), ships with a Magic Keyboard that doesn’t have a Touch ID button; all of the 4-port/10-core configurations ship with a Touch-ID–equipped keyboard.

Update (2024-11-08): Joe Rossignol:

Ahead of time, the first reviews of Apple’s latest all-in-one desktop computer have been shared by select media outlets and YouTube channels.

Jason Snell:

With the M4 iMac, the FaceTime camera has finally been upgraded to Center Stage. And maybe it was worth the wait, because this isn’t the same 12MP sensor as in some previous Center Stage cameras. It’s new and improved—so improved that I could tell the difference the first second that I turned it on.

In a challenging low-light environment, the original Center Stage camera on an Apple Studio Display can look fuzzy, blotchy, and low contrast. The new Center Stage camera on the M4 iMac looks sharper, with more contrast and much more natural-looking skin tones. It’s what Center Stage should’ve looked like all along, and it’s a nice upgrade.

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Using a nano-texture-covered display is a little weird—the reflections just stop at the screen edge, as if by magic. It works incredibly well. And most of the time, in more normal lighting conditions, I didn’t really notice the nano-texture being there. (Yes, if you look closely you will notice a light scatter that can reduce contrast a bit.)

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Apple talks a lot about how it wants to reduce waste and be a better environmental force in the world. Making iMacs with perfectly good displays that can’t ever be repurposed into something else doesn’t seem to fit with that attitude. It’s unfortunate.

Update (2024-11-25): Nathan Edwards (Hacker News):

But otherwise, it’s the same machine as it was in 2023, and it’s substantially the same as it was back in 2021. Don’t get me wrong, I love looking at this thing. I feel calmer and more productive walking into my office and seeing that unbroken expanse of blue instead of the rat’s nest of cables that come out of my regular monitor. There are just vanishingly few situations in which the most important thing about a computer is how it looks from the back, and the iMac asks you to give up too much in exchange.

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The thing about an all-in-one computer is that all of those things have to be worth it. If you have to start plugging in a bunch of stuff to compensate for what’s built in, you might as well get something else.

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But even when I’m using a different keyboard, I have to keep the Magic Keyboard within arm’s reach so I can use TouchID. TouchID is great, and it’s frustrating that Apple put it on the keyboard instead of the power button, and it’s doubly frustrating that you have to upgrade from the base model to get it.

Apple Hardware Announcement Apple M4 iMac Mac macOS 15 Sequoia RAM Solid-State Drive (SSD)

7 Comments

USB-C Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad

Joe Rossignol:

Alongside the new iMac, Apple announced updated versions of the Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad. The accessories are now equipped with USB-C charging ports, whereas the previous models used Lightning. Apple includes the Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard in the box with the iMac, and the Magic Trackpad is an optional upgrade.

Unfortunately, unlike the first-generation Magic peripherals, these are still only able to pair with one Mac at a time. So you cannot switch them between Macs in software.

Jay Peters:

Apple’s new USB-C-equipped Magic Mouse somehow still has the charging port on the bottom. While Apple could have used the launch as an opportunity to move the charging port from the underside of the device — where the port has remained for nearly a decade, despite other updates to the mouse and being mocked for the decision — the port is still there, as shown in the “view in your space” augmented reality rendering from Apple’s website.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I really hope nobody is surprised that the USB-C Magic Mouse charging point is in the same location.

Mike Piatek-Jimenez:

Wait, so Apple updated the port on the Magic Mouse, but didn’t fix the biggest bug related to the port of the Magic Mouse?!? 🤦‍♂️

John Gruber:

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

My other hunch is that the Magic Mouse’s designers actually see the inability to use it while plugged in as a feature, not a bug. They want you to use it wirelessly, so you have to use it wirelessly.

[…]

With this design, the mouse looks better 100 percent of the time it’s in use, and it looks a bit silly every few months when you need to charge it.

I’ll grant that it looks better, but I thought Apple design was supposed to be about how it works. I guess my question is, why are they optimizing for the minority of people who don’t know it’s wireless? In order to prevent some people from using it non-optimally, they’re consigning others to having mice that sometimes, at the worst possible time, don’t work at all. Could they not put an instruction card in the box or show a bezel notification when you plug it in to remind people that it can be used wirelessly?

Also, I’m seeing a lot of commentary about how you only have to charge it a few times a year or every few months, but I think for me it’s more like once or twice a month. I like the way the Magic Mouse works as a mouse, but it’s way more annoying than when I had a Logitech mouse that ran on a single AA battery for a whole year.

The low-battery notifications are also a problem. In my experience, they show up way too late (when the mouse is so close to dying that you have to interrupt what you’re doing) or not at all. Lately I’ve been using ToothFairy to show the current battery level in the menu bar so that I get earlier notice that the battery is getting low. One of the top feature requests I get is for it to support customizable low-battery notifications because the built-in macOS ones aren’t fit for purpose.

Another use case: I have a test Mac that I mostly access via screen sharing. It would be simpler if I could just leave the Magic Mouse plugged in so that, on the rare occasion when I do physically use that Mac, I can be sure that the battery won’t be dead. Since that’s not possible, I have to leave the mouse belly up, then unplug it for use, and I sometimes forget to plug it back in when I’m done using it.

None of this is the end of the world, but there’s a reason it’s a meme. One upon a time, all the Mac notebooks had upside down Apple logos, and I’m sure the designers had a reason for that, but eventually they had the courage to change it, to great applause.

Zac Alan Cichy:

What’s less fine than the charging port location is just the lack of fundamental iteration. We’re going on 16 years of not altering this mouse in any serious way.

I just grew up with an Apple that would KEEP PUSHING. I don’t think they found the end of the mouse with the Magic Mouse. It’s damn good, but not the end. Haptics. So much could be done.

One idea would be to support Qi charging so that you could just leave it on the pad now and then. I’m sure there’s more that could be done in other areas—I miss the side buttons that the Mighty Mouse had.

Jesper:

These properties of the Magic Mouse are reasonably understood within minutes, if not intellectually then at least vividly. It’s possible I’m underestimating the proportion of people whose anatomy allow them complete comfort with a Magic Mouse — that proportion, even if small, is likely at least hundreds of thousands of people at Apple’s scale — or the probably decidely bigger proportion who just don’t care and consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

It’s comfortable for me, but then I also like those small Logitech mice that you hold with your finger tips instead of putting your palm on top.

New needs friends, and progress is often downstream of a few blind alleys. But at this point I'm more than interested what a Magic Mouse 2, that tries to take the learnings of how Magic Mouse has played out in real life and how people's bodies actually work and do something different, would look like.

To just ship the same thing after nine years, with all the flaws that its trade-offs have lead to would be... well, pants-on-head stupid.

Sebastiaan de With:

OK but the most exciting news today is that you can now get a really nice woven black USB-C cable from Apple with a Magic Keyboard, Trackpad or Keyboard.

Nicholas Riley:

Seems the new Magic Keyboards without keypad are only available with an iMac for now? That was the one thing I planned on buying this week, but I guess it’ll be a while…

The USB-C Magic Keyboard is available, but not in any colors.

Joe Rossignol:

For the time being, Apple is continuing to sell a Lightning version of the Magic Keyboard with a numeric keypad, but it lacks a Touch ID button. Apple has yet to release a USB-C version of this particular Magic Keyboard.

The list of Apple devices and accessories that are still sold with either a Lightning port or a Lightning connector is now quite small[…]

Previously:

Update (2024-10-30): I don’t care about Touch ID, but unfortunately the non–Touch ID Magic Keyboard still has the globe key on the right side, where it’s nearly impossible to use as a modifier for the new window management keyboard shortcuts.

Update (2024-11-01): Juli Clover:

The new USB-C accessories require macOS Sequoia 15.1 to work properly, and as noted on the MacRumors forums, earlier versions of macOS do not work. There are reports from users running macOS Sonoma and Ventura who are having issues with the new devices. With the keyboard, Touch ID and function keys don’t work, and with the Magic Mouse, the scrolling doesn’t function. In some cases, the accessories are recognized as older devices, inhibiting proper functionality.
This isn’t a problem limited to just people running older versions of macOS, because there are also reports from developers who have installed the first macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta. It appears that the macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta was released before Apple could add in support for the new Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad.

Touch ID, I guess I can understand, but why don’t the basic features work? Are they not using standard Bluetooth? Did Apple make more extensive changes beyond just the port?