As we’ve gone from Mac mini for switchers to Mac mini for Pros

Mac mini. 4 years have passed since its last update. And now, at last, it’s already been updated when many took it for granted. Although both Phil Schiller and Tim Cook had once commented that the Mac mini was still in Apple’s plans and that it was an important machine for them. But the team we saw presented last 30th is not the machine we knew. It’s an evolution. It is a step forward and a change of range and user sector.

Mac mini, the entry range into the consumer sector

That was the mac mini target when it was introduced in 2005 by Steve Jobs, in the pre-Intel era. It wore a G4 processor and had two versions at 1.25Ghz and 1.4Ghz. It cost $799 tax-free. Looking at it from 2010 to 2014, the last year it received an update, the Mac mini has always had top-of-the-art hardware consumption and has even been used as HTPC by many in that early era of computers that served as a movie player (such as Home Theatre Personal Computer).

And its price has never exceeded $1,000 on base models, even when there has been more than one. To give concrete examples of its latest updates, in 2010 its launch price was $699 and its hardware was similar to the consumer-range white MacBooks, although there was a server-focused model (specifically called Mac mini Server) that was going to the $69 999. The following year the entry price dropped: $599 the lowest model, $799 the next, and $999 the Server model. It would repeat prices in 2012 and in its last version until the last day 30, version of late 2014, lowered its price even more in the entry models costing $499 (in Spain less than 600 euros). The next model $699 and then the model destined for Server (although no longer classified as such) for $999. And that was until the 30th, we insist.

So what we see clearly is that at the price and component level, the Mac mini has always been an entry into Apple’s range. It has been the cheapest computer of the company that served as an excuse for any user without professional purpose to enter the Apple ecosystem through OS X. The Mac switcher par excellence. And always with configurations similar to the company’s consumer range laptops, whether it’s macbook or MacBook Air.

-The Mac mini, until now, has been a consumer-end computer that has never exceeded $999 in its base-selling models (not including on-demand upgrades)-But that’s happened, now we’re not there anymore. The Mac mini as we knew it has died and in its color change to spatial gray (the only color you can get today) we have proof that Apple has changed the user target to which the computer is intended. The Mac mini is no longer a range-in computer and less of the consumer sector. It is still the cheapest, but with a substantial rise from the base model from 4 years ago. Because now the Mac mini is a computer of the Pro range (even though Apple hasn’t put that last name). And besides, and this is very important, the Mac mini has stopped using portable processor processors, as it has done so far, even on models called servers. The new i3, i5 or i7 that come in the new Mac mini are desktop range, desktop range, and this is a major change of philosophy on Apple’s part.

The little one who got big

One of the main focuses of frustration with the new Mac mini after its presentation last 30th is precisely this: not having understood that this new team is no longer what it was and that Apple has redefined it to serve the professional market. Mark Gurman told you a few months ago. The new Mac mini is now aimed at a type of creative professional user looking for a computer to put their own monitor (or monitors), with a lot of connection ports and with professional speed discs. This little one carries the same NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD that the new MacBook Pro of 2018 or even the iMac Pro already uses. With read and write speeds greater than 3GB/s.

-In my view, we cannot fall for the mistake of thinking that this new mini has an excessive price compared to previous generations, because we can no longer. By offering us a machine from another sector and with higher quality components, obviously, the price goes up

In addition to another big change I’ve discussed on social media or Apple Coding podcasts: Apple doesn’t manufacture desktop-range CPUs. The Mac mini, which is considered a desktop vertical sector product, uses portable gamut CPUs. Some other component of the computer may be desktop range, but CPUs have always been mobile range in the mini. And this year that has changed with the new Mac mini. Something quite surprising and that helps the new team to perform better and be a more powerful and focused team.

Let’s start your quad-core i3 base model. As we can understand, a Core i3 is low-end. But when we talk about a desktop range i3 designed to be plugged into the stream all day, while still being low-end we are talking about a good CPU. In fact, if we compare the new model with the average price range of the latest generation, we have that the i3 is much higher than this. Therefore the performance of this i3 we cannot take it lightly. We’re talking about a quad-core i3 that’s the Intel Core i3 8100, with 4 cores and 4 threads at 3.6Ghz, 6MB cache, and a 65W TDP. You have the specification sheet here. With a Geekbench score of 4,377 in single-core processing and 12,534 in multi-core. For the equipment that costs 899 euros. The one that was worth 799 euros in 2014, had a dual-core i5 and four-wire 2.6Ghz that scored 3,583 in single-core and 6,813 in multiple. That 2014 is the team I use now for work and I do great.

The most basic i3 model of the new Mac mini far outperforms the latest mid-range 2014 model (the i5 at 2.6Ghz). But sometimes we tend to belittle new CPUs or components that seem worse to us without thinking that even in the lower-end model of less than 1,000 euros, the performance improvement that we are going to achieve over the last generation is substantially higher, than a similar price and with more advanced features and speeds.

If we advance to the next model that already exceeds 1,000 euros, we are talking about a Core i5 8500 Coffee Lake with 6 cores and 6 threads, without multithread. With 9MB cache. Both this i5 and i3 have a feature that many Coffee Lake range desktops have this year: it has the same threads for process as cores. Therefore, Intel Hyper-Threading technology that allows more than one thread per physical core on the CPU is not supported. The i7 model that we can extend as a higher option yes, but the i3 and i5 of both base models do not.

This i5 achieves a score of 4,828 in single core and 18,237 in multiple. Meanwhile, the option to upgrade to an i7 is an 8700 Coffee Lake processor with 12MB cache and this time it does have not only 6 cores, has Hyper-Threading and therefore reaches up to 12 threads achieving a score of 5,303 in single core and 23,006 in multiple e. By reference, the Core i5 of this generation MacBook Pro, the 15″ model, gives a performance of 5,053 in simple and 21,357 in multiple, so we can see how this last CPU is quite powerful while the i5, for example , is quite competent to get very close to the above mentioned latter.

In fact, if we stick to the Geekbench tests (where we lack half the information for a correct assessment, but it allows us to get a rough idea of where the power of the equipment moves) last year’s i5 (2017) on MacBook Pro , would be located in the center of the i3 and i5, being surpassed by the i5 of the new Mac mini. So we’re not talking about slow or underperforming CPUs. They are CPUs with professional performance and not at all in a consumer sector.

Problems: Intel UHD, 128 GB and 8GB RAM

We have good power but graphically the options do not accompany and that Apple in a way tries to get users who want more graphics power to use an eGPU like those of Blackmagic. And here are two possible reflections.

The first: Is it wrong for Apple to want you to spend more on buying an eGPU if you’re going to use high-performance graphics? You already do this with the 15″ MacBook Pro where you have to pay a significant amount more to get to use the dedicated ATI graphics. So, on the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with a team of less than 1,300 euros to think that the investment of an eGPU might be interesting if we’re going to take advantage of it. In the professional sector are dilemmas that are not even raised, it is only reversed to find the solution sought.

-Sometimes it would be good to stop and think about our current situation, what serves us today to work and understand that the new models are a substantial improvement of what we already use in all aspects. And analyze things from a practical point of view and not the irrepressible desire to always want to have the most powerful and what has the most capacity. Whenever the price and budget fit us, of course

But the other reflection is simpler: what graphic power do you need? Is having a much more powerful graphics processor really going to make a substantial difference to your work? We’re not going to go into whether apple should include a dedicated GPU for the price charged. That’s a lost dialectical battle in which I don’t intend to convince anyone because it’s impossible to convince. I give the empirical arguments: Apple doesn’t include dedicated graphics other than higher-end computers like 27″ iMacs or 15″ MacBook Pros. And another empirical data: we agree that an Intel UHD 630 is not the recommended graphics to play Fortnite, but it is a graph capable of working with 3 simultaneous monitors in 4K at 60Hz without problem. Very bad it shouldn’t be. It’s 60% faster than the previous model, according to Apple. So the question should be that: what graphic power do I need? We may see that the UHD 630 is enough, more than we think.

This same answer should be given with RAM, which is also heavily criticized for the fact that the base option is 8GB. 8GB is very little say many. In my experience, that’s not true. At least on Mac. Again I’m not going to get into the lost debate of «so Apple charges, should put more RAM». I think for what Apple charges puts the RAM it has to put, which is not any one bought on Amazon.

I insist, I do not intend you to agree with me, I only express my opinion. But think about something: we know that Apple collects memory at the price of gold and I’m neither the first nor the last one who thinks it shouldn’t be. It doesn’t cost 240o to put 8GB more RAM (although it does cost on Amazon about 150-160o, two 8GB DIMM OS of the type that uses this computer, to put 16). But just as I know that, I also know that Apple tests the memories it uses for errors and that in stress tests they endure well and don’t fail. That would give for another article apart talk about the degradation of cheap memories and how they slow down a computer without us realizing its use and the aforementioned degradation of it.

And finally: 128GB. Another big complaint. Yes, it’s true. 128GB is little. But look, as I see it, I’m valuing it under my prism and my experience. I’m short on my 128GB. Even 256GB. Even 512GB. Today I work with 750GB on SSD and I need to connect external hard drives and I have an external storage server for work with 14TB of Synology hybrid RAID space. But my case is different. It’s not the majority. And still note that most of my storage is off the computer. Therefore, there may be people who have enough with 128GB. It’s a matter of real needs. Should I have put more Apple capacity into the base model? For my own time, but it’s the most powerful and fastest SSD on the market: it’s not as cheap as we can think. And Apple is a company: it works to make money, obviously. Like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or any other company in the world. And if we don’t like what they offer, there’s the market to choose other things.

I will try to respond to all these topics by analyzing what is the target user of this team: the professional or semi-professional artist, as well as the developers.

Goal, artists and developers

A developer doesn’t need graphics power. It needs process power. It needs disk speed. In fact, many of the creative professionals who can surround themselves around the Mac mini with the Intel UHD 630 have more than enough. Am I justifying Apple and its decision? No, I’m being empirical. And that’s why I tell you about my own experience. A usage that I know is superior in demand to the machine than the average. And if I thought the machine with that GPU isn’t worth it, then I don’t buy it and look for something else.

I develop today. I use Xcode for apps, Android Studio also for its corresponding apps, I use Unity to develop 3D video games for mobile and therefore Visual Studio, I do server side developments with Swift and that forces me to have a local PostgreSQL instance installed, I have mounted the Docker engine, sometimes I mount Linux virtual machines to use Swift, to mount servers, Docker instances of MySQL or Ubuntu… in addition my team serves to edit video in Full HD (1080p) for television (advertising), I make the podcasts Apple Coding and Daily… and I have a Mac mini 2014 dual-core 2.6Ghz with 8GB of RAM and a Crucial SSD of 550MB/s. Do I want more machine? Man, of course. We all want to have a better machine. Do I need it? No, 95% of the time.

In my last project where I was supposed to use Xcode and Unity open at the same time (which by the way, unity editor works on Metal thanks to the compatibility of Intel Integrated Graphics), while I had DB instances, I left a virtualized Linux test instance, was also open Visual Studio and I had to sporadically open other software such as Affinity Designer, a pgAdmin 4 server to query the database and also DB Browser for SQLite to view another database. Well… you could tell he was putting her on edge. But I could keep working and the biggest impact was that project generation in Unity took a few seconds longer than usual.

You mean this machine is good for anyone? No. I’m sure you’ll come up with a lot of scenarios where this machine could fall apart. The factors you fight against are disk, CPU, memory, graphics… everything has a limit, obviously. But if I don’t find that limit, a 2018 Mac mini with 8GB can only give me more air and better times. But certainly at the level I am now, my times are going to improve in seconds. If it now takes 5 minutes to generate an episode of almost 2 hours of the podcast, or just longer than a TV video lasts to render it, with the new computer it would go faster. That’s great.

The intangible

Finally, let’s talk about the intangible. What for me is T2 and heterogeneous computing. That makes an A12x Bionic from the new iPad Pro not a CPU: it’s a set of components that work together to achieve speed. That’s why measuring a computer’s performance by Geekbench tells us only part of the story.

Another day I will dedicate an article to T2 exclusively, but this processor allows the computer’s CPU to stop working with an encrypted disk. APFS, Apple’s file system, is encrypted by default. And encryption is one of the processes that slows down disk work the most and also burdens the CPU. However, giving that work to the T2 the CPU does not load from that task and the disk is running at the same speed as it would if it were not encrypted. To that we add the management of communication ports, sound chip and peripheral ports, even the chip to help video encoding in HEVC format. A significant number of aids that make a PC with this same CPU slower in many generic processes because they do not have a chip with specialized cores.

-The future of computing to stop centralizing all the work on the CPU itself and increasingly divide it into different small components as happens in Apple’s Bionic chips-

In conclusion, we cannot measure the power of a computer exclusively from the CPU or even the GPU itself. As rarely as it may seem, the Intel UHD 630, if I code a HEVC video, it’s likely to go even faster than on computers with more powerful CPUs. Because I use specific components for specific tasks. And this is the future of computing: stop centralizing all the work on the CPU itself and increasingly divide it into different small components like Apple’s Bionic chips. So if on paper the new minis are very powerful, the T2 only makes even more performance and efficiency better.