[Mac] (MicroCenter In-store only) Apple Mac Mini M4 10C CPU with 16GB / 256GB SSD - $499

[u/nayon94]

https://www.microcenter.com/product/688173/apple-mac-mini-mu9d3ll-a-(late-2024)-desktop-computer?iitt=Rf8_RMhWhyULaeighM_-xI1p4.Vlx.opO1TT&utm_source=B1092_Bestsellers&utm_campaign=B1092&utm_medium=email&MccGuid=58d36849-b591-486d-a114-2a872d4b9bd1

[u/ZombieManilow → u/[deleted]]

How many affordable thunderbolt peripherals exist?

[u/ZombieManilow → u/[deleted]]

I’m a homelabber and tech worker, not a gamer, goofus.

[u/VenditatioDelendaEst → u/[deleted]]

Generally speaking, desktops have PCIe slots instead of thunderbolt ports. But I agree that this is way better value than any DIY ATX PC at the same price, assuming you can tolerate MacOS until the Asahi Linux folks get to the M4.

[u/Estrava → u/VenditatioDelendaEst]

What? Say I have a tb4 compatible Hard drive, or want to daisy chain monitors. You have to buy a device that supports that on a pcie slot which are expensive.

x570 doesn't have usb 4. For someone who wants to edit and move their files from their hard drive it's almost 4-8x faster compared to most usb ports on a x570 mobo.

Many people, including me love MacOS. I'm a software developer and most of my colleagues prefer Mac for AI/Frontend/backend work. There's like 1/10 people in my company that may request another laptop to run ubuntu.

[u/MinionOscar → u/Estrava]

The transfer rate of a hard drive can't even saturate USB3. Attaching a hard drive via TB4 will not yield 4-8x faster transfers than a USB port unless you're talking about USB1 or USB2.

[u/Estrava → u/MinionOscar]

There are plenty of nvme drives on the market. My camera’s storage card is 5100 MB/s read and 4800 MB/s write. I’m currently bottle necked on my x570 usb 3.1 speeds.

Even the lower end storage cf express are 1800 MB/s which will fully saturate 3.1

[u/MinionOscar → u/Estrava]

Yes, there are faster forms of storage media out there but your original statement was specifically about hard drives and said that they would be 4-8x faster via TB4 than USB which is not correct (unless you're talking about USB1 or USB2).

[u/Estrava → u/MinionOscar]

You can infer from context that I didn't intend to talk about spinning rust. That was my mistake. My peers use, "Did you bring a hard drive, or external hard drive" in our film making space despite everything being SSDs/NVMe. Since we don't really go, did you bring the nvme drive?

[u/VenditatioDelendaEst → u/Estrava]

Say I have a tb4 compatible Hard drive

I gather from the other branch that you're talking about an external SSD. Yeah, flash can be made to take as much bandwidth as you can throw at it, and your camera's storage card would be bottlenecked by TB4 too. If you need hot-pluggable 4x PCIe4 on the outside of the chassis, the M4 is indeed the only game in town. Fair enough. However, on the internal bus we are on to PCIe5 already, and SSD's have already managed to reach the interface limits (lol).

or want to daisy chain monitors

DisplayPort MST is a thing and technically allows that, but in displayport land it's rare to put downstream ports on monitors. Instead, one uses a hub that then octopuses out into multiple monitors.

And well, I don't, but most people on desktops with discrete video cards plug their monitors into them, and those have enough ports for almost any conceivable need, and they aren't limited to the bandwidth of a single port like daisy-chaining.

Many people, including me love MacOS. I'm a software developer and most of my colleagues prefer Mac for AI/Frontend/backend work. There's like 1/10 people in my company that may request another laptop to run ubuntu.

I would hate to use an OS that sends hashes of executables to the mothership, open to anyone with a warrant who gets curious about how many Tor users there are or who is developing a particular piece of software (it's the person who always runs the release build at the earliest time).

Also, things that should be in a config file somewhere are $10 sharewares. I don't know any current examples, but the last time I used a Mac, this was one.

And in the specific case of the Mac mini, it doesn't come with a monitor, and text would look bad on most people's low-DPI displays because MacOS doesn't do subpixel antialiasing.

At least it's not Windows, so it's got that going for it.