Which is a completely artificial requirement and it's a shame people are forced to patch VMvare just to run macOS, sometimes just for the final stages before uploading the app to the App Store.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAE4N7YU8...

And it could actually be "Mini", which is increasingly a stretch for the current design from 8 years ago. The Apple TV is probably smaller and more powerful if you could run a general purpose OS on it.

I'm excited for the potential here.

If Apple keeps the current chassis, they could either make it more silent, or more powerful. Both would be fantastic for a pro machine.

Edit: I wouldn't even mind a slightly larger machine. The HP Z2 Mini G4 looks like it's going to be a great six-core workstation.

You answered your own question.

I'm sure someone is using them for something, but I've never fretted how big a stationary computer is.

They also have somewhat better cooling than laptops because they're so thick, and you can buy silent passive cooling cases for them.

It's not like Apple's going to make the new Mac Mini three times the size it needs to be and stuff a bunch of 3.5" HDD bays in for people who want to use it as a file server.

Smaller with fewer components and everything soldered/glued together is a cheap way to build smaller and cheaper at the cost or repairability, and Apple clearly doesn't care about repairability. They've said that the Mac Pro redesign will be more modular, but I don't see them doing that here.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comments/7ga2q9/skull_cany...

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+TV+4K+Teardown/97511#s...

At least since it's not a handheld touchscreen device, you can take it apart and replace stuff. It even uses Torx screws! But there's not a lot of discrete parts here, just the power supply,the motherboard, and the fan.

Once upon a time the Mac Minis would have let you replace the RAM or disk, but I'd expect it to look like a similar similar power supply + motherboard + fan in a box.

Minis a few years ago had a quad core processor option and a lot of people have been disappointed by its absence, making the current generation objectively worse than previous ones. I don’t think they’ll pass up the option to put it back in, IIRC it was something to do with their choice of Intel’s processor families that got it dropped in the first place.

The Mac mini is a perfect server: needs little power, it's small and stackable, easy to replace if something fails, doesn't have unnecessary components like big graphic cards or screen.

I'd love to buy a couple Mac minis as build servers and for running unit tests, but the current version is too slow and way to expensive.

Internally we had one used for our company's OSX Server running profile manager before going to Jamf Pro.

[1] https://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiserver.html

Honestly a version of the "trash can" Mac Pro with regular, consumer level internals would suit the Mac mini use-case just fine.

Give it a very good single video card rather than whatever strange 2x Firepro thingy, a regular i7 or i5 instead of a Xeon, and regular memory instead of ECC RAM.

If they can get it in at the $500-$1,500 ranges we'd be good. The cost of the novel industrial design has probably already been paid for by the Mac Pro version of it.

Some sort of novel integration into an eGPU enclosure might be a cool addition. (Although defeats the e in eGPU I guess). But it would certainly meet a lot of peoples' needs for upgradability.

Couple of disks in a RAID, lots of RAM, bring back the quad core. Like the Mac Mini Server of old. They've already built it before, they just need to bring it back in modern form.

I could see a RAID of SSDs like the iMac Pro has. Not in a base model certainly, but that's what I'd put in a pro-focused mini.

Thunderbolt 3 for expansion for sure. Which will be hilarious because the Mac Mini Pro will be a more up-to-date Pro machine than the Mac Pro is. They still have Thunderbolt 2 ports (with the mini DisplayPort connector) on Mac Pro, Macbook Air, and Mac Mini. The latter two are said to be updated soon, the Mac Pro who knows when.

Take a look at the Mini's modern competition: Dell's Optiplex 7060 mini or HP's Prodesk 600 G4 mini, which can use Intel's i7-6700T (6 cores / 12 hyper threads) and hold 32GB of memory and, IIRC, are even slightly smaller than a Mac Mini. Not quite a modern workstation but still a lot of computing power in a small package.

That's how far behind the times the Mac Mini is and Apple would be foolish not to catch up.

SSD options that aren't laughable. Right now Apple charges $600 to upgrade the mac mini's Fusion drive to 1 TB, when the cost of a good non-NVMe 1 TB SSD is around $200. I don't expect Apple to ever offer cheap memory or SSD upgrades but 200% markups vs retail are a joke (and that assumes no value for the fusion drive). 50% markup is better than their phone margins and says they should be able to offer 1 TB for $300 and 2 TB for $600.

An ARM chip running alongside Intel's CPU. Most importantly this will let me run the ARM macOS they are moving to next year. More immediately the ARM chip could (1) be used as GPUs by Mojave, giving the mini pro the performance for games more demanding than puzzle, (2) run iOS/tVOS now, sleeping Intel to save power while I do light tasks and serving as a higher spec Apple TV.

That and adding their hi-speed SSD controller (T2 chip?) would be great.

Really? I wish this were the case. I even invested some serious dollar into getting a decent laptop (Carbon X1, 6th generation), but generally in my experience the smaller it is the more unreliable it is.

It gets hot, it freezes up, all sorts of annoying problems. It is really frustrating, and now at this point I prefer to do all of my serious stuff on a desktop.

For clarification, things I do include: * solidworks design, * aftereffects compositing of things made in cinema4d, * python scripting, * watching movies on vlc, * having a shitload of tabs open in chrome at any given time, * opening very large text files in Notepad++

For reference, my typical workload for my 2018 MBP is:

* At least one Windows VM running * At least two web browsers running, sometimes three, depending on what I'm doing. * Python as needed * At least one large Java application running * The usual office-y applications - Outlook, Adium, Teams, OneNote, Word, Excel * Opening large text files in Sublime Text is a regular occurrence.

Even though there's a lot of stuff going on, there's nothing that routinely makes the machine spin up the fans, let alone overheat and crash.

You realize that that's a workload that 99.99% of users do not share, right?

I can't imagine Jony Ive would find a mix of USB A and C ports aesthetically pleasing.

I guess a lot like the 2012s. I have a 2012 mac mini server, i7, 16gb and two internal disks. The only thing I miss is that the built in GPU can't drive a 4k monitor.

The displaylink driver for Mac seemed to take a large leap ahead last year.

It would look a lot like the previous Mac Mini, quad core with upgradable memory and two drive bays. Before they crippled it to try and sell more Mac Pros.

Pretty much an Intel NUC with an i7.

That's exactly what I'm thinking although Apple being Apple, base price will be $1,299 for the i5 version, storage and memory will be soldered on and marked up 200%. It'll still sell like hotcakes because the alternative is a hackintosh and the time of your average HN reader is dear enough it's just easier and arguably more sensible to spend the money unless you really want to spend the time fighting MacOS to run on non-Apple hardware.

I've reached the point where I think maybe the mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina is the pinnacle of their development. While I could build something that functioned better in some areas, the overall package just wouldn't quite measure up.

Perhaps a minimal setup for compiling stuff for Apple's OSes?

I could go for something like that.