Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by m_mueller on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @03:46PM (#18340638)

A comparable system would be rhe 1600 hackish-mac mini I outlined in my last post if you add a 700 USD eGPU on top. Even if you deduct 400 for the additional casings required, it’s just so far from competitive. As you wrote, up to 100% markup for macOS and all the Apple benefits is acceptable, but it has gotten a really hard pill to swallow now.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by tootie on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @08:01PM (#18342291)

I'd say Win 10 with WSL is now arguably a better dev environment. The only reason I still use a Mac at work is because I need to support Safari/iOS clients and Apple doesn't allow VMs. You are not paying a 100% markup for OSX, you're paying a 100% markup because Apple keeps it 100% proprietary.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by newman314 on Tuesday October 30, 2018 @07:54PM (#18342254)

I've been considering going down the hackintosh route but now I'm considering something more extreme.

ESX system with MacOS VM and GPU passthrough. If this works, then I could have a standardized MacOS VM build that will keep working as I upgrade the underlying hardware. Still mulling this over...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by mmmpie on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @11:40AM (#18346631)

I’ve been running that setup as my main workstation for over 3 years. Use an nVidia gpu and a dedicated usb card for IO. You also need a second machine to do esx management, I have a laptop. And a second video card to see the esx console (handy when it isn’t working). Finally don’t use multiple drives for esx datastores, there is no way to remove them later (to upgrade or replace failed drives). I learnt the hard way, transferring 6TB of vms over usb 2 is not fun.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by newman314 on Friday November 02, 2018 @07:08PM (#18367471)

Cool! Do you perchance have a writeup of your setup?

I managed to get a High Sierra VM converted to Mojave yesterday. Previous attempts had been failing due to the VM not being APFS. This link was helpful: https://licson.net/post/vmware-apfs/

I started musing if trying to get an eGPU to work with a Mac VM would be possible but that might be pushing it too far. It looks like Thunderbolt 3 support might be hit or miss from what I've been able to find so far plus I do not see a lot of motherboards (Z390?) that are TB capable. Gigabyte just announced a Z390 based Designare which looked interesting. https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/gigabyte-launches-their-al...

Current plans are:

  * ESXI 6.5 or 6.7
  * 10G NIC
  * 32 or 64GB mem
  * mATX footprint
  * USB switch to control which machine keyboard/mouse goes to
  * MacOS VM with iGPU passthrough
  * Win VM with Nvidia GPU passthrough for gaming

I'm hoping this allows for my dream of having two machines in one without having to dual boot.

On a related note, I'm still annoyed that there does not seem to be a wealth of consumer MBs that have onboard 10G

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by copperx on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @11:41PM (#18351304)

I'm about to try qemu/kvm for a virtualized macOS solution. I have a 1050ti as my primary GPU on Linux (arguably a bad choice).

What card do you recommend for GPU passthrough?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple finally announces an overhauled Mac mini by copperx on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @12:26AM (#18343350)

I've heard that your proposed setup works great. Do it!

[ Parent | on HN ]