These days the only reasons I see to get a desktop are

1. You need some combination of power/thermals or expandability

2. Kiosks, public computers, etc

3. Cost? Maybe?

For pretty much any regular person in my life who's open to a mac, I'd point them towards a MacBook Air

1. can use a smartphone for all mobile tasks

2. see better on a large screen

3. are more comfortable with a mouse than a trackpad

4. don't have to worry about spilling tea on a laptop or dropping it on the floor. A keyboard is cheap to replace if that happens.

The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... maybe my eyesight isn't as bad as I thought it was and everyone else's is a lot worse!?

This new M4 mini is tempting enough that I might try a Mac again... but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

Edit: Adding that both of these machines are now running macOS 15.1 at this time.

But that workaround is “patched” on Apple Silicon and won’t work.

So yes if you have an Apple Silicon Mac plugged into a 1440p display, it will look bad with any sort of “scaling”- because scaling is disabled on macOS for sub-4K displays. What you’re actually doing when you’re “scaling” on say a 1440p display is running that display at 1920x1080 resolution- hence it looks like ass. Back before Apple Silicon, running that 1440p display at “1920x1080” was actually just scaling the UI elements up to appear as though you had a 1920x1080 display- since it was still utilizing the full …x1440 pixels of the display, “1920x1080” looked nicer than it would now.

So brass tacks it’s just about how macOS/OS X would obfuscate the true display resolution in the System Preferences -> Displays menu. Now with Apple Silicon Macs, “1920x1080” means “2x scaling” for 4K monitors and literally “we’ll run this higher-res monitor at literally 1920x1080” for any display under 4K resolution.

I’m almost sure that macOS can’t do that. It’s always done scaling by rendering the whole image at 2x the virtual resolution and then just displaying it on whatever screen you had. For example, for “looks like 1080p” on a 1440p screen it would draw onto a 2160p canvas (and do 2160p screenshots).

The same way someone might not notice motion smoothing on a TV, or how bad scaling and text rendering looks on a 1366*768 panel, or different colour casts from different display technologies. All three took me a while before I could tell what was wrong without seeing them side by side.

Does any of that matter, though? Who bothers with the existence of hypothetical artifacts in their displays they cannot even see?

In short: you probably want to get at least a 4k display anyway, but if you want to delay that, you should buy BetterDisplay. The difference is night and day.

I agree, it works… fine. But sadly more and more elements of modern macOS will look blurry / aliased because they are only made with hi-DPI in mind.

For example all SF Symbols, as far as I know, are not defined as pixel graphics but only stored as vectors and rasterized on the fly. Which works great at high res and makes them freely scalable, but on low-DPI displays they certainly look worse than a pixel-perfect icon would.

> something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux.

If you say it looks fine without it, I don't know what to say.

Best investment you’ll ever make. They’re not all that expensive. Having experienced 4k I feel impoverished having to return to lower resolutions.

I feel it’s a travesty that workplaces spend thousands on fancy desks and chairs and cheap out on bargain basement monitors.

That's what they said. I've been using Retina/HiDPI displays at work for close to a decade now. Still can't say I prefer one over the other. I have no problem seeing pixels, especially now that I've switched to Linux (KDE Plasma) at home. In fact I kind of like being able to catch a glimpse of the building blocks of the virtual world.

What actually does matter (for me) is uniformity and color accuracy. And you can't have that for cheap, especially not in 4K.

I used to dislike Windows font rendering, but it's still better than what macOS gives you for "regular" displays. You can fix it somewhat with BetterDisplay but still...

Using BetterDisplay to force a "2x" resolution will give you better rendering but at the cost of lower usable/effective resolution.

It's pretty funny that you need special hardware to keep nice macOS font rendering to stand in comparison to Windows.

Microsoft has a lot of problems but they are way more pragmatic in their choices giving a "good enough" experience on most hardware. But if you don't follow Apple's choice, your experience can go from great to barely passable in an instant.

Very different approaches, but as I'm getting older, I understand why the one from Microsoft is popular and why they deliver more value.

It comes at a large cost now, either more money than reasonable for one of the few compatible displays or accept a much worse experience, that is just not good for devices of this price. This is why a big affordable iMac is so necessary, but TC's Apple likes money too much to care about their legacy customers.

After such a long history of Mac OS having better font rendering and in general better graphic stack (Quartz, everything is basically a continuous PDF rendering) feels like a big letdown.

The problem is going to improve as more high-DPI displays are released for sale but it has taken a lot of time because most customers like to focus on other characteristics that are arguably more important for other use cases. There are plenty of premium display that are just good to great but you really have to think how it will work if you buy a Mac, most likely you'll need to compromise, feels bad considering the price of admition...

You are saying Mac are expensive but at the same time the potential buyers cant afford even a cheap 4K monitor? They go by like 200$? now. and even is that group exists.. its not like 2560p is torture on a Mac especially with that BetterDisplay HiDPI, I would bet many would not even notice the difference.

The fact is that if you buy an expensive Mac desktop, you need to also buy one of the few expensive displays that can work properly with it, otherwise you get degraded experience or compromise, which is unacceptable for hardware this price. We are in this situation only because of both engineering and commercial decisions from Apple.

Considering that they sold an entry level 27" iMac for a lower price than what the Studio sells for, well into 2021, the position is indefensible. Even if they wanted to make an external display, they didn't have to make it that overbuilt/expensive without any other choice. It is purely profit motivated move, because they want to extract 50% margin on everything, the old iMac was a low margin device and it's really the only reason it doesn't exist anymore. Conveniently all of that is supported by an unnecessary engineering decision (they didn't have to remove subpixel rendering).

Why do you feel the need to defend a mega corp terrible choices, only made to milk you as much as possible.

As for the niche thing, having installed/managed quite a few of those old 27" iMacs, I can tell you they were extremely popular, precisely because they were cost effective. I think you largely underestimate how large the customer base for the 27" iMac was. As far as I'm concerned, it's way less niche than a 650$ headphone, but the difference is that they can milk 50% margin on those while a big iMac at that margin target would put it in a price territory where most wouldn't even consider.

So yes, you can get a cheap display to have a price contained setup, but it's really not a great experience and doesn't make a lot of sense to comprise if you are going to get an expensive computer in the first place. At this rate you can get All-in-one 27" PC for not much more than a standalone display, it's not going to be great but at least it's cheap. If we are going to compromise, at least do it right.

https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-5700U-Displays-Computers-Emul... https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-Desktop-Computer-Graphic...

The concept of the Raspberry Pi is great, but the price point was never where it needed to be. Even when you could get one for around MSRP, doing anything with it was so much added cost. Yeah $35 for a little computer is great, but you needed a power supply, case, microSD card, and whatever hats (the hats have always been overpriced IMO).

You'll be able to sell your M4 mac mini in 5 years for $150 for an instant-cash offer from backmarket or any other reseller, while you'd be lucky to get $30 for the equivalent Beelink or BOSGAME after 6 months on ebay.

My macbook pro 15 inch, mid 2017 is valued at $195 by apple trade in. Bought for 2k iirc.

I owned a 2014 MBP (~$1200?) for a long time and as late as 2019 it was resellable for $500.

Your hypothetical scenario is so absurd you didn't even noticed your catastrophical scenario falls well within any warranty period.

In the meantime, I own cheap miniPCs that I used as daily drivers, and they soldier on for years.

I mean, do you really believe that NUCs from Intel and AMD will simply fall apart if they don't have an Apple sticker on them?

Macs do generally hold their resell value better than PCs, but that doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to usefulness.

I have bought several ThinkCenter small form factor PCs used for about $200 each, and they’ve each been about 5-7 years old. They’re perfectly fine and I can even get new parts from Lenovo, depending on the part and machine. Fantastic deal. They run loads of services in my home.

These are the dollar numbers claimed in the above post.

If you want to put in a bit of elbow grease, you can get a much better deal. M1 Mac Minis in my area are regularly selling for $350+ on FB Marketplace right now.

This reads like the epitome of Apple's reality distortion field. I mean, you're trying to convince yourself that a product is not overpriced when compared to equivalent products and subjecting customers to price gauging by asserting that you might be able to sell it later. That's quite the logical leap.

https://www.cio.com/article/236396/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-...

Nice size. The Beelink has better reviews. Any name brands?

It's a nice little low wattage machine for running some docker containers.

Ryzen one I got 2 years ago for my dad outperforms my M1 pro.

There are many other manufacturers. I am biased towards fanless builds, like those two.

NUCs are also a great option, especially if you replace the case with a fanless Akasa one.

It starts €599,00 for 2(!) core Celeron. Seems absurd when you can get a Mini for an extra €100 (you can run Linux/Windows in a VM and still get a magnitude or few better perf). Or even an used old NUC or something, you'd need to go back very far to get a crappier CPU...

So the actual starting price seems to be €900-1000 (i.e. if you want an i5..)

The Celeron G6900 has a 46W TDP and seems to be around ~20% (multicore) slower than the <10W N100. Seems absurd that they are pushing garbage like that at such prices (even if its the base config)

I am not endorsing any particular brand, but Cirrus7 is not that expensive within the fanless market and the quality of the entire build is very high. They also somtimes offer nice discounts for students and SMEs. There are quite a few comparable brands and also DIY options with cases from Streacom or Akasa. If you want something cheaper, Minix is pretty inexpensive, especially when you take into consideration they offer a decent fanless enclosure.

I still find it weird/confusing why would a reasonably high-end brand be selling configs with such horrible CPUs (especially perf/watt considering the whole fanless thing).

But I suppose they hardly have any options if they want a socketed MB. Laptop chips would probably be a lot better value (both cost and heat wise) but then it's no longer modular and e.g. Lunar Lake doesn't(?) even support non soldered-memory...

Mac Minis, and in general most Apple products, tend to offer great value in the lowest configuration. But upgrades are expensive. It is a bit of the opposite situation. I have not used Macs for very long, and I prefer Linux, yet the cheapest Mini looks quite appealing. When Intel Core 2 CPUs entered the laptop market, it was a similar situation. The cheapest MacBooks offered really great value compared to competition.

I got a BRIX, which gave me nothing but trouble. Its UEFI is very picky with SSD brands, wasted money on a couple now being used as external drives, and in the end not even with Windows.

It is now collecting dust waiting for the city hall disposal round.

Why exactly?

What are a "lot of people" storing on their computers these days? Photos are in the cloud or on our phones. Videos and music are streaming. Documents take up no space. Programs are in the cloud (for the most part).

Install your favorite flavor of Linux then. Beelink devices have a good reputation for being quite happy with a new OS. It's more compatible that the latest Apple devices, that's for certain.

The old Intel machines made excellent Linux boxes, excepting the TouchBar era because the TouchBar sucked (it was possible to install Linux, it would display the fake function keys, they worked, but not a good experience). I've converted two non-TouchBar Mac laptops into Linux machines, with zero complaints, one of them is in current use (not the laptop I'm typing on this instant however).

Now there's Asahi, which as a sibling comment points out, will surely be supported for M4 eventually. This is a great time to buy the M2 Minis and put Linux on them, if that's what you're into. Or you can wait around for the M4 port, whatever suits your needs.

Apple try to avoid being too heavy handed in the lockdown because they know the outrage it would cause from their legacy customers. Boil the frog slowly.

But they most definitely are trying to make the Mac more like an iPhone and they would rather not you install any other OS on it.

The bootloader not being completely locked is more for legacy reasons and multi-macOS support (dev/debug) but if you have any problem with it, you will need (surprise-surprise), another Mac for a DFU restore, just like an iPhone.

I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro and they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros. Being RAM-starved might have something to do with it though.

> but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600.

I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind. For example, most NUCs from the likes of minisforum and Beelink ship with a single SSD but support multiple SSDs, with their cases also having room for SATA drives. They even go as far as selling barebones versions of their NUCs, where customers can then pick and choose which RAM and SSDs to add.

The M4 Macbook Pro will be released next week, what did you mean instead ?

> they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros

I don't think I've seen a single other piece of user feedback online that corroborates this.

> I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind

Mac Mini gets its extensibility through Thunderbolt.

This is squarely in the NUC/SFF/1l-pc territory, and there is plenty of competition here from Beelink and Minisforum.

I just found the Beelink SER7 going for $509, and it has an 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU, 32GB DDR4. The 8845 in the beelink is very competitive[1] with M4 (beaten, but not "easily"), and also supports memory upgrades of up to 256GB.

1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

If it's audio/video, spawning VMs, it doesn't matter much. If it's for generative software, it might become an issue.

You know it's almost like if PC industry hardware designers are not complete morons.

Neither gets you any kind of useful warranty, at least for most people, who are unwilling to deal with overseas companies.

Apple has actual physical stores, and a phone number you can call.

I anticipated this concern, the $509 I gave earlier is the Amazon price that includes the mark-up. The Beelink SER7 costs only $320 on AliExpress.

Modern solid-state electronics are very reliable, most reliability issues for electronics are related to screens or batteries; which desktop computers lack. I guess there was a bad-capacitor problem over a decade ago, but nothing since then. If your risk-aversion for a desktop computer is high, you pay the Apple premium (possibly buying Applecare), or self-insure by buying 2 SER7s for nearly the same price ($640) as one regular M4 Mac Mini and keep the other one as a spare.

But that's aside from the main topic which was the personal and home use case. On that topic you get a decent set of products as well such as Pages/Numbers/etc. and others along with software support for the Mac Mini. I'm guessing the Beelink runs on Linux? That may be hard for some to work with (which is unfortunate since it's really not), or maybe they have to separately buy a Windows license? Something to consider in the comparison.

1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface)

2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer

So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game console.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/

If you need/require Thunderbolt 5, you'll have to step up from $599 to $1399+ for the M4 Pro-based mac mini's.

Basically, the only thing half-working are slow paced story games and slow strategy games (mostly turn based), which ironically require little ressource most of the time (so why pay for cloud service ?!).

Like most things "cloud" conceptually it is seductive but in practice extremely compromised.

• Risk of accidental unplugging.

• Contacts may become wonky over time → see above.

• The need to sacrifice a port (or the portion of one in the case of a dongle).

• Enclosures tend to have annoying IO lights.

• Takes a bit of space.

All of these can be solved, especially when dealing with a desktop that stays in place. Paradoxically, there was never a better time to be modest with internal storage.

Although I will say:

> photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer

Over my dead body :) If there’s one thing I’ll always happily carve out SSD space for, it’s local copies of my photo library!

This is quite possibly the dumbest comment I have ever read on Hacker News. Congratulations!

mini-ITX case start around 3L nowadays...

Apple just charge a lot of money for upgrades, even did when it was trivial to do them yourself, and they're not going to change once they made it impossible to do any kind of internal upgrade.

Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education.

Mac mini with M4 Pro starts at $1,399 (U.S.) and $1,299 (U.S.) for education.

> Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education. Additional technical specifications are available at apple.com/mac-mini.

But I wouldn't recommend it to people who are not used to it.

I tried to recommend Linux, with XFCE setup as basically windows, and people complain. Same for ChromeOS.

> go-to recommendation I'll give to anybody wanting an entry-level desktop

Can anybody get it with educational pricing?

Perhaps you should check out some Beelink and GMKTec Mini PC Systems.

[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/186605/...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-9900K...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+10+Core&id...

You’re comparing a used Tower to an Apple TV sized device.

I wonder why Apple bothers making small, efficient things when you don’t need it?

new is new and has legal ramifications, you cannot compare them unless you're throwing in a trustworthy extended warranty that matches -- and pretty much nothing matches apple in that regard

Why start off by calling people fanboys? It seems like you're looking for an argument instead of a genuine conversation.

The lot of us grew out of gaming in our teens and do real work now.

I don't think Windows fanboys understand real people care about more than numbers.

For half that price I can get a used Dell/HP/Lenovo mico/tiny PC with a full i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 256SSD.

Still good to see. Great for an office PC or HTPC.

Not really. Do a quick googling for cheap miniPCs from brands such as minisforum or Beelink. Years ago they were selling Ryzen5 and Intel i5 with 16BG of RAM for around $300. No "educational software" bullshit either, just straight from Amazon to anyone who bothered to click on a button.