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  3. Mac Mini has come of age?

  • Mac Mini has come of age?

    MackerM
    MackerM
    last edited
    last edited

    At last! Apple now offer a Mac Mini fit for hefty duties in soft-scoring - as a very worthy slave if not solo as a pretty powerful self-contained system.

    The max memory option for the Mini M4 Pro (the top-spec version) is 64GB, so now the Mini can host a seriously big chunk of a large orchestral template - or even an entire template in many cases.

    I've been waiting years for the Mini to come of age. Now it has - pretty much.

    What I didn't see coming is the Mini's 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports! No doubt it'll be a while before we see 3rd party TB 5 hubs or SSD enclosures, but for now I see those TB 5 ports as some very nice future-proofing.

    Even so, Apple are charging £100 extra for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet option. Lol. Cheeky monkeys!
  • P
    P

    I share your enthusiasm, and I was waiting for someone else to post about it. For me, it was the most invigorating read of an Apple announcement in the last several years.

    OWC touts this Thunderbolt 5 external SSD, currently listing it as available in "mid-November 2024" however changing that arrival date may prove. The 4TB model is 600 dollars.

    And let us further celebrate the reduction of hard drive space needed as VSL recompiles our libraries. So we may fairly anticipate the lion's share of our current libraries fitting on a 4TB, getting piped into a Mac Mini at an alarming (or at least claimed) 6000 MB/sec.

    Also -- and I'm not geek enough to know the particulars -- but I'm guessing the bump in GPU power might add to Vienna Power House capabilities.

    As someone who might jump to all of this from an Intel Mac mini mid-2018, it's a hopeful time.

    https://www.owc.com/blog/powerful-new-owc-envoy-ultra-thunderbolt-5-ssd-wins-cined-best-of-show-award-at-ibc-2024

    P.S. Yeah, 100 extra for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet... pretty retro, huh?

  • MackerM
    MackerM
    last edited
    last edited

    Thanks for your reply and the link, Plowman.

    Oh ho! Major kudos to OWC for their super-quick adoption of TB5. I've always liked their engineering attitude - good old-fashioned integrity in both design and build with even the most up to date materials.

    If I go for the Mini M4 Pro 64 GB it'll be as a VEPro slave for a while. I'm not yet ready to retire my excellent old 2017 iMac (stuck at Ventura now and forever), though I'm starting to feel the relentless pressure of Apple (and others) trying to drag us semi-forcibly along an expensive helter-skelter ride into ... erm ... 'the future'.

    I love Apple hardware; the Mini inside is just beautiful. But on the other hand, I have to wonder where they're getting the software kids from. Happily been with Apple hardware since the first Mac in '84, but nowadays I'm getting really sick of their software. Maybe it's written somewhere:- "junk food must be accompanied by junk software". Lol.

    Well, I have to face it: a Mini would be my insurance against critical incompatibilities with all the latest junkware for several years to come.