[askafriend]

That's the whole premise of the Mac Mini.

It's the only non-Pro designated Mac that has four Thunderbolt 3 ports. I don't think you'd find this level of I/O in any other machine in this price range.

That incredibly powerful I/O makes for tons of expansion possibilities. Storage, GPU, etc.

(Edited to say "non-Pro designated")

[olyjohn]

Not all Thunderbolt 3 ports are the same. Good chance that two ports are sharing a single PCIe 3.0 4x controller. Since PCIe 3.0 is good for ~7.8Gb/sec/lane, you're looking at two 40Gb/sec Thunderbolt ports sharing about 31Gb/sec of bandwidth on the PCIe bus. Okay, probably not that big of a deal really.

The point being that a "Pro" system might have 4 individual Thunderbolt controllers, each getting their own 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes.

I think that's why the specs say "Up to 40GB/sec" on the page. It sadly doesn't say which controller it has... But I guess my whole point is really moot in practicality. Good luck saturating that much bandwidth.

[askafriend]

Mac mini, iMac Pro, and Macbook Pro all have two Thunderbolt 3 controllers.

The Mac Pro starts with two controllers but can be configured up to six.

The I/O is actually pretty good and provides for a ton of headroom for expansion down the line (I'm thinking primarily storage and GPU for my use-case).

I can see a pretty high powered eGPU saturating the lanes.

[gowld]

4K 60Hz is 8Gbps at 8bit/channel 4:2:0 color. If you go to 16bits and 4:4:4, teach of those double the data rate.

[mayoff]

Currently shipping Macs with four Thunderbolt 3 ports:

* Mac Pro

* Mac Mini

* iMac Pro

* MacBook Pro 16"

* MacBook Pro 13"

[askafriend]

You're totally right, I should have said non-Pro designated Mac.

I must have mixed it up in my head.