[wpwpwpw]

As usual, no upgradability. There's evidence that it's possible with SSDs with no loss of performance. Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips and a simple switch. More future landfill material.

[llm_nerd]

>More future landfill material.

I wish Apple devices were more upgradable (and cheaper and more fixable), but I would speculate that Apple devices are the last devices to end up in a landfill (or more aptly, recycled). If you outgrow a device there is a very robust resale market and that machine will happily fill someone else's needs.

Apple devices seem to stay in use for an eternity.

[spiderfarmer]

I used to upgrade my Mac mini every time a new one came out. The resale value was amazing.

[infecto]

Are we going to hear this for every product release ad nauseam forever? Not sure about you but at least for myself, I always trade-in/recycle my products with Apple which I hope closes the loop as close as possible.

[richwater]

Yes because it's so ridiculous to call it a professional machine and not let people put in their own RAM and instead charge $200+ for 8GB

[infecto]

The days where this actually matters is going away. Your opinion is but a tiny minority, for the vast majority it does not matter. $200-800 for a tool that generates an enormous amount of value is incredible, no desire to upgrade it myself. I think about how rarely a PC gaming computer needs to be upgraded these days, by the time it happens its usually a complete overhaul because there is a CPU, Mobo upgrade required.

[fennecbutt]

More pointlessly defending multi trillion dollar companies for their penny pinching. Sure it's useful, but it could be cheaper without so much anti consumer markup. And y'all should be in favour of this yet you've been taught by apple's cult atmosphere to be "happy with what master gives us"

[kissiel]

On a desktop computer it's not as bothersome to have an NVME plugged in to one of the thunderbolt ports.

[Longlius]

Thunderbolt is significantly slower than gen 4 NVME. In the PC world, gen 3 speeds are considered an extreme budget-tier option these days.

[kissiel]

TB5 is 15GB/s. So gen 5 equivalent. I'm not saying there are tb5 enclosures in the wilds, but it's a matter of time. Also if you're bottlenecked by buffered, linear reads and writes so much that there is a difference between 3GB/s and 7GB/s then I envy you. Most of what I choke my desktops and servers with is random IO that wouldn't saturate gen2 :)

[spacedcowboy]

Thunderbolt 5 is very high data transport, but the latency of going through the TB port is still higher than going through PCIe. In a single large transfer, I'd expect TB5 to win, in a millions-of-tiny-transfers scenario, I'm not so sure.

[kalleboo]

Thunderbolt is PCIe though, just over an external interface. That's why eGPUs worked so well. I can't see a situation where the latency of Thunderbolt has a significant impact on disk usage when eGPUs, where latency is so much more noticeable, worked acceptably?

[spacedcowboy]

Actually not.

Thunderbolt provides a tunneling mechanism for PCIe, DisplayPort, USB etc. It's also a mesh network where packets are source-static routed from node to node in the network - so the source sets up the route-to-the-destination and the data packet is transmitted from controller-node to controller-node until it gets to the destination, then it's unpacked and presented as data to the system.

You could see some of this on the venerable "trashcan" Mac Pro, where one of the TB controllers wasn't directly connected to the port, but came through another TB node. The latencies on the ports connected to this TB controller were slightly higher due to the extra transit-time.

Latencies over PCIe are measured in tens of nanoseconds (say 70-100) depending on chipset and how much you pay. Latencies over TB can be several hundreds of nanoseconds. TB presents as a PCI interface, but that's an adaptor-type design pattern, it's not fundamentally PCIe underneath.

[kstrauser]

This is the Mac Mini, their budget desktop. It's not the one targeted at people who would consider Thunderbolt a limiting factor.

[jsheard]

The same limitation applies to all of their higher end machines though, with the sole exception of the Mac Pro.

[PaulRobinson]

Not everyone needs a Lamborghini just to do their weekly grocery shopping.

The vast majority of people who will buy this will be just fine with that level of performance for many years to come.

[kissiel]

Bandwidth vs latency is like a pickup vs lambo I guess. And what the tb limits is the bandwidth, if you catch my drift (although lambos are awd and poor at drifting). So the actual performance that matters (the snappiness) is still there.

[buildbot]

It does not apply to memory. It’s much harder to maintain signal integrity. 200+ 4GHz signals.

[wpwpwpw]

If a CPU is socket-able, so should memory chips be.

[buildbot]

It won’t ever be able run as fast as a soldered system.

Have you installed a server CPU?

It’s really easy to fuckup and lose a few channels of memory due to the contact being bad. Right now I’ve got a 3647 Xeon phi cpu that’s refusing to train dimm a1 for _reasons_

That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have.

Here’s an example BGA socket: https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/bga-sockets/

Not something that’s going in a tiny laptop chassis.

[richwater]

People running a single desktop machine are way better served by being able to upgrade RAM modules than worrying about single contacts being bad between the RAM stick and motherboard.

[buildbot]

Yes? I wasn’t making a claim that it was better to solder everything for everyone. I’m saying the overlap between most Apple users and those people is low.

[fennecbutt]

Give definitive evidence that soldered is faster, in my experience with decent contact this is not true at all. I think the general confusion is around typical ram sticks with a controller onboard and much fewer io broke out compared to the raw ram without controller which is often what you get soldered, with more io broken out.

The bga socket you chose is more for test or industrial hardware, versus desktop cpu sockets which are much slimmer and consumer friendly.

Really disingenuous, imo. It's absolutely possible for Apple to make these chips replaceable, using the heat spreader as the retaining plate.

[sliken]

Sure, they are. Buy a Epyc or Xeon, burns 200+ watts, has 8 to 12 channels, which requires 8 or 12 dimms, which are barely fitting in 19" racks (next gen are moving to 21").

Or you could get a m3 max, run the memory at twice the speed, still have a 512 bit wide memory bus, and have a 10+ hour battery life. Presumably similar with the m4 max, rumors claim later today (Wednesday).

How much do you want that socket?

[jonas21]

Apple puts the memory, CPU, and GPU all on the same chip. This generates less waste as you only need a single package and socket, and uses less energy during operation.

[aseipp]

And many desktops do that today, but like everything it has tradeoffs, such as peak bandwidth and power usage. DDR sockets inherently make this sacrifice, integrated designs will always have wider buses, higher bandwidth, etc. That's also why you don't get sockets for your GPU memory, either. It's a design tradeoff.

[wpwpwpw]

-> It won’t ever be able run as fast as a soldered system.

Yeah, just take a look at PCIe 5 and it's 512GB/s of bandwidth.

-> Have you installed a server CPU?

Yeah, and none of the problems you mentioned.

-> That’s not an experience Apple wants any user of their products to have.

Yeah, just look at the older macs with upgradable components and the easyness you had replacing them... So, instead of making it easier, let's just remove it altogether.

[aseipp]

PCIe is a serial interface, not parallel like modern DRAM interfaces. They're completely different at a hardware level, the electrical design constraints are completely different, the latency characteristics are completely different. I think you are just throwing words and numbers out and don't really know what they mean at all.

[wmf]

LPCAMM2 solves this.

[piva00]

> Probably the same would apply to memory, maybe with replaceable memory chips

The memory chip is embedded in the SoC, how do you envision a way to do replacement of memory chips with this design/architecture?

[jsheard]

As discussed in the iMac thread yesterday, LPCAMM2 makes it possible. There are LPCAMM2 modules with the same 7500 MT/s spec as the M4s integrated memory, and two of them running in parallel would match the M4 Pro.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra...

Even if Apple wanted to support modular memory, which they obviously don't, the ultra-tiny form factor of the new Mini would probably still rule it out though. Soldering the memory down is still more compact.

[Rohansi]

No way the new Mini is too small to allow upgradability. You can buy a Windows mini PC that is not only smaller than the new Mini but also allows upgrading both RAM and SSD. And that's without using LPCAMM2 - just normal SO-DIMMs. (Example: https://trigkey.com/products/trigkey-green-g4-16g-500g-n100)

[wtallis]

That system you linked to is an extremely poor example. It relies on an external power brick, is incredibly underpowered, only gives one PCIe lane to the M.2 slot limiting it to ~800MB/s according to their specs (meaning it's only PCIe gen3), and has only one SODIMM slot (meaning it's operating with just a 64-bit memory bus, half the bandwidth of mainstream consumer PCs).

It's basically a 12 year old PC shrunk into a tiny box and low power budget.

[Rohansi]

Sure, it's not on the same performance level but this isn't the only option. There is a wide range of options available in the same form factor. Here's something higher end: https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-mini-pc-p3-amd-ry... Probably still uses an external power brick but I imagine that's just to reduce costs.

My point is that this size of device is already available with upgradability so the form factor isn't the issue. Apple is significantly better at engineering products than these random companies and they could surely have made this new Mac Mini upgradeable. I do understand why they wouldn't want to though!

[sliken]

Sure. Generally with 1/2 the memory bandwidth (or usually less), a worse iGPU, and slower CPU.

That N100 is an Intel Atom, quite a bit of a downgrade from the M4 with the fastest CPU cores out there.

[sliken]

M4 pro uses LPDDR5X-8533.

[wpwpwpw]

I am not talking about DIMMs. Talking about the chips themselves. I am pretty sure they don't make different APUs for different memory sizes, it's just a fuse or something like that. If CPUs can use sockets, so do memory chips.

[buildbot]

Nope. Not reliable ones.

The pin density on a bga memory is like, 0.3mm for the type typically used by apple. That’s 200 0.3mm pins that have to line up and work at 4GHz and survive you dropping it 5 feet.

[berbec]

It is possible but very hard and dangerous. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

0: https://www.chongdiantou.com/archives/73084.html

[massysett]

For drives at least, the upgrade path is the USB-C port.

[999900000999]

I don't think these even boot once the SSDs die.

Apple knows how to make money, I can buy a quality 4TB Nvme for 300$( you can definitely go lower if you want to risk it ). The upgrade to 4TB on the M4 Pro Mini is 1200$(it's not supported on the base model) , on top of 1400$ for the actual computer.

It I had to guess, most of Apple's margin is on users riding the pricing ladder up into the stratosphere.

I had an experience a few years ago at an Apple store, where this clerk refuse to sell me the cheapest m1 MacBook Air. There's probably some direction from up top which is trying convince people they need the more expensive Macs.

[hggigg]

I doubt the internal SSD is going to die before the power supply gets cooked.

If it does, you can get the SSD chips replaced. That is well proven now. Granted it needs a specialist with rework kit but they are starting to become more common now that it's an issue.

[kstrauser]

> I don't think these even boot once the SSDs die.

All Macs that I know of let you configure the boot drive. I had an older Mac Mini with a spinning HDD. I added an external SSD, set that up as the boot drive, and never touched the slow drive again. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't do the same with this.

[orangecat]

M-series Macs require a functioning internal drive in order to boot off external storage: https://tidbits.com/2021/05/27/an-m1-mac-cant-boot-from-an-e...

[kstrauser]

Well, I guess I'm extremely surprised, then. I don't care for that one bit.

[999900000999]

I can't find an official source, but from what I've heard the newer Macs need to boot from the internal SSD. https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/CZOHuFQcy4

[kersplody]

Correct, the stage 2 bootloader and system firmware must be on the SSD. The OS can then boot from an external volume.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...

[PaulRobinson]

Wow, are you still using your original 386DX board, with minor upgrades along the way? /s

I actually think Apple's way of managing upgrades isn't as harsh as many people think.

The first thing to get to sustainability is to use less. If you don't need the hardware to make hardware easily upgradable, you simplify the hardware and use less of it. This is one of the reasons Apple do it.

Secondly, they're using a lot of recycled material in this thing. Their lede line on it is that its carbon neutral. Show me another desktop PC like this that can make that claim.

Thirdly, the "half-life" of a Mac is kind of insane. When I was buying Thinkpads, Dells, and the like, I'd get 2-3 years down the line and I'd "need" to upgrade the whole thing. I've got a 2017 Mac Mini, and an 2015 MBP in regular use. I have a G4 iBook that was in active use by my parents from 2004 until _this Spring_ - they only gave it up because they couldn't upgrade Chrome on it any more, so it's about to become a retro Linux term for me, because the hardware is still sound (albeit too under-powered for anything modern).

And lastly, they take old hardware in and recycle it back into the new stuff in the first step. They give relatively decent trade-in prices, and are one of the few consumer brands doing that.

Given that they're shipping it with 16GB of RAM, which is fine for my needs, I think I'm confident in saying I could buy one, use it for 5-8 years, and then get it recycled when I upgrade at that point, while most PCs with upgradable RAM being sold today are going to landfill within 4 years, perhaps.

[shantara]

I think you’re giving PCs way too little credit compared to Macs. AM4 motherboards from 2017 can have 5800x3d or 5700x3d CPU installed, the former of which is still #2 in the majority of gaming benchmarks beating anything Intel can offer for a fraction of price and power consumed.

[seec]

A 2004 G4 iBook has been unsupported for any software for decades, let alone Chrome who was first released in 2008. I don't know if they actually ever made an official PPC version of Chrome but I doubt it.

You are a liar but a bad one.

You can like Macs, you can prefer it, you can rationalise the added cost any way you want. But the fact is, Macs do not have any more useful life than PCs if your price matches them. You play the role of the typical Apple fanboy who compares a 1.5k MacBook to a random crappy Lenovo that was on sale for less than 500. The Mac is better/longer lasting. It's almost as if price convey some sort of information on quality...