Apple M4 Macs: iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro

pendragon1 said:
perfectly fine it theyre out of warranty, but if not, it voids whatever is remaining. done plenty of lid/screen replacements on all sorts off laptops...
we put apple care on every single teachers macbook and probably 80% use it. it saves us while under the 3 year warranty. then i start swapping them, batteries too.
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It makes sense if you're not wanting to do the work, but Apple Care is like $200 for 2 years and a replacement screen is $300 new. With Apple Care you pay $250 for a screen plus $200 for the Apple Care, which means you're in the hole for $450. This is made worse because it's an Apple product as replacing the actual screen from the lid is cancer, which is why most people opt to just replace the lid. The Asus Rog laptop from 2024 has a screen that only costs $140 to replace, because again the screen isn't cancer to replace from the lid. Buying Apple is kinda where the problem starts, and Applecare has just extended that problem. Also Europe enforces a 2 year warranty which makes this exclusively an American solution to American problems. Makes sense since Apple products sell much higher in American than Europe. Also, opening up a product to repair does not void warranty, as this has been mentioned many times before. If Apple voids your warranty because of this then this just makes Apple a bigger dick, or more of what they are already.
Shoganai said:
No, this is what you do. You make assumptions and put words in people's mouths, which leads to irritating conversations. Your main means of communication leans toward straw man nonsense.
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If someone told me they brought their car to the dealer constantly for repairs under warranty, I might just avoid that car brand. Great that the warranty is there, but I hate having to have things repaired all the time.
Are you trying to convince me? Or you?
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When I criticize something then it's constructive. I'm not going to sit here and play as a mascot and fight for a team. When I criticize then that's because I want something done about it. Nothing is perfect and things can always be made better. Wouldn't it be nice if Apple put M.2 slots and allowed you to use universal SSD storage? Wouldn't it be nice if Apple didn't charge you for more ram and SSD to the point where it's cheaper to buy two base model Mac Mini's for the price of one? Wouldn't it be nice if Apple donated effort to Asahi Linux so that Apple users could use Linux if they wanted? Stop pretending the Mushroom kingdom is fine and you need to spread propaganda to keep your teams spirits high. We are consumers and we deserve better products.
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DukenukemX said:
It makes sense if you're not wanting to do the work, but Apple Care is like $200 for 2 years and a replacement screen is $300 new. With Apple Care you pay $250 for a screen plus $200 for the Apple Care, which means you're in the hole for $450. This is made worse because it's an Apple product as replacing the actual screen from the lid is cancer, which is why most people opt to just replace the lid. The Asus Rog laptop from 2024 has a screen that only costs $140 to replace, because again the screen isn't cancer to replace from the lid. Buying Apple is kinda where the problem starts, and Applecare has just extended that problem. Also Europe enforces a 2 year warranty which makes this exclusively an American solution to American problems. Makes sense since Apple products sell much higher in American than Europe. Also, opening up a product to repair does not void warranty, as this has been mentioned many times before. If Apple voids your warranty because of this then this just makes Apple a bigger dick, or more of what they are already.

If someone told me they brought their car to the dealer constantly for repairs under warranty, I might just avoid that car brand. Great that the warranty is there, but I hate having to have things repaired all the time.

When I criticize something then it's constructive. I'm not going to sit here and play as a mascot and fight for a team. When I criticize then that's because I want something done about it. Nothing is perfect and things can always be made better. Wouldn't it be nice if Apple put M.2 slots and allowed you to use universal SSD storage? Wouldn't it be nice if Apple didn't charge you for more ram and SSD to the point where it's cheaper to buy two base model Mac Mini's for the price of one? Wouldn't it be nice if Apple donated effort to Asahi Linux so that Apple users could use Linux if they wanted? Stop pretending the Mushroom kingdom is fine and you need to spread propaganda to keep your teams spirits high. We are consumers and we deserve better products.
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I’m officially going to put you on ignore. Good luck!
 
pendragon1 said:
dude, its fucking insane...
but when a macbook pro sits in a litre of almond milk for the weekend, applecare is a god send..
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Well it was in my tote bag and my “water” bottle was leaking and I didn’t know.

Liquid damage isn’t so bad, Apple doesn’t really care more than not. The one that’s harder to explain is when the “special” kid in class has a flip out and tosses it across the room. Or in that one case at the IFP at the front of the room.

Viewsonic… MacBook broke in 2, that touchscreen wasn’t even skuffed.
 
DukenukemX said:
and a replacement screen is $300 new.
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The Chinese knockoff screen for the MacBook Pro A2819 (M3 version) is damned near $500 CAD alone.
And it requires some special tools to deal with with a decently high risk of destroying everything above the hinge.
Apple care plus is $300 CAD. So in my case I can buy Apple care for less than the basic parts for the common failure points.
And sadly the number of people who grab their open laptops by the screen with 2 or 3 fingers and Vulcan Neck Pinch a dead spot in their screens is insane.
 
Lakados said:
The Chinese knockoff screen for the MacBook Pro A2819 (M3 version) is damned near $500 CAD alone.
And it requires some special tools to deal with with a decently high risk of destroying everything above the hinge.
Apple care plus is $300 CAD. So in my case I can buy Apple care for less than the basic parts for the common failure points.
And sadly the number of people who grab their open laptops by the screen with 2 or 3 fingers and Vulcan Neck Pinch a dead spot in their screens is insane.
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You should be charging a deposit on people who do this stuff.
 
Lakados said:
Apple and Dell are closer to 3 weeks but yes.
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Well, I was just adding some incentive.

The one time we needed repair services that I know about at my last job, NBD service provided a laptop mobo replacement for (as far as we know) a non-user-at-fault machine.
 
I’ve had the weekend to use my MacBook Pro (14-inch, base M4, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD).

Yeah, the design is extremely familiar, but good grief the performance is wonderful for the power category. It just doesn’t quit… and that includes the battery, which can clearly last for two workdays in my use case (lots of Photoshop, many browser tabs that include some intensive web apps, Slack, music and the like).

Something I didn’t think I’d appreciate as much as I do: the Center Stage webcam. It looks good, but more importantly I stay in frame if I have to lean to the side for whatever reason. I’m surprised it took this long to reach the Mac.
 
Aurelius said:
I’ve had the weekend to use my MacBook Pro (14-inch, base M4, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD).

Yeah, the design is extremely familiar, but good grief the performance is wonderful for the power category. It just doesn’t quit… and that includes the battery, which can clearly last for two workdays in my use case (lots of Photoshop, many browser tabs that include some intensive web apps, Slack, music and the like).

Something I didn’t think I’d appreciate as much as I do: the Center Stage webcam. It looks good, but more importantly I stay in frame if I have to lean to the side for whatever reason. I’m surprised it took this long to reach the Mac.
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It really is a pleasant experience. It always feels so horrible going back to Windows to do anything work related ... so I don't.
 
Aurelius said:
I’ve had the weekend to use my MacBook Pro (14-inch, base M4, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD).

Yeah, the design is extremely familiar, but good grief the performance is wonderful for the power category. It just doesn’t quit… and that includes the battery, which can clearly last for two workdays in my use case (lots of Photoshop, many browser tabs that include some intensive web apps, Slack, music and the like).

Something I didn’t think I’d appreciate as much as I do: the Center Stage webcam. It looks good, but more importantly I stay in frame if I have to lean to the side for whatever reason. I’m surprised it took this long to reach the Mac.
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What color did you get?
 
Quiz said:
What color did you get?
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Silver. Not as cool, but also not as fingerprinty. I wouldn't mind Space Black as it's not that bad from what I've seen first-hand, but silver is just likely to last longer. That and it definitely gives me classic Mac vibes.
 
Mine delivered this morning and, well, it's terrific. 16" M4 Max 16-core, space black, 64GB, 4TB replacing a M1 Max with the same RAM and storage. Got the nano-texture screen.

First impressions: very, very fast, and I absolutely love the panel finish. Form factor is 100% identical to my M1 Max but that also means all the sleeves etc. are 100% interchangeable. Haven't had much time to play around but I did install WOW on it since I've been tooling around in it on the M1 Max in recent weeks and it's dramatically faster, I can say that much. Overall, I love it.
 
A few updates after kicking the tires a bit more:
- The performance is pretty damn impressive. I let Cinebench 2024 run a few times and am generally getting around 16,500 running it in GPU mode (Metal). This is pretty astonishing since the Threadripper desktop with a RTX4090 desktop card is running the same benchmark hits around 20,800 (CUDA) and I should note that the laptop is pulling about 100W while the desktop is averaging roughly 5x that. Very impressive that this laptop is keeping close to a mildly OC'd 24 core thread ripper CPU and a liquid cooled RTX4090.
- The laptop fans get LOUD when in performance mode. Like "whoa, it's been a long time since I heard fans this loud in a laptop" loud. It's fairly acceptable when the GPU is under full load, but when the CPU is under full load? Wind blower. I'd actually say "I'm leaving the room until it's done" loud.
- I don't think I could overstate how much I love this screen. Went out on the patio and... WOW. Bright and beautiful. It reminds me like a very, very modern version of those hyper bright outdoors displays you sometimes could get on say an old school Panasonic Toughbook, taking that rugged, bright, outdoor "I can read this in the glaring sun" display but with far higher resolution, color fidelity and contrast. I have a Studio XDR display with this coating at work, and I don't like it. I have used an iMac Pro with the coating at work and again not liked it. I have plenty of windows laptops with matte surfaces and don't particularly like those as well. However here it just seems to work.
- The upgraded front camera is a significant improvement. The previous front cameras were (IMO) rather chintzy given the cost of these devices. The new one is exactly what I'd expect. Center Stage is great, but resolution seems to be much better as well.
 
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Aurelius said:
Silver. Not as cool, but also not as fingerprinty. I wouldn't mind Space Black as it's not that bad from what I've seen first-hand, but silver is just likely to last longer. That and it definitely gives me classic Mac vibes.
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I'm liking the black. Until now I've had a 16" M1 Max for personal and 16" M2 Max for work, both the same size and same silver color, and there have been many a day that I took the wrong laptop to work or took the wrong one on a personal vacation trip. So this time I got the space black and I do like the look. It's irritating that while the charging cable is a lovely matching black, the power brick is the same old rounded plastic shiny white box.

Happy to run any benchmarks etc. anybody wants me to try.
 
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uOpt said:
Would you run a Common Lisp benchmark for me? Do you have homebrew or macports?
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Send me a link and I'm happy to try running it. I can install homebrew though I'm not an expert. The laptop is new with a fresh install and I'm not using it for anything serious yet so I'm happy to toss some stuff on it and try.
 
sphinx99 said:
Send me a link and I'm happy to try running it. I can install homebrew though I'm not an expert. The laptop is new with a fresh install and I'm not using it for anything serious yet so I'm happy to toss some stuff on it and try.
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Will send p.m. It is a custom run of the Screamer Common Lisp package from quicklisp. I'll prepare a web page with the required bits when used with homebrew.
 
Still happy with the MacBook Pro so far. I can tell I'll actually enjoy using it on the road, which I couldn't say with some of the recent Windows laptops and detachables I've tried or seen as of late. (To be clear: I've used some genuinely good Windows portables, they just tend to wilt under my demands.)

And knowing how the M4 performs in real life, the Mac mini with the regular M4 chip increasingly seems like a great deal if you're looking for a desktop... at least, so long as you have modest storage needs or don't mind buying an external drive. It can handle virtually any common uses, including some casual (and increasingly not-so-casual) gaming and AV editing.

Yes, the Best Buy clearance special will do a lot of this... but that system will frankly suck. Slower, noisier, larger, and not even necessarily more affordable when you look at the real-world costs. There's an HP Pavilion desktop discounted to $600 as I write this, for example. It looks tempting with a Ryzen 7, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD... but then you realize the CPU is multiple generations old, there's certainly no Thunderbolt (even the USB-C spec it supports is outdated), and its wireless support tops out at Wi-Fi 5. About the only advantage is that there's a cheap keyboard and mouse combo in the box.

Part of this is no doubt because desktops have generally fallen out of favor compared to laptops. Even so... who'd have thought that a Mac mini would be a better deal than even some of the more affordable Dell and HP machines?
 
Holy crap I just realized how small the new Mini is, it's barely larger than the current AppleTV units
 
zehoo said:
Fan noise. I wasn’t buying mine for a few months anyway, this makes me want to wait for the studio. The drawbacks of a smaller chassis.


View: https://youtu.be/Kg6aCBl3_Gc?si=DQ-d1PHPxiCobV4O
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Sure, if you have really, really good hearing, fan noise would be a thing. However, I have to say I have heard no fan noise on mine, especially when compared to my Windows PC that I built.
 
ManofGod said:
Sure, if you have really, really good hearing, fan noise would be a thing. However, I have to say I have heard no fan noise on mine, especially when compared to my Windows PC that I built.
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Years of heavy music did a superb job of "assisting" my ability to ignore background noise.
 
The guys at Phoronix actually did real benchmarks of the Mac Mini M4 against Linux machines running x86. They can't install Linux on it because Asahi Linux isn't even working on M3's let alone M4's, so this turned into M4+MacOS vs x86+Linux. Base model M4 so no M4 Pro or Max here. The only benchmarks it seems to win is power efficiency, and even there the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was nearly matching it in most tests, and in some occasions even beat it. Hopefully he gets his hands on an M4 Pro, because that's when shit gets real. I'd like to see CachyOS used instead of Ubuntu 24.04.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux
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DukenukemX said:
and even there the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was nearly matching it in most tests
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Looking at bench on each page ?

Code compile, ffmepg / LLVM
Hx370: 1657 / 16043 joules
M4: 473 / 5707 joules

About 3 times more energy to do the compilation

7-zip
m4: 208 joules
HX 370: 1053
About 5x more energy

C-ray: m4: 2513 joules HX370: 7880
3x time more energy

V-ray: 808 vs 1739, 2xtime more energy on the HX
Indigo: 797 vs 1405, 1.8 times or something like that

Quantlib
No hx370 but 10,640 joules vs 54,475 for the 9700x

Apache: 573 vs 1687 joules, 3xtime more energy for the 370hx
DuckDB: 1359 vs 2821, 2xtime more energy for the 370hx

x265 video: 148 vs 269, 1.8x
Kvazaar: 479 vs 443, first test where they are close that I see
FLAC: 64 vs 137, 2x for 370hx
avifenc: 2086 vs 3063, 1.5 time for energy for the hx370
jpeg-xl: 590 vs 1082, a bit less than twice

Are you sure about the nearly matching ? The article in question conclusion say:

But where the M4 was really a standout winner was in the performance-per-Watt with the power efficiency typically well in the lead compared to the tested x86_64 desktop processors on Linux.

Which seem to be true looking at the number, not close at all.
 
DukenukemX said:
The guys at Phoronix actually did real benchmarks of the Mac Mini M4 against Linux machines running x86. They can't install Linux on it because Asahi Linux isn't even working on M3's let alone M4's, so this turned into M4+MacOS vs x86+Linux. Base model M4 so no M4 Pro or Max here. The only benchmarks it seems to win is power efficiency, and even there the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was nearly matching it in most tests, and in some occasions even beat it. Hopefully he gets his hands on an M4 Pro, because that's when shit gets real. I'd like to see CachyOS used instead of Ubuntu 24.04.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux
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Phoronix (Michael) was comparing an 8-core Apple CPU that costs $600 for the whole system with 16-core and greater x86 chips that cost $600 for the CPU alone.
 
DukenukemX said:
10 core Mac Mini and it goes sky high in price if you add more ram and storage.
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It's still the entry-level Mac mini. Yes, you're right that more RAM and storage balloons the price quickly, but you realistically don't need more than 16GB of RAM for most uses, and even storage beyond 512GB is less necessary than it once was.

And looking through Phoronix's tests, it's notable that a base M4 is drawing even with or beating the latest-generation AMD and Intel desktop chips in some tests. It does get its ass kicked in some benchmarks, but as has been mentioned... it's a $600 Mac mini competing against PCs where the CPU by itself sometimes costs as much as the entire Mac. Even the middling chips often cost half as much.

Let's also not forget that some of these tools are ones you wouldn't realistically use on a Mac. Am I really going to rely on x265 or Kvazaar for video encoding when I can use iMovie (for free) or, if I'm a creative professional, Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro? I don't think so.
 
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