The NUC was never going to be a mass market product.
Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t
And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.
It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to get to where the M2 chip is today (including acquisitions) - but it only exists today all because of the A-series SoC in the iPhone: without the iPhone Apple would likely be still dependent on Intel for Mac chips.
The iPhone isn’t going away any time soon - but when/if that day comes, Apple is going to be faced with having to maintain all those iPhone-originated projects with no easy way to walk them down (e.g. switching from Apple Silicon back to Intel - or stock ARM - is going to damage Apple’s credibility for years). I’m concerned Apple might be painting themselves into a corner by continuing to shed businesses it isn’t interested in that might be a useful lifeline in a post-iPhone world, like their XServe hardware - or even their MacPro workstations: Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types - while at the high-end (movies, etc) the great migration from FCP-on-Mac to Avid-on-Windows took place almost a decade ago - and the lack of PCI-Ex GPUs in the 2023 M2 MacPro is further evidence, to me at-least, that Apple is increasingly uninterested in the Workstation market - which leaves them with less access to trend-setting professionals - which erodes their ability to compete, long-term, imo.
Intel killing-off the NUC is unfortunate, but ultimately is not Intel’s core business (chipmaking) which remains their priority. I don’t blame Intel for doing that; but it would be the same thing if Apple killed-off their Mac Studio line (they even look-alike): it isn’t their (current) core-business - but as Apple sheds - or neglects - its old core-businesses (i.e. computers) it leaves them with fewer contingency options.
> Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types
I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case.
But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
I think you're right that Apple has lost a lot of creative professionals over the years who migrated to Windows, and the lack of plug and play GPUs may well keep some of those professionals away.
But I think it's actually precisely the indies that represent Apple's best chance at making inroads into the space again over the long run. If you're a kid trying to bootstrap a new YouTube channel or experimenting with filmography and building a portfolio, it's hard to recommend a better combo than FCP and a Mac Mini for performance and cost.
Except that the bottom end is severly hamstrung for "creators" with just 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage at half performance. Fix both and you are at $1000+ for the Mac mini; even worse in non-$ currencies, e.g. 1150€.
The performance of that one is good and great for stuff like video editing, but it is also double the price.
Side note: minisforum um790 with a current amd laptop chip seems to be competitive with an m2 pro (similar power and efficiency under load, somewhat worse idle) and you can even get 64gb of ram while still being much cheaper than the Mac mini. Q: What are the cheapest macs with 32gb of ram? With 64gb?
The half rate SSD at the entry point is unfortunate, but it takes the SSD performance from great to just fine. I wouldn't call it a deal breaker, especially at the price-point. If you can't splurge a little higher, you'll be ok.
Really, getting the insanely good media encode engines built into the silicon is the point for a small indie creative shop (which is what we're talking about here). The rest of the M1/2 chip is just gravy for them.
That still leaves the ram upgrade and thus 929€ at the current apple store price for 16gb ram, 256gb storage, 1 gbit ethernet. Which again, is an okay deal for a large sized nuc, but at $1000 that is about par for the course.
Again, we're talking about entry level creators. I have been talking purely about the entry level models this whole time. I know what they come with. I know the specs, the upsides, and the downsides.
The entry-level models are great. The best entry-level machines Apple has ever offered. They would slot into any indie-creators workflow very well.
Would I recommend some upgrades if they can afford them? Yes. Some more RAM and more SSD is always a good idea. If they can't afford it? That's fine, the base models are fantastic.
Agree to disagree. Even for "entry level creators" the 8gb ram is a dealbreaker in my view. That ups the effective base price to 900€. Again very good machine, but no surprise that 900€ gets you a good device.
The experience of a low-end memory mac configuration is mostly ok, but lots of people are used to comparing storage and memory directly and have the impression you get 'less for more' when shopping Apple.
In a sense, that's true when you're using badly written non-native software (Slack, Teams, anything Java based ;) ) and you really should try out if your apps fit or upgrade right away. But even an 8Gb mac will happily run iMovie, Garageband etc for a student project or hobby use.
> lots of people are used to comparing storage and memory directly and have the impression you get 'less for more' when shopping Apple.
Yeah, I feel like most people in these conversations are sort of in "grocery store mode" -- sitting in an aisle comparing the ingredients of one jar of mayo versus another jar of mayo from a competing brand.
It's just not that simple anymore with Apple's new SoCs. What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.
I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.
Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.
> What Apple is doing with its combo of core performance, unified memory setup, specialized compute blocks on the SoC, and the overall thermal efficiency which allows all of this to just run and run without throttling all that much--it adds up to way more than the sum of its parts. You really have to use it in your daily life to believe it and feel the difference.
The future that fusion-HSA promised is finally here. Everyone drools over the possibility of PCs getting console-like zero-copy shared memory between the various accelerators, and people want analogous features to be ported onto the current dGPU/CPU paradigm (like directstorage). Fusion-HSA never got there itself, otherwise iGPUs would be able to do zero-copy already, but Apple has done it and the silence is thunderous.
Nobody cares, everyone is just waiting for AMD to implement something competitive and then it'll be cool. Strix Point/Strix Halo I guess.
PC enthusiasts are gonna hate this but I don't think you'll ever be able to really get to a high-performance APU without some kind of soldered memory. Consoles use soldered memory too. GDDR6 vs stacked LPDDR5X is a design call but both are clearly superior to socketed memory, you'd need an Epyc-sized socket to get an equivalent amount of memory bandwidth into an APU, and it'd pull an enormous amount of power for PHYs too. You'd probably end up with like 30w of idle power lol, meanwhile Apple is doing 25W for the whole chip. Crazy stuff.
The practical way that x86 is going to get there is what AMD is doing with Strix/Strix Halo and Intel is doing with Adamantine - you have to go to stacked cache to make up for the lack of memory bandwidth (and perhaps even still go to quad-channel like Strix Halo), and it's still going to use a lot more silicon (expensive!) and use a lot more power than just stacking some LPDDR5X on there and calling it a day. You can't get to 6-8 channels worth of bandwidth from 2 actual channels without some kind of a hack, either you run the pins super fast (GDDR6) or you move the channels on top of the package (LPDDR5X), and both of those need to be soldered. And that's a large part of why consoles and Apple Silicon can deliver a relatively large punch (3060 perf with a good CPU at 25W package power is nothing to sneeze at!) at consumer-friendly prices.
Low-end dGPUs are done for until stacking gets common, but APUs and low-end dGPUs are such an amazing impedence-match for stacking and people can't see it because it says Apple on the box instead of AMD. It grinds me when people ignore or shit-talk really cool advancements in tech just because it doesn't fit their mold or their brand, this is what everyone has been waiting 10 years for.
> I still have a mix of Intel machines and Apple Silicon machines for my work and personal life, and it's just so immediately apparent the latency difference in usage. Apple Silicon feels and runs so much better.
To be fair, some of this is the fact that it's *nix. If you run Linux on your Intel machines it'll be snappier than windows too, my 5700G SFF build is a crazy machine for linux. But honestly having a well-supported *nix ecosystem with first-class vendor support is a good value offering, I think that's why Apple is having a surprising renaissance with computer-touchers right now. Non-techies get the happy bubble OS, techies get something they can drill down to the terminal and do their thing with dotfiles/zshrc. And everyone likes the fact that they're a well-built laptop with incredible battery life and good performance while mobile.
> Sure, would I recommend more than 8GB of RAM? Yes. More SSD is better? Of course. But Apple Silicon in even its thinnest entry-level configuration is an auto-recommend for me. And the prices at that entry-level are so, so reasonable for what you're getting.
I agree with both you and the commenters you're responding to. If the entry-level models will work for your needs, they're value champs. You will not find a similar value offering to a mac mini at the $400 edu pricing for example, if your use-case fits into 8GB/256GB it blows away anything else at that price point. Often there are some deals at bigbox stores or electronics retailers (B+H, Best Buy, Costco, etc) that offer some decent prices on the higher range stuff as well. A loaded-out M1 Max 16" (MK233LL/A) is $3300 on B+H right now (and it was $3200 a couple weeks ago) and you can find 32GB/1TB manufacturer refurb (applecare-eligible) M1 MBPs on Woot pretty regularly. The refurb store also allows you a lot of the flexibility of custom configuration but especially when combined with the edu/veteran discounts it gets you close to the level of that bigbox or refurb pricing. M1 Max 10C/24C with 64GB/1TB is about $2550 for example, that's a pretty nice machine too.
I would really say that if you're a developer you probably do want at least 1TB storage. A lot of things rely on being able to store docker images/pipenvs/node packages/etc in the expected place, and while I'm sure you can configure them to run on an external, it's a pain, and they aren't configured to "float away to the cloud" like apple does with their first-party apps. A 256gb spec is a thin client/cloud terminal only - used 16GB/256GB MBAs are very very cheap compared to the higher models and I have to think some of it is because people try it and learn the hard way 256GB isn't enough for them. This includes me, and while I could never have gotten to "yes" on a loaded MBP or even a 512GB or 1TB upgrade on the MBA, 16/256 definitely did not work the way I'd hoped even as a homebody with a NAS. They really are aimed at momputers and people deeply into the icloud ecosystem where everything can be silently swapped out on-demand.
That said I definitely do feel the complaint others are making that Apple basically does "product tiering by RAM/storage envy", as I once heard someone call it. Really the difference between a MBA and a MBP or between the different chassis sizes is pretty minimal when you equalize for RAM/storage, a decently loaded 15" MBA is at least $1600 and probably closer to $2k, and that also gets you an entry-level MBP or a refurb loaded (32GB/1TB) MBP. $2k for a laptop is a lot but nobody else has the kind of laptop performance and battery life that Apple does right now, so it's kind of a question of whether you're just looking for the cheapest thing that checks the boxes or if you're looking at the offering holistically. Nothing wrong with an XPS or a Latitude or Thinkpad or whatever either, but if you're spending "premium ultrabook/business laptop/gaming laptop with dGPU money" you can definitely get a real nice macbook too and it both has unique selling points and targets a different set of needs.
And Apple has perfected the art of stacking their tiers perfectly so that you can talk yourself into getting the next higher model. That's why they're the most valuable company on the planet, lol.
> But with Apple Silicon, there's actually never been a better price to performance ratio at the bottom end of their lineup, perhaps in Apple's entire history. An entry-level Mac Mini or MacBook Air can give an indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
The frustrating thing is just how quickly value decays with Apple's pricing strategy.
When it comes to the Mac Mini/Studio, outside of some extremely niche applications, it really only makes sense to get base models. It is infuriating how much Apple charges for additional ram.
Yeah, I can agree with you that Apple's general pricing ladder is annoying.
But I'll also say as a software engineer, the MacBook Pro 16 with an M1 Max is the best tool I've ever used for my work.
I dock into a thunderbolt setup with a couple high resolution monitors. I have docker running. Often multiple IDE instances with large codebases. Multiple Chrome windows with dozens if not hundreds of tabs. Zoom calls running screen shares. The machine barely gets warm and I never hear the fans. My prior work laptops would have been howling and begging for mercy.
I often forget that I leave applications running, only to remember later "maybe you should kill those processes". With past work machines, I'd routinely have to hunt for processes to kill to claw back CPU cycles and quiet down the spinning fans.
And then I unplug it from the dock and do all of this at the airport for a few hours. Still silent, cool, and performant. I've never seen anything like it before. And while it's not "thin and light" it's also not the heaviest workstation quality laptop I've ever used.
Not sure how this fits into your personal value propositions, but I can tell you I'd pay far more than I did for this quality of a machine.
> I don't think this take makes any sense. Sure, you can spec out an insanely expensive Mac today. That's always been the case.
Yes, of course - but historically Apple's MacPros (and G3, G4, and G5 PowerMacs before that) had a fairly reasonable entry-prices - but in recent years (especially since 2013) the entry-price of Apple's workstation-tier machines has risen sharply over inflation:
In 2005, Apple advertised[1] the PowerMac G5 for sale at $1999 - adjusted for inflation that's $3100 today, but today's equivalent: the MacPro, sells at an eyewatering $6,999[2]. While in 2013, that $1999 adjusted-for-inflation would be $2400 but the 2013 "trashcan" MacPro started at $3000. Today that would be $3900 - which itself is roughly half the current $6999.
As with the Vision Pro, Apple's pricing is intended to limit demand which accomodates Apple's low-volume, US-domestic manufacturing of the Mac Pro (and everyone else can just get an iMac Pro or Mac Studio) - but this risks making Apple's workstation-class machines so inaccessible they never develop an audience, and the companies that write software for workstation-scenarios (oil-and-gas? AutoDesk? etc) will likely avoid the hassle of porting Win32 or *nix number-crunching software to Apple's hardware. Overall, it feels like Apple is trying to contrive and stage-manage their own workstation swansong - it will be beautiful, but is it wise?
> today's equivalent: the MacPro, sells at an eyewatering $6,999[2].
Others have already called you out on this, but are you being intentionally misleading to bolster your point, or just unaware of the Mac Studio's configuration options versus the Mac Pro?
The Mac Studio is effectively the new Pro. It has literally the same chip (Ultra) as the Pro for thousands of dollars less, and also offers another still very performant configuration (Max) for even less money. The Pro now only serves a very small niche that needs PCIe.
If you were to use the Mac Studio in your price comparisons, your point basically evaporates.
That’s because most people who bought these machines 20 years ago now just buy laptops which are perfectly sufficient for their use cases.
Even if there was a 3000-400 desktop Mac Pro I doubt many people would buy it instead of a MBP.
If you need a laptop anyway what’s the point of getting an another machine which is just marginally faster? That wasn’t really the case 10-20 years ago when laptops weren’t really an option as a primary machine for demanding use cases.
> If you need a laptop anyway what’s the point of getting an another machine which is just marginally faster? That wasn’t really the case 10-20 years ago when laptops weren’t really an option as a primary machine for demanding use cases.
Laptops, even those marketed as "mobile workstations", really can't compete with a proper desktop-experience - yes, a docking-station goes a long way with replicating connectivity options, but (in my life, at least) there's far too many qualiatative and quantiatative benefits to having a "proper" desktop for dev.
----
A major point for me is that I treat my laptops and portables as though they could/will go missing the next day - which means I'm careful to avoid putting irreplacable data on my laptop (and have Bitlocker enabled, which does noticably impact disk IO, even today) - whereas my desktop is a different, and a more trusted, environment. I'm not going to compromise my daily computing experience by using a throwaway-ish environment.
> Laptops, even those marketed as "mobile workstations", really can't compete with a proper desktop-experience
But that's what I've found remarkable about the MacBook Pro 16 with the M1 Max. It absolutely does replicate a desktop computing experience with smooth performance... and it does it even on battery power. As I said in my other post I've just never seen anything like it. It's beyond benchmarks to have an experience that just never hiccups or stalls on a laptop.
> A major point for me is that I treat my laptops and portables as though they could/will go missing the next day
You might need to recognize that you're the outlier in these conversations, then. The world has largely moved to laptops. Only those that truly need a desktop are issued one these days (and again, with the Max / Pro chips, even the need should be called into question for most use cases). Especially with hybrid work policies, I can't really imagine any modern corporate office issuing you a big old tower on your first day.
Honestly, I don't know - but I'm not willing to bet either way: don't forget there's a _huge_ contingent of people at companies of all sizes that figured out VBA in Office by themselves and write software internally at work who don't identify with us, the HN fringe, who only code in the office, on a company-provided desktop.
I've only ever seen (and experienced first-hand) software companies and startups issuing laptops as-standard instead of desktops twice in my whole career, all other companies I've either worked for, or worked with, preferred desktops.
At my current company we interface with a lot of independent contractors and I have noticed that exclusive laptop use is far more common there - but it's still at-odds with my own personal experience.
I would say the entry level workstation line today is Mac Studio (starting at $1999), not Mac Pro, which is strictly top end. The $6999 model of today is not equivalent to the old entry models in any way, unless you just go by bulkiness.
Why "not equivalent"? Both are top-tier workstation options of their times.
But... the UX of PowerMac G5 is lot more pleasant and everything feels lot more responsive than on modern Pros. Probably because of lack of signature verifications, SIP, RPC with Apple servers. But still, those machines _feel_ better.
The Mac pro is just a Mac studio with a "PCI express expansion chassis" bolted on which is of no use to most people. The price says Apple doesn't want to sell a lot of those machines, they probably only fitted a M2 CPU in an old Mac pro chassis to tick off the 'entire range migrated to Apple silicon' promise.
> But... the UX on PowerMac G5 is lot more pleasant and everything feels lot more responsive
Heh, that reminds me of when a friend of mine invited me over to show-off his hand-restored Mac (early-1990s-ish - I think it was a Performa 520 or 575?) and despite the lack of double-buffered graphics there were hardly any painting artifacts but the most striking thing was just how smooth and responsive everything felt - obviously the fact it's a CRT helps a lot.
When the world moved away from computer CRTs to TFTs we also went from 70-85Hz to 60Hz everywhere - and I swear I definitely can "feel" 60Hz vs. 85Hz - so I'm looking forward to monitors gradually shifting towards 120Hz or 144Hz (or higher?) because that definitely helps with responsiveness and snappiness, even with double-buffering and desktop composition.
> indie creator tremendous power and performance per dollar.
Not with 8GB of RAM and Intel and AMD had caught up with performance per dollar. Apple is mainly competing on performance per thickness/battery life/fan volume which are still huge selling points.
The one major flaw I would like to point out here. Don't look at development on apple silicon as only development on Apple silicon. They base the architecture off their A-series processors in their phones, but scaled up. So all the research money for Apple Silicon is also research money for their in house A-series processors for their phones.
> And if Apple “fails” with “trendsetting professionals” which is only a tiny market and the Mac itself is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, does it matter?
Only in that Apple would need a platform to develop for iOS. But at that future Mac failure point that dev platform would just be iPadOS or something. I would be disappointed if Macs went away, Windows is garbage and no Linux desktop experience is as good (for me) as the Mac's but Apple wouldn't really notice in terms of revenue.
However I don't think there's any foreseeable reason for the Mac to go away. Most of the Apple's development effort is shared between macOS and iOS with even more iOS things being ported to the Mac side. Even hardware development is shared between the platforms and will be shared with the Vision platform. Even with 10% of the company's revenues the Mac is nowhere near 10% of Apple's OpEx so it definitely makes more money than it costs to develop and maintain.
As an ex-Appler I'm a bit biased as well. I've used every version of Windows since 3.1 and Windows 8 was the last straw for me.
The Windows 8 UI was schizophrenic and a lot of effort was made to force you to use the newest most broken UI. I even got a touch capable laptop and could rarely use just Metro/Modern apps because they were crippled but the classic UI is just unusable with touch. I could only comfortably use Windows 8 with the third party Classic Shell and avoiding and Metro UI app.
Windows 10 walked some of those missteps back but then became incredibly infuriating with its automatic updates. I tend to leave machines running for weeks or months, sometimes asleep and other times not. Despite me telling Windows to not do updates automatically I'll come back to a machine sitting at the user login window. All my context now gone.
Or more fun Windows having updated in the background and I shut down or reboot without realizing. Depending on the updates I have to wait some unbounded length of time just to use the system again.
Windows sleep support is also still atrocious on most machines I've used. My MacBook I can put to sleep and remove the charger and leave it for a week and it'll have battery left to do work. My Windows work laptop I left asleep but unplugged and the battery was dead after a couple hours.
That's all on top of UI/UX issues I don't like because I've been using OSX for over twenty years. Mac keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures are second nature to me now and using Windows is jarring. Ctrl as a modifier key is unergonomic vs the Command key. Windows' trackpad gestures, especially app switching, are uncomfortable. All of the UI fades and pop-up previews are too distracting and there's rarely a safe place to park your cursor to read something. Everything wants to face in some tooltip or context toolbar under the cursor.
I'm fine if people like Windows but for me it's just frustrating to use. Unfortunately my work laptop is Windows now and I'm constantly annoyed with its UX problems.
In a way it would be logical for Apple to get out of the computer business and scrap all MacBooks and Mac Minis. That they only have around 10% of the market means that most people uses iPhones with non-Apple computers anyway. They could focus on making that experience even better.
Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t
And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.