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Purchase thought process

I have a Windows laptop for almost everything: works, movies, games, anything you name it. but I’m not sure why, I’ve been distracted a lot of time with it, it seems like I can’t focus more on the stuff that I need to. I feels like I need to setup a boundary to separate work/entertainment device

I’ve tried dual booting with Linux to separate those “environments” (https://wibenson.com/back-to-linux/), but the OS isn’t just … right, even after a lot of time tinkering with it. I feel like a lot of software on Linux is created to fulfill the needs, but it lacks the final touches that make it whole.

I've considered building a PC, but now might not be a good idea since I might need it to also do LLM well, I believe the Nvidia card is the best option here due to the software and community support, and the 5xxx series might be released soon with god knows what new AI feature that they will bring and walled on their new series, and it will be quite pricey too

then, apple just does a week of product release, one of them is Mac mini

Mac OS with One of the fastest single core in the planet, 16GB of RAM for all base variant,  not make my electricity bill go kaboom

the most important thing

same price with previous base variant

I’m sold

To be honest, this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for quite a time, a time when Apple stops mocking people with its “pro” devices that start with 8GB of Memory. They might not create “Scary Fast” event like last year, but oh boy, we don’t need a big event for a good product, we just need a good product

and by great product, not you iPhone 16 with 60hz refresh rate, not you

also, never touch specs upgrade on the Apple website, they make no sense on the pricing, I might be better off with building a PC if I need something more than 256GB / 16GB of RAM

If I consider the base model price and form factor, with the same price I can get Beelink SER7 with the specs:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (Max Turbo Frequency 5.1GHz, 8C/16T, 16MB L3 Cache)
• GPU: AMD Radeon 780M 12-core 2700MHz
• RAM: 2x SO-DIMM DDR5 5600MHz Slots (Built-in 32GB, up to 2x 32GB)
• Storage: 2x M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe4.0X4 SSD Slots (Built-in 1TB, up to 2x 4TB)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.2, WiFi: WiFi 6 (Intel AX200)

For comparison, the Mac mini’s specs:

• Processor: Apple M4 (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores)
• RAM: 16GB unified memory
• Storage: 256GB SSD
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Ports: Front: 2x USB-C (10Gbps), headphone Back: 3x Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1, ethernet
• Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Dimensions: 5 x 5 x 2 inches

Beelink has double the RAM, 4X more storage, but Macs are much better on CPU and GPU performance, which affect how fast is an application loaded & runs or a webpage is opened.  I’m a proud owner of an early 2015 Macbook Pro that still runs today, albeit out of its time and we can tell that it’s very slow compared to most modern devices, I feel good with the user experience. how snappy everything is and I feel good using this OS.

In the end, two things matter here, which device can bring me more value, and if I’m good with the price that I paid for it.

I’ve considered a Macbook (pro) as my purchase, but I can tell that this Macbook would just sit there on the table, closed, connected to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Maybe a few days on the outside in a month, but with more than twice what this Mac mini cost, I can’t justify that.

On my wishful thinking, in the future, if technology advances so much that I tempted to acquire another device, and this Mac mini is still survives, I think it can be a good homelab server device for it's low energy consumption, or maybe a NAS Server due to its high-speed port

First Impression  

Everything loaded instantly, after 4 generations, most applications already have their silicon version which makes it more efficient than using a translation layer. Trying to check the limit, it can run LLM qwen2.5-coder 7b and stable diffusion quite well, it is not mindblowing fast but I think it's enough for personal use.

❯ ollama run qwen2.5-coder --verbose
>>> golang script to remove disk from a machines and attach it to another
...
...
you're working with other cloud providers or on-premises systems, the steps would be similar but the API calls and
configurations will differ.

total duration:       48.671739791s
load duration:        22.358958ms
prompt eval count:    43 token(s)
prompt eval duration: 394ms
prompt eval rate:     109.14 tokens/s
eval count:           955 token(s)
eval duration:        48.252s
eval rate:            19.79 tokens/s

For the OS itself, not much has changed since the last mac os that I used (Monterey), some new features require another Apple device like an iPad for screen extension or an iPhone for “external webcam”.

Another new feature "Apple Intelligence" which they put everywhere (and not yet available until some months ago) is not usable, I’ve tried to use it several times but this might be the first apple major feature that I might not touch.

for example, if I want to access the notification panel using a keyboard shortcut, I need to ask with a specific keyword or it will just return Google search

for comparison, this is what ChatGPT does on the first try

maybe this will change after Apple integrates Siri with ChatGPT, but .. the features haven’t been released yet