Miniature Mac Experiment

Back when I supported Windows systems for a living I used an Acorn Risc PC at home. That computer was my main machine for at least a decade, but with Acorn gone I knew that RISC OS couldn't stay as my everyday operating system for much longer.

Guess I've dated myself a bit there.

Sitting in front of Windows every day, I decided that wasn't what I wanted to see when I left work. It was either going to be Mac or Linux, and the year of the Linux desktop was still twenty-two years in the future for me. "Besides," I thought, "a bit of Mac knowledge might open other doors in the future." From the moment I wiggled the pointer over the Dock and all those shiny icons magnified into view, I was hooked. This might even be fun!

Entering the summer of 2003 the new PowerMac G5 was announced, so I was able to find a lovely PowerMac G4 at a discount. Top-of-the-range dual 1.42 GHz, and probably the most expensive single thing I'd ever bought at the time.

One decade later (this appears to be my cadence for a big system upgrade) it was time to pull a similar move with the Mac Pro. Once the "trashcan" Mac Pro was announced I managed to wangle a deal on the "Mid 2012" model, another dual CPU system with Xeon X5650s at 2.66 GHz.

We purchased quite a few Mac Pro (Late 2013) models at work around then, and like most folk I thought I'd try to be funny.

Aiming High

My plan has always been to buy something great and keep it for ages, upgrading and tinkering with things along the way. But my requirements of a computer haven't really changed a great deal over all those years. Sure, I deal with more video these days, but almost any moderate system in the 2020s can do that well enough for me. And with Mac computers at least, tinkering has become less possible as components have been distilled down into system-on-chip packages.

So I bought a MacBook Pro laptop, which was a mistake. Brilliant machine, but I got a screen I barely used, a battery I just watched degrade, and I barely took it anywhere because it was so expensive and I didn't want to lose it or smack it against a rack cabinet. I've got a cheap Thinkpad running Ubuntu for that.

I'd have liked to buy a Mac Pro (2019) but I don't love the "disconnect everything from the back to open" case design, they're still flippin' expensive, and they're outperformed by 2x multi-core and 3x single-core by the current Mac mini at a third of even a low second-hand price. Plus, this is supposed to be a long-term purchase. It's expected that Intel systems will be dropped from macOS next year.

Miniature Mac

Outperformed by the current Mac mini, eh? For £599? Maybe I should just get one of those.

So I did. Back to proper desktop ARM system after twenty years away.

I picked one up on the day they were released and made an overly long video taking a peek in the box, because I was quite excited to have it. My plan was to see if I could use it for a year as my primary computer. The Mac mini (2024) was released in November of last year, so right now I'm at about ten months.

For six hundred quid, it's really an amazing computer. The processing power in it is wild, and the fan can only ever be heard (even then only quietly) after squishing video for more than a few minutes. Graphical compute? Okay, that's not so brilliant. It's about half the speed of the Radeon VII in my Mac Pro, but that's not something I demand of it. It's been great.

But ten months in, what's gone wrong?

Memory

As has been widely observed, the moment you customise the Mac mini in any way, the value proposition falls off a cliff. My guess was that I could get away with the base model because I'd be pairing it with my dock from the laptop days, which has a big SSD inside for chunky file storage. The laptop had 32 GB of dedotated wam, the old Mac Pro has 96 GB, but I thought I could get away with it. And I did. For quite a while.

Trick is, that little SSD was doing some heavy lifting. While the system was fresh and clean, as I tried to keep it, it worked just fine. But add an app here, a background service there, and before I'd really noticed the memory pressure was constantly 50% and higher, and swap was in constant use.

The most notable consequence was software beginning to hang while data was shuffled back and forth from RAM to SSD and back again. Sometimes a quit-and-restart was the faster (occasionally only, Firefox) way to get an app back into operation. In hand with that was the wear on that internal drive, which had dropped to 96% health in those ten months. It took my server Mac mini (2020) three and a half years to reach the same point, and I'd mistakenly put the iCloud cache on that drive.

I hopped onto Apple's website and clicked to upgrade one to 32 GB. Turns out that extra 16 GB RAM costs £400, more than ten times the cost of buying a stick of DDR5, making the £599 bargain a much less palatable £999. That's insane, which is likely why there are no bargains to be found on eBay either. Nobody's that daft!

This, I decided, was the worst case scenario, so I set my budget to a total of £1000, under the assumption I could get about £450 for the Mac mini, and set off searching for a deal. There had to be something else out there. Some Mac with Apple silicon that has 32 GB RAM, but one I can buy second-hand that doesn't perform too much worse than the M4.

No way. I can have one of those?

Biscuit Tin

What if I were to say that you can have that 32 GB RAM with double the storage, ten-gig ethernet, an extra Thunderbolt 4 port, a couple of additional USB-A ports, an SDXC card slot, the same multi-core performance, roughly 70% of the single-core performance, but far more than double the graphics performance for £5 less?

That's the Mac Studio for you, specifically the base M2 Max version.

Okay, eBay had a £75 coupon running at the time, and at this moment they still do. But even at the full £1069 I'd probably have broken my budget a bit and gone for it.

It's the ultimate biscuit tin of Apple computers. Photos don't do justice to its sheer size and blank appearance. Where the Mac mini is a well-proportioned little jewel, this is a brick.

But what a brick!

Winning Brick

This Mac Studio is silent all the time. The cooling system was clearly built for the snazzier M2 Ultra, because on this one the fans never spin up above idle. Even doing dull stuff, like scrolling big spreadsheets, it's so smooth what with having all that GPU power to spare. That was the biggest surprise; that there'd be any noticeable difference with graphical performance on the desktop. I'd assumed that bridge was well and truly crossed with the M4.

And I thought the slower single-core performance might be noticeable, but for my work it hasn't been in the least. If I'd bought that upgraded Mac mini and tried one of these at some point in the future, I'd have been very disappointed with my choice.

It's even capable of firing up some games, though benchmarks definitely don't tell the whole story there. I'll have a waffle about that at some point, next time I get chance.

Deals To Be Had

It was very close, but it seems my needs still can't quite be met by Apple's entry-level machine. If tinkering were possible, even just throwing in a RAM stick, I'd likely have got away with it. The real surprise was just how expensive that base model could become, and how much of a bargain (comparatively speaking) could be had when looking at the previous generation.

Perhaps the lack of upgradability is heralding a stronger supply of retired systems for IT bargain hunters such as myself; ones which haven't been twiddled with, and might be in better working order than if the previous owner spent more time in there with a screwdriver.

It'll be interesting to see (perhaps in another ten years) where the balance has shifted. Will we all need ridiculous systems to support our virtual assistants, or will the second-hand and last-generation options be even more viable than ever?