
Apple's Mac Mini Is Now Three Years Old, No Refresh Date in Sight - bangonkeyboard
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/16/mac-mini-now-three-years-old/
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pippy
The lack of effort on the Mini line demonstrates Apples focus on profit over
its customers. Boosting desktop market share, gaining new customers, while
still operating a profit are all worthwhile focusing on. Given they're all
long term goals, it's well worth while investing in.

I'm disheartened with what Apple did with the Mini line up. I love the form
factor.

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walterbell
Apple should create a “Mac Mini Retro”, an update of the 2012 Mac Mini.

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convolvatron
the 2008 minis would still be perfectly useful machines if they still got
browser upgrades, or better yet OS upgrades

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SyneRyder
They'll probably run Windows 10. I've got a couple of 2006/2007 MacBooks that
I ended up installing Windows 10 on, since Apple long ago stopped making OS
updates for them. (One was stuck on Snow Leopard, but still runs Win 10 fairly
well, especially any Win32 apps.)

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joshmn
Hackintosh Minis have never been more popular.

For those who are weary: I've made my Hackintosh Pro a daily-driver for the
last 3 years without issue. i7/4770k/32GB/Gigabyte mobo/1070/1TB SSD. Even
seamlessly upgraded from 10.9 to 10.10 to 10.11 just like you would any other
Mac.

Happy to answer any questions.

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ac29
It's not too hard to pirate Windows either. That doesn't make it a viable
option for individuals, or, especially, businesses who don't want to engage in
copyright infringement.

If you make your living even in part by using a Hackintosh, that is, at best,
hypocritical.

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joshmn
I have a trashcan pro that sits and collects dust (I paid more than $3k for
it). Then I needed to upgrade the video card and was left SOL. My Hackintosh
Pro is simply my "backup". I don't feel the need to further justify my
decision, but I've supported Apple for a very long time. I'm simply one of the
many buyers who they've seem to leave behind.

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Recurecur
"I'm simply one of the many buyers who they've seem to leave behind."

Exactly. It's fairly mindboggling that a company with Apple's resources isn't
doing a better job at producing a sufficient lineup of machines.

Minis with CPUs up to quad core i7s would be great. Apple also ought to
introduce a mini-tower with (gasp) upgradable components. That is in fact the
"greenest" type of computer, as it won't be recycled for much longer. Apple
could then, once again, legitimately claim to offer some of the most powerful
consumer systems - something it's a long way from at the moment.

Finally, Apple should offer a true "pro" laptop with a Xeon processor, lots of
ECC RAM, and a choice of "pro" graphics chips. HP, Dell, and Lenovo all do.

Apple is the last company left with a viable commercial Unix. It needs to
offer powerful machines!

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newscracker
Apple has really dropped the ball on the Mac mini (and also the Mac Pro,
though that got some attention in some official interviews). It's a shame that
the company, even with so much money, is unable to segregate work among
different teams and get things done. Since a Mac is a required machine for
iOS/tvOS/watchOS development, pushing out new MacBook after MacBook and
pushing out new iMacs once in a while just isn't enough. The Mac mini is a
really great machine by itself, and the older models that were also easily
upgradeable on RAM and secondary storage were fantastic (the Intel CPU based
models can still run Linux if they do not have official support for the latest
or recent versions OS X or macOS).

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dingo_bat
Aren't there hundreds of small form factor PCs available now? Just get them.
It's a commodity market. Apple is unwilling/incapable of competing on such low
margin boxes.

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firemancoder
I think the article covers it pretty well, I don't have much hope for a
refresh, and I didn't buy the last one.

Still using a 2012 MM that runs superb. Was waiting for an upgrade, then saw
the processor and passed on it. I would love to see a new MM with a real CPU
in it, and the two drive option. Will likely never happen, but at least Intel
is getting into the smaller form factor market with the NUC.

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jagger27
If you really like macOS, the Hackintosh route is keeping quite stable these
days. The NUCs have such generic hardware that there is practically no .kext
fiddling and with the Clover bootloader any adjustments that need to happen
are a breeze.

Up until recently graphics issues with my Radeon cards kept me from using
macOS full-time on my rig, needing major backflips to get acceleration and
full resolution support working reliably. Now it's just a zero-config .kext
drop in, whereas the common suggestion was just to get an Nvidia GPU or live
with the on-board graphics.

Even better is the recent work to support AMD CPUs. Dev interest in getting
them supported fell off quite a bit since the Leopard and Snow Leopard days
but it's seeing a strong resurgence now.

Just to put things in a more perspective, though I have a few years of effort
put into understanding what goes into Hackintoshing my latest effort in
getting High Sierra working on an APFS drive took less than an hour overall.
Whereas before, it was a weekend job. Better still, if you're in the market to
buy new, the common build guides are bullet-proof. Basically anything from
Intel (like Ethernet controllers) works without any issues and has for some
time. Most hardware that looks something like an iMac or Mac Pro will be
reliable and trouble-free, especially if you hang back a dot release or two.

