Rui CarmoSince I’m changing jobs without even taking a proper break, I haven’t been able to take part in the blow by blow as Apple “phoned in” the Mac updates this week, but I still have feelings about them.
I must confess I have zero enthusiasm for the iMac update. But I did chuckle at Nilay Patel’s take on Apple’s latest work of art in the unlabelled charts space, and think it is a very good example of how Apple’s marketing can be completely out of touch with reality:
But re-focusing on the hardware, I found most of it meh. For starters, the iMac is not for me anymore (even if I did find the “desk cam” feature very neat), and the new Magic Mouse is still… just badly designed.
My years of using iMacs since the original, lovely G4 Luxo-like “lamp” and from then through the G5 and the 27” Intel i5 (which is gathering dust in a corner) have shown that the iMac is a flawed machine if you value long-term maintenance–and any sort of upgrade ever since the M-series machines took over.
The MacBooks are… nice, but mine is plenty good enough for quite a few more years, even if Apple Intelligence evolves apace (like I wrote the other day, it is very far from either useful or impressive).
The new mini, though, is the thing. The M4 Pro models almost nail the sweet spot a few notches below the Mac Studio (which will, of course, move the goalposts again when it comes out), and I am very tempted to get one once I can scrounge up enough money to spare, since my M2 Pro is starting to feel a bit “tight” in terms of CPU and storage.
However, the mini remains a hostage of the Apple tax on storage and RAM.
I know how much 1TB of decent SSD storage costs–in fact, I recently bought four times that amount for roughly €200, and it just stinks that Apple still charges through the nose to have a decent base amount of storage built in and gimps the entry-level at 512GB.
The real story, though, is the baseline amounts of RAM–starting at either 16Gb or 24GB (for the Pro), they simultaneously remove the stigma of the 8GB entry-level and make the available upgrades (48GB for €460, for instance) seem like a rip-off.
This was definitely a conscious decision to make the base models more attractive while ensuring they will fully support Apple Intelligence (which will likely require your machine to have local models permanently loaded in-RAM), but the SKU tiering is still a bit too rich for my taste.
And, of course, having to pay a premium for a 10GbE network interface (with mini-PCs and €100 SBCs shipping with 2.5GbE) just sours this particularly cute Apple.
But hey, at least the Mac mini got a real upgrade, unlike the iPad mini. It is finally a machine free of most of its previous compromises, and if it weren’t for the power button being on the bottom, it would be perfect.