Originally published at: On the "triumphant return" of old-timey USB ports to the Mac | Boing Boing
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Apple did this just so that next year they can introduce “wireless USB” and make sure you have to buy all your peripherals again, or at least buy overpriced adapters for them.
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The M1 Mac Mini has old-timey USB
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I read somewhere that it also has a 3.5mm diameter hole that one can plug a pair of headphones into.
Will miracles never cease!
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The Mac mini never lost its USB-A ports, and has always had the best connectivity in Apple devices. I’m more excited about the 10G Ethernet in the new Mac Studio, but I think I’ll wait for the M2 version, and in any case there is no point in my upgrading until I’ve found a replacement for Lightroom.
Most software is not optimized enough to fully use the 20 cores on the M1 Ultra (16 really, the 4 Efficiency cores have no business being in a high-performance desktop computer) and so I doubt the performance will be that much greater than a regular M1, M1 Pro or M1 Max unless you use GPU-optimized apps, which is not my case. Really the only draw of the Ultra is the higher RAM capacity. Apple has also lost the single-thread performance crown to Intel’s Golden Cove architecture. It will be a challenge for them to come back given how much turnover there’s been in the Apple Silicon team lately.
To be frank, I’m more looking forward to the HP Z2 Mini G9 workstation to upgrade my Z2 Mini G4 home server and to the ASUS ProArt StudioBook with a Ryzen9 5900HX, 64GB RAM and a GeForce RTX 3070 that would make both a fine gaming laptop and a Linux workstation.
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You can spec 10Gb ethernet in an ordinary mac mini. And it won’t eat into your i/o
The mac studio (with the ordinary m1 max) looks to be well specced. I have a mac mini m1 (with ordinary ethernet) and though it’s fast for most things, there are definite performance ceilings.
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I’m on an i7 Mac mini, and deeply regret not getting the 10G build-to-order upgrade. I do have a TB3 10G adapter from QNAP but the power requirements of my other USB-C/TB3 devices exceed what the Mini can power and I had to choose between that and the fast SSD. I have an Anker TB4 hub but it’s not supported by Mojave, and upgrading would lose me Lightroom 6 compatibility, so I am stuck until I find a replacement for that, which has proven surprisingly difficult.
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What’s next, a standards-compliant Safari browser?
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Apple has been (without admitting as such, of course) rolling back many of the worst design mistakes as of late. The latest MBPs brought back physical function keys, got rid of the dreadful Touch Bar, brought back MagSafe power, and brought back a decent selection of ports (SD card, HDMI, etc). They also rolled back the new butterfly keyboards that were such a manufacturing disaster. All good moves! Here’s hoping these trends continue and Apple steps back a bit from the ledge of design-for-design’s-sake excess they were teetering over.
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Special headphones, they never need to be charged!
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