Mac mini M2

[...] My mid-tier, Intel 2019 Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM suddenly died by the end of 2023. I quickly got a basemodel 256GB/8GB MacMini M2 as a replacement. While initialy supposed to be a temporary replacement until my MBP gets fixed, I ended up using it for another year as my main daily machine for everything, inluding professionally (fullstack software dev). [...] Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2). [...] Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.

[...] I use it for certain projects that I just want to be lazy about (personal website with sensitive data committed to the repo) projects that are for friends/family and don’t need to be public. [...] I think the thing that sets it apart from others would be I run it on a m2 Mac mini? [...]

[...] My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves) To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. [...] The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. [...]

Maybe I'm just too rich to appreciate it these days but a, say, 1-year old used mac mini m2 looks like it can be snatched for around $499 on ebay. [...] They charge $200 for the ram upgrade precisely because they know the "base" config is so limited and just for marketing. [...]

I bought a Mac Mini M2 last year to start playing around with some personal projects, and I did some tests using LM Studio running Mixtral models with pretty good throughput, I also tested Open AI's whisper models to do some transcriptions and those ran fine as well. I do, however, recommend that you upgrade the RAM, 8GB is barely enough as is, so getting at least 16GB would be better. (I don't recommend upgrading the SSD though, since because of Thunderbolt 4 you can have a fast external SSD for half the price that Apple charges for storage).

I have the Satechi hub for my Mac Mini M2 that I got a year ago... [...]

[...] With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. [...] The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable. Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so. [...]

This morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018, which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled enough to not be fun to use anymore — now this! However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.) Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much better built, incredible mileage for the price. [...] My main machine is still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea, battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't need for my use. Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+ battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable build quality? [...] Or is Apple actually providing the best value here? [...]

[...] Therefore they wouldn't be represented even though they are gamers, they spend money, and they have Macs. I don't have a PC for personal use, but I do have a lot of game consoles, an M1 MacBook Pro, and an M2 Mac mini. [...] So I wind up spending money on Switch games that would've gone to Steam if the publisher had bothered with a macOS release. [...] I'd say my money's on the table, but my money's in Nintendo's wallet. [...]

I tried this in my mac mini m2 16GB, unfortunately I have to use an usb disk for the model weights, and I’m getting 0.5 tok/s. Still, being able to run (heh maybe crawl is more accurate) a 100B model on this computer AT ALL is pretty cool. I see disk maxing out at 400 MB/s, this disk should be able to hit 1GB/s (it hits that eg when verifying the check sum of the weights), so there might be some optimization to be done there (I’m guessing it’s because the weights access is not pure sequential reads but involves some randomness depending on which expert)

[...] I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). [...]

[...] If you have a 3090 or an M2 Mac Mini or a machine with 64GB unified memory, you should be able to know in 30 seconds what you can actually run well. [...]

[...] The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason. I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11. Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. [...]

[...] Then again, I transferred 4 iPhone photos to the imac 2 feet away and it failed. [...] It's flakey as hell, and this is a 3rd generation iPhone SE and M2 mac mini. [...] I really hate bluetooth. [...] FWIW, I got PhotoSync app (not free) long ago so as to share photos with "everything" and it runs in the background on the mac, but I stupidly hold to the notion that whatever comes with the operating system otta work.

Daily-driver, zero-cloud stack (runs on a 16 GB M2 Mac mini): Ollama + llama3:8b-instruct-q4KM – 4 GB, answers code questions in <300 ms. [...]

[...] On my M2 mac mini: $ hyperfine "LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en" "LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en" Benchmark 1: LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en Time (mean ± σ): 2.007 s ± 0.005 s [User: 1.940 s, System: 0.064 s] Range (min … max): 1.997 s … 2.015 s 10 runs Benchmark 2: LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en Time (mean ± σ): 898.5 ms ± 9.7 ms [User: 2795.8 ms, System: 93.6 ms] Range (min … max): 875.0 ms … 906.9 ms 10 runs Summary LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en ran 2.23 ± 0.02 times faster than LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en Info about the tools: $ which sort /usr/bin/sort $ which gsort /opt/homebrew/bin/gsort $ brew info coreutils | head -n3 == coreutils: stable 9.6 (bottled), HEAD GNU File, Shell, and Text utilities There are other tools in coreutils for which this applies as well. [...]

[...] Among the devices I use every day are a custom-built Windows 11 box, an M2 Mac Mini, an older PC running PopOS (Ubuntu-based), an iPad, and a Google Pixel. [...]

[...] Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. [...] The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... [...] but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

I do this exact thing with my M2 Mac Mini (plex, a few home lab things with no display). [...]

[...] My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. [...] And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value. [...]

[...] I have an M2 mac mini. [...] For example, in my clone of Linux (also on my M2 mac mini): $ git remote -v origin git@github.com:BurntSushi/linux (fetch) origin git@github.com:BurntSushi/linux (push) $ git rev-parse HEAD 84e57d292203a45c96dbcb2e6be9dd80961d981a $ hyperfine "rg '[A-Z]+NOBODY' ." "gg '[A-Z]+NOBODY'" Benchmark 1: rg '[A-Z]+NOBODY' . [...] That might be worth investigating. [...]

Absolutely, 7B will run comfortably on 16GB of RAM and most consumer level hardware. [...] I ran this originally on a M1 with 32GB, I run this on an Air M2 with 16GB (and mac mini M2 32GB), no problem. [...] 7b is obviously less capable but the instant response makes it worth exploring. It's very useful as a Google search replacement that is instantly more valuable, for general questions, than dealing with the hellscape of blog spam ruling Google atm. [...]

Since a few weeks I've been using the cheapest base model Mac Mini M2 which I got from a major german retailer for 650€ (all taxes included) brand-new. [...] I don't think there is any comparable WIntel machine for that price available (and within same form factor) with comparable gaming performance - mostly because available iGPUs are not powerful enough. [...] I hope GPTK is just Apples first foray into gaming, they could release a trimmed-down version (less ports, no ethernet, no speaker) of a Mac Mini with a gaming focus and compete with PS5/Xbox on the price. But it needs better software UX for gaming just like Proton did for Linux.

[...] Especially the higer i7/i9 models had thermal throttling issues when connected to an external monitor. My 3000€ i7 mbp16 2019 recently died and I replaced it with an "interim" base model, 650€ MacMini M2. The jump is huge, that freakin Mini beats my 3yo (I bought it in 2020) decked out MBP that constantly spun fans. [...]

Updated to macOS 15.3. [...] Noticeable Bluetooth artifacting that doesn't happen with my iPhone. Could it be because I use a Mac mini M2? I've had bluetooth issues with it before, but they were fixed with later updates.

Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. [...]

This reminds me of two things I experienced when I added a Mac Mini (M2 Pro) to my setup. [...] When I connected my iPad Pro M1 to the Mac via a 10Gbps rated USB-C/C cable, it only connected at USB 2.0 speeds (480Mbps). However, when I used a USB-C to USB-A adapter, then a USB-A to USB-C cable to my iPad, it connected at 10Gbps. [...]

[...] Desktop: With me typing this on the MacMini M2 base model (8GB/256GB) retailed at 650€ I can assure you, it is a nice gaming machine hardware-wise. [...] Now the major issue is software, there is just not enough games available. [...]

I'm wondering whether a Mac Mini M2 Pro or a Mac Studio with M2 Max would still pale in comparison to a Windows based box with an NVIDIA GPU. [...]

And if you use bluetooth IO (non-apple). I do on my Mac Mini M2, and yet I have maybe pressed that button 3 times in the year that I am using it as my main machine as I never power it off.

Maybe I'm just too rich to appreciate it these days but a, say, 1-year old used mac mini m2 looks like it can be snatched for around $499 on ebay. [...] Compare with I think we've hit the commodity price point market with used Apple hardware. [...]

My iPhone 13 Pro and my iPad Mini don’t support it. 🎉 Tragically my iPad Pro M1 does, and I just upgraded my desktop to a Mac Mini M2 Pro last year. 😞

I got a Mac mini M2 last March. [...]

[...] The Mac mini M2 is maxed out with 32GB. [...] In fact when I bought it a couple of years ago I'd barely used Blender for anything. [...]

nope just my normal m2 mac mini. I bought it just as a normal computer to do my taxes and whatever, so it’s mind blowing that I can run this kind of AI workload on it. Well, “run” might be generous, it gets like 3-5tok/s I’m working on a setup that’s more geared towards running tasks overnight so the slow tok/s doesn’t matter as much

[...] The Mac app reports 4.4 token/s in the Mac Mini M2 with 8GB RAM. [...]

My Mac Mini M2 sometimes blinks in November months. I've replaced my display cable recently with an HDMI to DVI cable with ferrite cores from monoprice, I'll see if it makes a difference this November.

[...] I have Mac mini M2 16GB, it does hold all the cameras I have. [...]

Having completed SotTR on my MacMini M2 8GB, the game plays fluent at 1080p around 40-60fps without any issues. There are youtubers showing Cyberpunk on the Neo on lowest settings running around 50fps. Cyberpunk being somewhat special as it is visually so beautiful, that I would not recommend to complete it on a Neo.

the windows version is playable on macos through wine. Even modern version, I got it running on a m2 mac mini on Macos 15 sequoia EDIT: this was for HL1 I’m not sure about HL2

[...] However, next to it there's a M2 mac mini that uses all of 37 W when I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 so... [...] The last 10% of performance requires far more than 10% of the power. [...]

I had an old Tesla M40 12 GB lying around and figured I’d try it out with some 8-13B llms, but was disappointed to find that it’s around the same speed as my mac mini m2. I suppose the mac mini is a 10 years newer chip, but it’s crazy that mobile today matches data center from 10 years ago

I never not used Whisky on an Apple Silicon device. Recently played Control on my Mac mini M2 Pro with it.

I have a Mac mini m2 with 8gb and it's clearly not enough. I'm only using it to test my flutter app on iOS and manage fragile xcode settings. Most of my work is on a Windows pc.

For many use cases you are correct. That said, I bought a 32G M2 Mac mini in January, and mostly using Ollama, I use local LLMs for many useful local apps and many experiments. I augment running local models with Colab Pro, Grok APIs, OpenAI APIs, etc.

[...] I managed to get a 9 zero hash in under an hour on a M2 Mac Mini using it. [...]

My MacMini M2 has one built in. [...]

I upgraded from a MacMini M1 (Geekbench multicore pref: 8425) to an MacMini M2 Pro with 12 cores (Geekbench multicore pref: 14431.) That was definitely worth it. The only upgrade for the M3 line I would make would be to an M3 Max 16 core (Geekbench multicore pref: 21387) or an upcoming M3 Ultra 32 core (probably a Geekbench multicore pref: 30000), but it is very expensive and probably not available in the MacMini form factor, so I will hold off for now. All stats from here:

Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.

Now over a one week I have used macOS and it feels great OS for real. Some tricks and things are in another place than windows etc but overall feels great and my plan is to keep this Mac mini m2 and learn better macOS enviroment better to handle.