Re: Two points

On 12/1/24 7:43 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sun, 1 Dec 2024 14:29:48 -0500, -hh wrote:
 

On 11/29/24 4:54 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
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On 29 Nov 2024 14:52:53 GMT, vallor wrote:
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2) I own two Mac mini's, which are sitting in a drawer.  They were
made from notebook equipment, and they are crap.

>
Since they switched to ARM, everything named “Mac” from Apple is now a
glorified notebook anyway.

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Which makes it sound like notebooks haven't advanced in the past 20
years to be as powerful as many desktops.

 They are fundamentally compromised just from the form factor.

Your opinion doesn't really matter, because Free Market decided a long time ago that notebooks had passed the 'Good Enough' test:  notebooks passed the 50% marketshare point vs desktops way back in 2008, and are at 80% today (not even counting tablets).

As Scotty
might have said, “Ya canna change the laws of physics, Cap’n!”. Push them
too far for too long, and they get hot. Where does the heat go? And so
they have to throttle back. Compared to a desktop with equivalent
performance specs, they have no staying power.

First, it's not you, but the user's workflow which determines what the sustained load may be.  Without that use case need, the extra size/cost/etc of provisioning for an infinite duration 100% load isn't justified.
Second, got substantiation that your own PC doesn't ever throttle? Because one can invariably contrive a test which causes throttling, but that doesn't mean that the test is representative of any real world workflow.  For example, the Mac Studio can be made to throttle by forcing it to run a full load on both the CPU & GPU simultaneously: now what real life application actually ever does that?  Name names.

So we have a Mac Studio now, which is a low-end UNIX workstation.

>
Is that ARM-based? Is it as expandable as the old x86-based Mac Pro? If
no, then don’t call it a “workstation”.

>
The moniker of "workstation" is a bit more nebulous these days, as more
and more task workflows can be adequately performed by core hardware
instead of needing specialized expansion cards.

 In hardware terms, I think of it in terms of hardware that is configurable
for different uses over its working life. You need upgradeable RAM and
expansion slots for that. But Apple is doing away with those across its
entire product line.

Which is merely how *you* personally think about the question, which is trying to disregard how much PCs have changed in the last 30 years. Sure, incremental upgrades were important when a new PC was being effectively obsoleted in 18 months ... but today, we have the Good Enough paradigm and the State of the Shelf has reliably stable and low prices, so we get long effective productive lifespans in service with minimal change.  That's why Enterprise typically replaces instead of upgrades, classically on a five year depreciation table. YMMV, but the last office IT project that I can recall working on that called for our organization to do upgrades was on a bunch of 386's back in the 1990s.
-hh