Re: Two points

On 11/29/24 4:54 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On 29 Nov 2024 14:52:53 GMT, vallor wrote:
 

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.

Which makes it sound like notebooks haven't advanced in the past 20 years to be as powerful as many desktops.  It would behoove you to check performance benchmarks prior to being so immediately dismissive.
Case in point, what's your own personal desktop PC's hardware specs today, and what numbers does it CPU post in the likes of Geekbench?

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.
And case in point, Joel was bragging about his i5-10400 CPU the other day, which in Geekbench posts roughly 1450 single-/5500 multi- scores.
<https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-10400>
I don't recall which generation of Mac Studio Scott has, but the lowest performing one ever sold (2022 M1 Max) Geekbench scores are 1780/12650, which are +23% and +130% greater than the above Intel desktop CPU.
<https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14470909>
And FYI, if we move up to the latest Apple Notebook, the 2024 MacBook Pro with the M4 Max CPU, its 3900 / 25000 ... that's +170% and +350%.
Time for a paradigm shift, grandpa.
-hh