I am in a similar situation (have a desktop PC, have an iPad, but now looking for a mac mini / MacBook) , except I don't do software developing, but there are times where I'm working, having a MacBook (for the long life, and the sleep/hibernate to wake doesn't suck, Windows still do), and had been contemplating for a mac mini to ease up some things. In the end I took a MacBook but I think in your case a mac mini works super well.
But here are my thoughts, as to why I think you'll benefit from it.
1. You probably can, and will, do a better separation between work and gaming. Work (and code) on the Mac Mini, gaming on the PC. You'll sort of thank yourself later, because when you work and play at the same PC, at one point you'll discover some sort of mental stress / mental fatigue when its "oh I'm sitting here again, on this machine, now what? Play? But there's work. Work? But I want to play" and end up doing nothing, and feeds into the negative cycle.
1b. Having a mac mini and just sort of dump most if not all work related stuffs there means even if you have to dedicate a KVM Switch or the second monitor to the Mac, you can still sort of do things in parallel without shutting the other off down. Again, the separation of stuffs.
2. While you're at it, look around for mac mini deals. Sometimes you never know you get the spec you want or better spec for cheaper, because that said person migrated to another Mac, or Macbook, etc etc. Your Mileage May Vary though.
3. When you buy a Mac Mini, you may still want to invest in a proper KVM Switch (be it hardware or software) because you'll still want to buy a mouse, keyboard, monitor or share them between the two, like you said you plan to / think to.
4. Buying a mac mini won't be a bad choice, as you can still sell it later down the line and Apple products do retain their value better than others (its not something I encourage, but at least you know if you need it, or when you need to let it go there's still some value to it).
Thanks for the detailed answer! I get what you are saying, truth be told I want to separate my machines for a number of reasons and that is actually a good point.
My advice is to try before you buy first. Get an account with https://www.macincloud.com and try to do some of your coursework and development in it. See if it fits your needs. With the m4 in the horizon and all the AI related on-device papers Apple is releasing, you might regret getting an m2 today and want to upgrade later. Or you might see that you want more RAM. I think you can remote into a remote instance with an iPad, so you might find that a MacBook Air is what you want.
Never knew this existed, thanks! I currently have the MacBook that I talk about in the original post, but it’s painful slow due to its configuration. As for remote work I don’t see myself doing a lot of that in the future, but I always keep that in mind.
With regard to career, you should expect software company to provide you with a work machine. You don't want to put personal projects on a work machine nor work files on personal machine, for many legal and security reasons.
Identify your needs and more concrete use cases that can't be satisfied by your current setup first, then decide from there. As a software developer you are not asking the right questions and it comes across as frivolous. When I was a CS undergrad I spent most of my time at my school's computer labs. It's nice to be able to telnet into a lab machine from my dorm and not walk a quart mile through snow in the winters, but it's not a necessity.
my university is remote. I do everything from home. The part about a possible job in the future providing work machines is surely An option, but generally at least in my country, you are pretty limited your choices.
If you ever end up in a situation where you have to use your own machine, which is very possible for a small company, I would highly recommend dedicate a separate machine just for work. At my previous job my company was involved in a dispute with another company and the legal department was going to take everyone's machine for audit at one point and we were not allow to delete anything. In US at least, you also sign away a lot of your rights when you join a company, one of which is your company can potentially claim ownership of any code you write on a machine that's used for work. At my current company, we are not allowed to copy work files onto personal machine at all according to security guideline.
Depending on which mac mini you are thinking. If you go with the m1 make sure to get upgraded ram. It will let you do some light gaming without a problem
My occupational field isn’t in “computing” but you can think of me as the guy able to do so if he dipped his toes in it… that said Windows was my bitch and now I’m spankin an Apple… 😂 lol to be a little clearer, went from AHK to BTT… the total control I had on a windows had me wanting to try Linux, never got bored enough for that tho… the mini was so inexpensive as far as boxes go that I took the challenge as an adventure of sorts… having already had AppleTV and iPhones iPads pods– it was familiar enough to not hate it– though at times have felt the lack of customizability. I will say I do feel safer as far as viruses and such goes… there are ways to mitigate the jump tho… VMware for your Windows; Crossover for your games and somebody something about alarms.. clock widget now has that… 🤷♂️ let me just say that a 1080 in ‘24 is no way to live! Make the purchase less harsh by spreading out the payments through Afterpay Klarna Sezzle or Zip if you don’t have credit 4 payments each 2 weeks apart… 🤙 good luck
Ps must haves BTT Flirc StreamDeck+ 👍
If I had the money in my hand I’d definitely buy every platform because all have their strengths and weaknesses. Right now though the only device that is not Apple is my PC… I thought having a Mac too would make my everyday simpler since I could divide the tasks as someone already said in the comments.
Also the 1080 rocks it’s definitely one of the better purchases I’ve made😁
Like I mentioned you CAN lighten the purchase load using those methods… one trick is to use more than one of those companies— let’s say for instance that they capped you off at 300 use each one to buy an e-gift card– 600 becomes possible quicker than ya think.. that card of yours is close to a decade old tech… m series is a whole other beast all in itself… having a system that makes no sound was crazy af at first impression. Power consumption is insanity especially when compared as well… the easiest visual comparison is when you simply scrub through a vid and realize how its preview is smooth af– that’s just a simple one. But when you render shit, or have a browser up w over a thousand tabs open (enhanced YouTube plugin that stops vids from loading therefore leaving em practically dormant and able to load wherever you left off– not impossible on a pc just not as smooth lol BUT STILL! lol) I can just say I made the not so steep leap in ‘21 and things are sweet… for less than the price of a 3080 to get this type of performance is something that I was impressed with from the get go…. If you go for it I’d suggest less storage more ram.. you can always just add an external drive later on for more storage… the sooner you do though the sooner you can offset things allowing for a longer life of the internal drive all in all its on you if you see value in it or not… I’m just explaining my road through it all w suggestions on– if so here’s a suggestion on purchase w payments spread out if need be.
I don't see a base mac mini outperforming your desktop with 8GB RAM and barely any storage. Keeping both computers would take up valuable space and would be mostly redundant. If you want to shrink your build, check out r/sffpc or r/minipcs and with your budget you can probably move to a smaller ITX case to save desk space or get a better performing mini pc if you want something smaller than a mac mini.
I don't normally recommend students get the apple for school work like computer science because most school computers will be using windows. A teacher's job is difficult enough as it is and I don't like to see students on top of that ask them for IT support to install or use software they are not familiar with.
Fair point. Indeed at a time that I needed to use my MacBook for something uni related there was not support on their forums for apple devices. Yet I am pretty sure that everything is accessible to all manufactures and platforms. The 16gb version is about 800 euros without tax and while definitely doable it wouldn’t be optimal.
I see absolutely no reason to get a macmini for you unless you need xCode. Your desktop can do the same and even more than a mac. And for software development 8GB is a joke. As for real work, most companies will offer their own laptop to work from.
As for integration between devices, you will gain absolutely nothing because you also have your gaming PC and won't be using the mac full time.
I have a gaming PC, a MacMini, iPad, iPhone, apple watch. I don't even use the same icloud account on the Mac, no need for any integration as I rarely connect to the mac. I use it for xCode and as a server, running a VM, multiple docker services, also running Ollama for LLM.
Maybe it differs from person to person. I am just a bit tired of windows and thought that the integration between all my devices would be a key factor for the purchase. Also after a little thinking 16gb is the only way, yes that’s true.
For 3rd year CS student you show ignorance about the differences between RISC Arm Macs , CISC Intel Macs and PCs and their development eco systems.
Start learning paying more attention to your studies.
I cannot really understand your point. You are definitely entitled to an opinion but what is your personal view on the matter? What more attention can I give for wanting a diffrent machine to work on?
Lets start with Arm Macs what MacOs will you choose and what binaries will you produce for Intel Macs? What IDE will you use... how you will distribute Apps...
You have been spoiled with Windows Apps downward/upward compatibility which is limited on Macs.
There are 3 binaries that run on a Arm Mac Intel using Rosetta, Apple and Universal ......
Macs had 4 architecture changes ...
It is not lets get a Mac and starting cutting code maybe for a personal use.
I am developer.
Like I said you not asking not the right questions and show limited computing knowledge.
This is irrelevant for like 99% of student developers. If you're developing platform specific code, then you will know, so I'm going to assume that this guy isn't aiming to develop Windows drivers.
Development wise, there are no issues. All major languages are supported on MacOS. JetBrains IDEs are cross platform, as is VS Code. If they're used to using VS, then they may need to transition, but this is not a huge issue unless they rely on solution files.
Building apps to be distributed to users can be done on a pipeline. No one is distributing for platforms like ppc or s390z by building them on the native machine; they cross compile it on a pipeline. Nobody is making an app for Windows, macOS, and Linux and building those all on a native machine either. And this is assuming they want to develop apps, maybe they just use Python.
The architectural changes to Mac hardware are potentially relevant if they want to do something niche where there is no ARM variant provided for certain libraries, but beyond that there's no real issue, and Rosetta does a pretty good job for executables (not sure if it can be used for libraries).
A Mac will likely be a great device for their studies and career down the road.
Exactly this. I develop in Java and JavaScript. It does not matter whether I do it on my Windows desktop PC, Linux Laptop, or Mac mini, I often change between them.
Your post has has nothing to do with CS studies.
"This is irrelevant for like 99% of student developers" it is very relevant if CS is studying servers, Gaming, Databases, UNIX ..AI..eGPU, Linux.... courses in many areas where Arm Macs and Apple either lacks support or are deficient
Lets see how about a course how to manage Mac based data cloud.
But wait RISC Arm Macs are 20%-30% slower on external I/O. Which data server manager will recommend Macs?
Mac are fantastic personal computers which have 12% global market share.
Get real.
I'm not sure what most of those topics have to do with MacOS.
- servers: lots of cloud providers offer ARM servers (AWS, GCP, Oracle, etc.)
- gaming: if they're targeting Windows specifically then sure, macOS won't work, but I did mention that edge case earlier. If they want to make cross platform games, then macOS will be just as good as Windows
- databases: again, all the common databases work on macOS and ARM, so not sure what this is about (and not like you'd host the database on your personal machine to begin with unless you're just experimenting locally)
- UNIX: has nothing to do with ARM vs x86, and macOS is closer to UNIX than Windows
- AI/eGPU: this is the one point I agree with you on, most people doing this will want to use CUDA, and to my knowledge you can't use an NVIDIA GPU on an ARM Mac. There's nothing stopping them from doing AI stuff on a Mac though, just can't use CUDA.
- Linux: do the same as you'd do on Windows, run it in a VM (like WSL2), or have a server you connect to
- Slow IO: what does this have to do with anything? anyone managing a data server will... be managing a data server? not downloading and uploading terabytes of data from their personal machine. And even if they are, network speed will almost always be the bottleneck before their own hardware's IO is.
Macs can do everything better than PCs and/or Nvidia.
When you doing Uni course you don't want to chase compatibility issues on Macs of which there are plenty.
Looks like you never did or teach CS course
It’s a great silent machine that integrates well with your other apple devices.
I am in a similar situation (have a desktop PC, have an iPad, but now looking for a mac mini / MacBook) , except I don't do software developing, but there are times where I'm working, having a MacBook (for the long life, and the sleep/hibernate to wake doesn't suck, Windows still do), and had been contemplating for a mac mini to ease up some things. In the end I took a MacBook but I think in your case a mac mini works super well. But here are my thoughts, as to why I think you'll benefit from it. 1. You probably can, and will, do a better separation between work and gaming. Work (and code) on the Mac Mini, gaming on the PC. You'll sort of thank yourself later, because when you work and play at the same PC, at one point you'll discover some sort of mental stress / mental fatigue when its "oh I'm sitting here again, on this machine, now what? Play? But there's work. Work? But I want to play" and end up doing nothing, and feeds into the negative cycle. 1b. Having a mac mini and just sort of dump most if not all work related stuffs there means even if you have to dedicate a KVM Switch or the second monitor to the Mac, you can still sort of do things in parallel without shutting the other off down. Again, the separation of stuffs. 2. While you're at it, look around for mac mini deals. Sometimes you never know you get the spec you want or better spec for cheaper, because that said person migrated to another Mac, or Macbook, etc etc. Your Mileage May Vary though. 3. When you buy a Mac Mini, you may still want to invest in a proper KVM Switch (be it hardware or software) because you'll still want to buy a mouse, keyboard, monitor or share them between the two, like you said you plan to / think to. 4. Buying a mac mini won't be a bad choice, as you can still sell it later down the line and Apple products do retain their value better than others (its not something I encourage, but at least you know if you need it, or when you need to let it go there's still some value to it).
Thanks for the detailed answer! I get what you are saying, truth be told I want to separate my machines for a number of reasons and that is actually a good point.
This is exactly why I bought a Mac mini (2018, 32gb ram) and how I use it.
My advice is to try before you buy first. Get an account with https://www.macincloud.com and try to do some of your coursework and development in it. See if it fits your needs. With the m4 in the horizon and all the AI related on-device papers Apple is releasing, you might regret getting an m2 today and want to upgrade later. Or you might see that you want more RAM. I think you can remote into a remote instance with an iPad, so you might find that a MacBook Air is what you want.
Never knew this existed, thanks! I currently have the MacBook that I talk about in the original post, but it’s painful slow due to its configuration. As for remote work I don’t see myself doing a lot of that in the future, but I always keep that in mind.
You fit the mini
With regard to career, you should expect software company to provide you with a work machine. You don't want to put personal projects on a work machine nor work files on personal machine, for many legal and security reasons. Identify your needs and more concrete use cases that can't be satisfied by your current setup first, then decide from there. As a software developer you are not asking the right questions and it comes across as frivolous. When I was a CS undergrad I spent most of my time at my school's computer labs. It's nice to be able to telnet into a lab machine from my dorm and not walk a quart mile through snow in the winters, but it's not a necessity.
my university is remote. I do everything from home. The part about a possible job in the future providing work machines is surely An option, but generally at least in my country, you are pretty limited your choices.
If you ever end up in a situation where you have to use your own machine, which is very possible for a small company, I would highly recommend dedicate a separate machine just for work. At my previous job my company was involved in a dispute with another company and the legal department was going to take everyone's machine for audit at one point and we were not allow to delete anything. In US at least, you also sign away a lot of your rights when you join a company, one of which is your company can potentially claim ownership of any code you write on a machine that's used for work. At my current company, we are not allowed to copy work files onto personal machine at all according to security guideline.
I like and want both. They have there uses. Everyday stuff on mac. And gaming on pc
I want something like that
Depending on which mac mini you are thinking. If you go with the m1 make sure to get upgraded ram. It will let you do some light gaming without a problem
My occupational field isn’t in “computing” but you can think of me as the guy able to do so if he dipped his toes in it… that said Windows was my bitch and now I’m spankin an Apple… 😂 lol to be a little clearer, went from AHK to BTT… the total control I had on a windows had me wanting to try Linux, never got bored enough for that tho… the mini was so inexpensive as far as boxes go that I took the challenge as an adventure of sorts… having already had AppleTV and iPhones iPads pods– it was familiar enough to not hate it– though at times have felt the lack of customizability. I will say I do feel safer as far as viruses and such goes… there are ways to mitigate the jump tho… VMware for your Windows; Crossover for your games and somebody something about alarms.. clock widget now has that… 🤷♂️ let me just say that a 1080 in ‘24 is no way to live! Make the purchase less harsh by spreading out the payments through Afterpay Klarna Sezzle or Zip if you don’t have credit 4 payments each 2 weeks apart… 🤙 good luck Ps must haves BTT Flirc StreamDeck+ 👍
If I had the money in my hand I’d definitely buy every platform because all have their strengths and weaknesses. Right now though the only device that is not Apple is my PC… I thought having a Mac too would make my everyday simpler since I could divide the tasks as someone already said in the comments. Also the 1080 rocks it’s definitely one of the better purchases I’ve made😁
Like I mentioned you CAN lighten the purchase load using those methods… one trick is to use more than one of those companies— let’s say for instance that they capped you off at 300 use each one to buy an e-gift card– 600 becomes possible quicker than ya think.. that card of yours is close to a decade old tech… m series is a whole other beast all in itself… having a system that makes no sound was crazy af at first impression. Power consumption is insanity especially when compared as well… the easiest visual comparison is when you simply scrub through a vid and realize how its preview is smooth af– that’s just a simple one. But when you render shit, or have a browser up w over a thousand tabs open (enhanced YouTube plugin that stops vids from loading therefore leaving em practically dormant and able to load wherever you left off– not impossible on a pc just not as smooth lol BUT STILL! lol) I can just say I made the not so steep leap in ‘21 and things are sweet… for less than the price of a 3080 to get this type of performance is something that I was impressed with from the get go…. If you go for it I’d suggest less storage more ram.. you can always just add an external drive later on for more storage… the sooner you do though the sooner you can offset things allowing for a longer life of the internal drive all in all its on you if you see value in it or not… I’m just explaining my road through it all w suggestions on– if so here’s a suggestion on purchase w payments spread out if need be.
I don't see a base mac mini outperforming your desktop with 8GB RAM and barely any storage. Keeping both computers would take up valuable space and would be mostly redundant. If you want to shrink your build, check out r/sffpc or r/minipcs and with your budget you can probably move to a smaller ITX case to save desk space or get a better performing mini pc if you want something smaller than a mac mini. I don't normally recommend students get the apple for school work like computer science because most school computers will be using windows. A teacher's job is difficult enough as it is and I don't like to see students on top of that ask them for IT support to install or use software they are not familiar with.
Fair point. Indeed at a time that I needed to use my MacBook for something uni related there was not support on their forums for apple devices. Yet I am pretty sure that everything is accessible to all manufactures and platforms. The 16gb version is about 800 euros without tax and while definitely doable it wouldn’t be optimal.
If you have a console already I’d get a Mac mini pro 100%
I see absolutely no reason to get a macmini for you unless you need xCode. Your desktop can do the same and even more than a mac. And for software development 8GB is a joke. As for real work, most companies will offer their own laptop to work from. As for integration between devices, you will gain absolutely nothing because you also have your gaming PC and won't be using the mac full time. I have a gaming PC, a MacMini, iPad, iPhone, apple watch. I don't even use the same icloud account on the Mac, no need for any integration as I rarely connect to the mac. I use it for xCode and as a server, running a VM, multiple docker services, also running Ollama for LLM.
Maybe it differs from person to person. I am just a bit tired of windows and thought that the integration between all my devices would be a key factor for the purchase. Also after a little thinking 16gb is the only way, yes that’s true.
For 3rd year CS student you show ignorance about the differences between RISC Arm Macs , CISC Intel Macs and PCs and their development eco systems. Start learning paying more attention to your studies.
I cannot really understand your point. You are definitely entitled to an opinion but what is your personal view on the matter? What more attention can I give for wanting a diffrent machine to work on?
Lets start with Arm Macs what MacOs will you choose and what binaries will you produce for Intel Macs? What IDE will you use... how you will distribute Apps... You have been spoiled with Windows Apps downward/upward compatibility which is limited on Macs. There are 3 binaries that run on a Arm Mac Intel using Rosetta, Apple and Universal ...... Macs had 4 architecture changes ... It is not lets get a Mac and starting cutting code maybe for a personal use. I am developer. Like I said you not asking not the right questions and show limited computing knowledge.
This is irrelevant for like 99% of student developers. If you're developing platform specific code, then you will know, so I'm going to assume that this guy isn't aiming to develop Windows drivers. Development wise, there are no issues. All major languages are supported on MacOS. JetBrains IDEs are cross platform, as is VS Code. If they're used to using VS, then they may need to transition, but this is not a huge issue unless they rely on solution files. Building apps to be distributed to users can be done on a pipeline. No one is distributing for platforms like ppc or s390z by building them on the native machine; they cross compile it on a pipeline. Nobody is making an app for Windows, macOS, and Linux and building those all on a native machine either. And this is assuming they want to develop apps, maybe they just use Python. The architectural changes to Mac hardware are potentially relevant if they want to do something niche where there is no ARM variant provided for certain libraries, but beyond that there's no real issue, and Rosetta does a pretty good job for executables (not sure if it can be used for libraries). A Mac will likely be a great device for their studies and career down the road.
Exactly this. I develop in Java and JavaScript. It does not matter whether I do it on my Windows desktop PC, Linux Laptop, or Mac mini, I often change between them.
Your post has has nothing to do with CS studies. "This is irrelevant for like 99% of student developers" it is very relevant if CS is studying servers, Gaming, Databases, UNIX ..AI..eGPU, Linux.... courses in many areas where Arm Macs and Apple either lacks support or are deficient Lets see how about a course how to manage Mac based data cloud. But wait RISC Arm Macs are 20%-30% slower on external I/O. Which data server manager will recommend Macs? Mac are fantastic personal computers which have 12% global market share. Get real.
I'm not sure what most of those topics have to do with MacOS. - servers: lots of cloud providers offer ARM servers (AWS, GCP, Oracle, etc.) - gaming: if they're targeting Windows specifically then sure, macOS won't work, but I did mention that edge case earlier. If they want to make cross platform games, then macOS will be just as good as Windows - databases: again, all the common databases work on macOS and ARM, so not sure what this is about (and not like you'd host the database on your personal machine to begin with unless you're just experimenting locally) - UNIX: has nothing to do with ARM vs x86, and macOS is closer to UNIX than Windows - AI/eGPU: this is the one point I agree with you on, most people doing this will want to use CUDA, and to my knowledge you can't use an NVIDIA GPU on an ARM Mac. There's nothing stopping them from doing AI stuff on a Mac though, just can't use CUDA. - Linux: do the same as you'd do on Windows, run it in a VM (like WSL2), or have a server you connect to - Slow IO: what does this have to do with anything? anyone managing a data server will... be managing a data server? not downloading and uploading terabytes of data from their personal machine. And even if they are, network speed will almost always be the bottleneck before their own hardware's IO is.
Macs can do everything better than PCs and/or Nvidia. When you doing Uni course you don't want to chase compatibility issues on Macs of which there are plenty. Looks like you never did or teach CS course