Mac Operating System World - 2018 Mac Mini

[bunnspecial]

Originally Posted by alarmguy

Over time though and through many updates things go downhill, will be interesting for me in the Mac world to see if the same happens, I suspect not, time will tell ...


I still use a 2012 laptop as my primary computer, and it really has shown no signs of slowing down.

Granted it was before Apple went nuts on making everything non-upgradeable, and I was at least able to do the RAM(up to 16gb from the 4gb it shipped with) myself. I also went a bit nutty on storage-I have a 1tb SSD on board, and supplemented that probably a year ago with a secondary 2tb spinner. I'd have gone bigger on the spinner, but larger capacity drives are too thick to fit the chassis(or so I've been told). I could do the dual drive set up by removing the seldom used optical drive-I actually have the SSD installed there since I wanted the sudden motion sensor active for the spinner, and it only works on the main bay.

In any case, I haven't timed the boot up recently(especially given that I'm now at 24 days of uptime, and 100+ isn't all that unusual for me) but it's not exactly slow.

I'm going to keep using this computer as long as I can. Apple is continuing to support it in Catalina, even though I won't be upgrading.

 

[alarmguy]

^^^Well, so far things are great here with the Mac mini^^^
Everything has been plug and play so far, monitor, mouse, keyboard, Nikon D3300, next will try my Brother 6490CW longest I have EVER owned a printer and has been rock solid, first Brother I have ever owned too, Im sold on the brand now. HP/Epson or whatever, never again.

 

[Skippy722]

Originally Posted by alarmguy
^^^Well, so far things are great here with the Mac mini^^^
Everything has been plug and play so far, monitor, mouse, keyboard, Nikon D3300, next will try my Brother 6490CW longest I have EVER owned a printer and has been rock solid, first Brother I have ever owned too, Im sold on the brand now. HP/Epson or whatever, never again.


Printers are evil and must be punished!!!!

 

[alarmguy]

Originally Posted by Skippy722
Originally Posted by alarmguy
^^^Well, so far things are great here with the Mac mini^^^
Everything has been plug and play so far, monitor, mouse, keyboard, Nikon D3300, next will try my Brother 6490CW longest I have EVER owned a printer and has been rock solid, first Brother I have ever owned too, Im sold on the brand now. HP/Epson or whatever, never again.


Printers are evil and must be punished!!!!

Cant disagree with that !!! ^^^ Though been lucky with this one.

Ok, back to monitors, as you know I decided to go with a 24 inch 23.8 - HP 24F been using it a week or so now.
Love it, fantastic monitor.
I tried and returned a 25 inch HP before this one, it was freaking out my eyes, text wasn't that crisp but even worse was the glossy type screen, even though HP doesn't call it glossy, it was and that model was a HP 25er.

Ok, onto today, out of curiosity I am currently trying out a HP 27 Model # Z4N74AA curved screen monitor for fun, it was on sale in Staples. I am still holding onto the 24F but want to give a larger version one last try, even though technically 1080P on a 27" isn't ideal and you do not want to go higher. I am not a believer in the curve screens and do think its a gimmick but the price was right and I have always been curious about them.
First impressions, had it up and running for about the last 5 hours, had some work pretty intense related work to do on it. Have been tinkering with adjusting it just right for my eyes/comfort.
The screen is huge and taking me a while to adjust, at first it was overwhelming the white areas where there is no text can tire your eyes but the text, to my surprise is pretty darn crisp compared to the 25er that I returned. Had my wife "the examiner" verify, she says without question its more crisp then the HP25er that I returned. I find this interesting because all the panels I have were always IPS panels and besides the fun factor of the curved screen, this panel is actually a VA which is know for its tremendous grayscale/black levels/contrast levels (for lack of better words)
I think that is the difference on this larger panel with the crisp text.
Im liking it for the novelty and will be a keeper IF my eyes eventually adjust to it, just because its so large and I only sit about 36 inches from the monitor. The tricky part for me is I wear contact lens and some monitors just dont work with them.

 

[Skippy722]

When you connect a non-Apple display, does it still do it's weird yet incredibly effective screen scaling? Like on my MBP, I run the setting that says "Looks like 1440x900" which is also the "Default for display" option. The actual screen resolution is 2560x1600.

 

[alarmguy]

I have no idea what you are talking about but I will look into this, I assume maybe it no longer does what you say as I think Apple is out of the monitor business the last few years.
Pretty much everything has been plug in play on the mini.

 

[alarmguy]

Opps, l looking at "Display" in settings now, the "check mark" is on "Default for Display" instead of "Scaled"
Under "Color" it actually has "HP 27 Curved" selected.
So this was all plug and play, first time I ever went into display on this mini.

Keep in mind Mac is completely new to me!

 

[alarmguy]

^^^ Ok, I just changed the resolution to 900 instead of 1080p Text is a bit larger which isn't bad on the 27 inch screen, feels like I am using up some wasted extra room on the screen.
Can not really notice negative effects on the text pixelating at the slightly reduced resolution.
Hmmmm ... trying to play with this as much as possible, dont want to return it if I dont have too but will be switching back and forth between the 24 and 27 one the next couple days to see which one goes back.

 

[Andrew1972]

I had fuzzy text on my previously Crystal clear dell ultra sharp monitor on Windows.

The fix for my Mac book pro:

https://medium.com/@mrahmadawais/fix-macos-mojave-blurry-font-rendering-issue-4331757b0776

 

[alarmguy]

Originally Posted by madRiver
I had fuzzy text on my previously Crystal clear dell ultra sharp monitor on Windows.

The fix for my Mac book pro:

https://medium.com/@mrahmadawais/fix-macos-mojave-blurry-font-rendering-issue-4331757b0776


Interesting, I'm not having a font issue with the two current monitors I am trying - HP24f and HP 27 (model number in previous posts)
Its rather crisp but I did for the heck of it uncheck font smoothing.
Not sure if it changed anything or not but will examine it more later.

Im starting to adjust to the 27 curve, would like to keep it, have a few more days to decide. (return window for the store)
I can tell you, after experiencing the deep black level (contrast ratio?) I am sold on the VA monitors vs IPS

Right now its bike to the beach day.
Weather here has been awesome, no rain in weeks (getting a little extreme now) Recording breaking temps - endless 90s ... beach cooler of course.

I am curious and no time to play around right now but does anyone know what key on a windows keyboard will mimic the ⌘ that I see all the time in Mac posts?

 

[alarmguy]

Ok, returned the 27 inch HP Curved screen.
I wanted it to work so I could keep it, but no deal. Its was freaking out my eyes. Dont get me wrong, it was a beautiful display and lots of fun but way to big for what I need.
Without question if your a perfectionist (yeah I know) You are really pushing it using 1080P display on a 27 inch unless you have a really large desk and sitting 40 inches or more away from it.
With that said I also wear contact lens and well, just didn't work. Aimlessly I kept switching monitors back and forth.
From the new 24F to the 27 curve, and back and forth and back and forth.

Looking closely you can see the difference in the pixels. A 27 has about 82 per inch and a 24 about 92 per inch and why for me I would need to be further from the screen.
Text on my 24F is really sweet. Black level in text is nice and deep. Keep in mind these are not scientific measurements I am talking about, fruitless for a lower cost monitor I might think. Anyway, Love it, no more experimenting. 24F is the keeper. Returned the other already.

So all in all, I have tried a HP 25er didn't like it at all/text NG, HP 27 curve was nice fun kind of thing to play around with but to me and for what I need didn't compare to the HP 24F. Love it and glad I am finally done!
Im amazed how reasonable a good monitor can be, I spend what I feel is value but don not settle for junk at a low price, I know in the price range you are not getting the "best" but darn it, far superior to anything from just a few years ago! Quite honestly I can not fault it at all.

Ok, time to get my printer working/fingers crossed, installed the drivers and see if it now plugs and plays or maybe I should enjoy my day and do it later !

 

[alarmguy]

Mini update, well, as many know, I ditched the Windows operating system from my main desktop after 25 years for this Mac mini. Just frustrated with windows updates breaking things that were working fine before the update, then updates to fix the things the update broke!

So far, so good, but ... *LOL*
My mini has updated a couple times, nothing broke and well, I think of this as kind of cool, however I am about to click for my Apple to update from Apples Mojave to Catalina!
I assume all will go just fine but wow, how fast things evolve!

 

[PWMDMD]

My personal life is on Apple stuff and my business life is on Win 10 so:

1. I run a 2018 Mac mini at work with a 3GHz 6-core i5, 256GB solid state HD and 32GB of ram - bought the ram aftermarket and installed myself which was not an easy job but it's doable with the right tools.

2. I have 16GB of RAM dedicated to the Mac and run Win 10 through Parallels and have 16GB of ram dedicated to it. My business runs Windows only software and with Mission control set to the middle mouse button it's easily accessible and it's treated like any other application.

3. This Mac mini is SIGNIFICANTLY faster, more responsive and NEVER gets bogged down compared to my late 2015 iMac at home with 24GB of ram - I think the biggest difference is the HD.

4. I had a Mac mini with 16GB from 2014 and it was basically unusable due to the slow notebook-style HD.

For the money I'm pretty happy with this little Mac mini.....

 

[alarmguy]

^^^^^Wow, thanks for this ^^^ PWMDMD

As you might have noticed if you read through this very long thread. I have a 2018 Series Mac mini (purchased new this past month) same exact specs as you, except 8 Gb ram.
Yes, I am on the road to having all personal computing in apples world, more or less, will make a decision in the coming year if I extend that to their phone.
I am thrilled with the Mac mini, freaking thing is fast, like, amazing, honestly, couldn't use anything faster because I dont see how that can be?

Ok, now lets hope for reliability! Im torn on wondering if I should buy APPLE CARE + for $99. Which is basically an extended warranty for 2 years = 3 total and unlimited tech support which I would never use. I NEVER buy extended warranties, not in 35 years, except when I bought my 2014 Harley thinking it would break down all the time, here we are approaching 2020 and it still has not needed a repair and I am thinking I wasted that money!

 

[JHZR2]

I'm still running an original PowerPC G4 Mac mini (2005, iirc) for certain things. I swapped in an SSD which was great, but I think ran TRIM and lost the boot partition. Going to swap back to a standard HDD.

Still runs just fine. Won't run these ever bulkier websites that stream media, but runs other stuff fine.

Not everything (os included) get security updates anymore.

But for a basic computer, not a bad setup. The retina imac may be a better deal with a 4K screen, refurbished, for others reading this thread with interest for what to buy.

That said, the Intel Nuc system looks kind of interesting too. Not sure ignoring one could turn one into a hackintosh or some sort of Linux.

 

[bunnspecial]

I personally don't upgrade OSs until at least the .1 version comes out, and sometimes later. Mojave will still be well supported for a while now.

Actually, there are a couple of reasons why I won't be updating to Catalina until I'm drug there kicking and screaming because of a few legacy 32 bit apps I'm running.

 

[alarmguy]

^^ Smart move ^^ *L*

25 years of Windows and I would typically wait a couple months, I dont know what just happened though!

Update showed up on my Mac, thought to myself cool and I just clicked to download it and install, being new to Mac I assumed it was out for a little while but and trusted Apple to have it right, I guess but ... yeah, I know.
When I saw how involved it was to download and installed then I realized, how extensive that "click" was to update my system >>> *L* man the Mac mini was cranking away for some time!

I guess its about a month since getting the Mac mini and I am still impressed how fast it is, man, just click here, click there and well, I am there. I like the "photo" section too, where I upload photo from my Nikon d3300. I dont know, everything just works. I still have to learn about the system, so far, pretty simply though, but want to use it to its full potentiall.

 

[JHZR2]

I'll say, having just updated three macs, the downloads have been slow, they haven't downloaded al the updates at once, and there must be a firmware flash or something because you get an old school beep and a long time with the black Apple screen.

 

[alarmguy]

Being new to Macs I wasn't sure what to expect as far as updating. It was an extensive update for sure and I now have Catalina, I too had times of a long black screen.
All seems good though.

Updates freak me out more so on a brand new machine, I just dont trust updates, I put in a lot of effort researching before getting a new computer and then all of a sudden, plug the thing in and the updates start right away or within a week or two.

*L* have the update "fear" mainly because of my bad experience with Windows 10 updates which has been the worse and I have been through almost every version of Windows in the last 25 ish years and well, why, I just purchased my first Mac desktop.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Originally Posted by alarmguy
Being new to Macs I wasn't sure what to expect as far as updating. It was an extensive update for sure and I now have Catalina, I too had times of a long black screen.
All seems good though.

Updates freak me out more so on a brand new machine, I just dont trust updates, I put in a lot of effort researching before getting a new computer and then all of a sudden, plug the thing in and the updates start right away or within a week or two.

*L* have the update "fear" mainly because of my bad experience with Windows 10 updates which has been the worse and I have been through almost every version of Windows in the last 25 ish years and well, why, I just purchased my first Mac desktop.


The "brand new machine" may have been sitting on a shelf for some time; so there may very well be some bug fixes and security updates available. Those types of updates very, very, very rarely have any impact on a user's day-to-day use.

I've found Apple to be by far the best among the OS's I've used over the years at "not buggering everything up" in both small, incremental updates as well as major OS version bumps. I don't envy Microsoft's situation, where they have millions of commercial customers who require backwards-compatibility; and most desktop Linux distributions are not beholden to anyone in particular and might completely change the way things look and work if and when they feel like it. I have seen the odd and occasional Linux update introduce some issues with closed-source drivers; but mostly it is the changes that'll throw a user for a loop.