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From: -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Two points
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2024 21:47:59 -0500
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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:
>>
>>> 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.
> 
> 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