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Apple's new M1 Mac Mini as source (misses out on silent operation)

Beershaun

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I'll keep encouraging you to ditch the ancient PC now and use your Mac mini as a primary PC and use a raspberry pi for music player duties. Set up a media server like Plex or roon on your Mac mini and you are off to the races. You have a fantastic box in the Mac mini for primary computer and media server duties.
 

jhaider

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You can upgrade a headless Mac using Apple's Screen Sharing app from another Mac. I was able to load Monterrey onto our media Mac over Screen Sharing from my MBP.
 
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mononoaware

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I'll keep encouraging you to ditch the ancient PC now and use your Mac mini as a primary PC and use a raspberry pi for music player duties. Set up a media server like Plex or roon on your Mac mini and you are off to the races. You have a fantastic box in the Mac mini for primary computer and media server duties.
Thanks for the push.
I really do prefer to hear the death rattles of the ancient PC since it does all that I ask of it and still runs very fast since it is an i7 model, even more so since I swapped out it's spinning platter for a SSD a year or so ago.
Honestly it's falling apart though so switching over maybe is sooner than you think. Two USB ports are permanently malfunctioning (I trouble-shooted everything and looked it up, it's got to do with the controller/PSU engaging protection to prevent PSU failure), I have 4 ports left though so it's chugging along.

And yes of course when I switch to the M1 Mac Mini, I will look at all possible options and take steps to achieve the functionality I need. I will return to this thread and consider your suggestions among those.
 
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mononoaware

mononoaware

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You can upgrade a headless Mac using Apple's Screen Sharing app from another Mac. I was able to load Monterrey onto our media Mac over Screen Sharing from my MBP.
Yes that is one option. I recently discovered you can actually just plug in a iPad via thunderbolt and use it as a temporary screen as well via lightning cable.
This was going to be the next thing that I was going to try with my budget iPad, it's not exactly the biggest screen but I think it will be enough just to perform a MacOS upgrade.
 

tmtomh

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I understood it to be the most "power efficient" chip, therefore ideal for use in their iPad Pro's (with limited battery capacity) as well as Mac's etc (made sense to me to have one of their first proper chips be "compatible" with a wide range of products.
To my understanding more processing speed usually results in more power consumption so M1 Max likely consumes more power than the M1, but I figure if they are sticking it in their battery-powered Macbooks then it should still be relatively power efficient (I have read some great things about the M1 Pro/Max Macbook battery-life).
The speed at which laptop batteries degrade has been a sore spot for laptop owners for quite awhile. I helped decide on a "Macbook" style Intel laptop for a family member and of course 1.5-2 years later the battery can hardly last 2.5-3 hours on a full charge. I think the M1 chips will bring a fresh look at laptop battery-life as I have seen reviews state they are pretty impressive.

It was a no brainer for me to go for the M1 Mac Mini, since all I wanted was power efficiency since at least for the first few years of ownership I will be using it strictly to wake in and out of sleep just to play music files. And if there comes a time my current ancient PC dies, I will start using the Mac Mini only for basic word processing and internet browsing tasks. So in my use case I like to think it was quite a good investment (I went with the 512GB model).

Yes, the M1 is indeed the most power-efficient chip, and the M1 Pro and Max do use more power. The cool thing about these chips - even the base M1 - is that in addition to being so good on power-per-watt, they also happen to be very solid, at times outstanding, performers on pure speed, even disregarding power consumption: the 3rd-party M1 vs Intel i-series comparisons, for example, have not evaluated them based on power per watt; they just run benchmarks and timed tests on both and compare them to each other. So when the M1 beats an Intel i5 or i7, it's beating it at around 10 watts vs around 45 watts.
 
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mononoaware

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Yes, the M1 is indeed the most power-efficient chip, and the M1 Pro and Max do use more power. The cool thing about these chips - even the base M1 - is that in addition to being so good on power-per-watt, they also happen to be very solid, at times outstanding, performers on pure speed, even disregarding power consumption: the 3rd-party M1 vs Intel i-series comparisons, for example, have not evaluated them based on power per watt; they just run benchmarks and timed tests on both and compare them to each other. So when the M1 beats an Intel i5 or i7, it's beating it at around 10 watts vs around 45 watts.
Going to go on a Intel tangent here, but the old thirsty i7 in my ancient Acer PC is still pretty good performance wise (it is like the beating heart of the old PC which keeps me from turning it into E-waste).
Recently had an experience with a more modern "All-in-one" Acer PC (everything is inside the screen) with a i7 "T" processor which I understand as the more efficient model since the All-in-one runs off of a laptop brick type power supply (permanently). The TDP of the i7 "T" model is 2/5 of the TDP of the i7 running in my ancient tower desktop and for everyday tasks honestly the "T" processor was just as fast for everyday non-demanding tasks.

Then I tested the time both took to do an identical big Windows 10 Update just for fun. The old i7 just ploughed through the update while the efficient i7 "T" processor in the All-in-one took it's sweet time (not sure if the throttling was happening due to another component but as a "normal" user that was my experience). Not that it really matters much though since these days "Automatic OS updates" basically go ahead during those moments where you are not using the computer. Anyway this was a good reminder that the i7 in my old PC is still no slouch (Specs are 3.4Ghz Base 3.9Ghz boost/max).

I am not trying to make any comparisons to M1 here, just sharing my experience with a full power i7 vs power efficient i7.
 
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