... are there any other M4 Mac Mini users here? I'm LOViNG mine - and have done a few sponsored product videos on accessories on my YT channel...

I did a giveaway for a Minisopuru hub - the vertical MINI218B PRO; https://minisopuru.com/products/mini218bpro

... but the winner, StingRay (a BBS user) who was just helping me make sure my giveaway software/website was working, didn't own an M4 Mini...

If anyone here would like the veritcal NVME hub, I'm willing to offer it to any BBS user who has an M4 Mac Mini. :P

Just lemme know...



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Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: paulie420 to All on Tue Jun 24 2025 06:58 pm

... are there any other M4 Mac Mini users here? I'm LOViNG mine - and have done a few sponsored product videos on accessories on my YT channel...

I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying to use Mac OS 9.x on it. I had also bought a hard drive for it from eBay that was already set up to dual-boot OS X and OS 9, and also bought a RAM upgrade for it. In the past, I had opened up a Mac Mini to do similar upgrades myself (though that was with an Intel Mac Mini), so I thought I could handle doing the same for the M4. I got it open, put the larger RAM module in, and swapped the hard drive, but since then, it has been failing to boot. It starts up but shows the ? icon that it doesn't recognize the drive. I tried swapping the original hard drive back in, but it's still showing the ? boot icon. I'm not sure what's happening with it, but I've been meaning to try to find a place that can repair it. I seem to recall emailing Computer Renaissance in my area here (maybe you've heard of them, since you're in Oregon?) and I think they said they can repair it, so I thought of taking it there. I just haven't yet..

Nightfox
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... are there any other M4 Mac Mini users here? I'm LOViNG mine - and
have done a few sponsored product videos on accessories on my YT channel...

Not I, though I am seriously tempted to get one as my daily driver PC. My work laptop died late last year after myriad issues with win 11, WSL and Docker, all of which I needed to do my job. I manged to get a M3 Macbook pro as a replacement.... OMG it is so much better. Stuff just works! And its faster and actually portable.

If anyone here would like the veritcal NVME hub, I'm willing to offer it to any BBS user who has an M4 Mac Mini. :P

Thats one thing I don't quite have my head around with these Mac Mini's. The storage expansion options. Buying one with a large SSD built-in is super pricy, how well does these NVEM hubs work with a Mac Mini & MacOS?

Also what options have you got for using large arrays of spinning rust i.e. RAID with normal HDDs?

Anyhow glad you are loving yours, might be getting one myself once life has calmed down and a few other major financial things are out of the way.

... Pere diem: Father's Day.

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... are there any other M4 Mac Mini users here? I'm LOViNG mine - and have done a few sponsored product videos on accessories on my YT channel...

Not I, though I am seriously tempted to get one as my daily driver PC.
My work laptop died late last year after myriad issues with win 11, WSL and Docker, all of which I needed to do my job. I manged to get a M3 Macbook pro as a replacement.... OMG it is so much better. Stuff just works! And its faster and actually portable.

Dude - for the $499 student discount, its one of the best PCs that you can buy right now... it is ON FUEGO; seriously, it performs above its weight class and Apple doesn't check the student discount - at $499, its the best compute you can buy right now...

Thats one thing I don't quite have my head around with these Mac Mini's. The storage expansion options. Buying one with a large SSD built-in is super pricy, how well does these NVEM hubs work with a Mac Mini & MacOS?

So - the USB-3 hubs are around 1000mbps/sec. Thunderbolt 4 is even faster around 3000mbps/sec - for the M4 Mac Mini PRO Thunderbolt 5 is even m0re fast....

But even for 4K video editing I'm OK on the 1000mbps.

Also what options have you got for using large arrays of spinning rust i.e. RAID with normal HDDs?

I don't know... donate to my gofundme and I'll find out!! :P

Anyhow glad you are loving yours, might be getting one myself once life has calmed down and a few other major financial things are out of the
way.

I love it. Buy one - you'll be happy.



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I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying to use Mac OS 9.x on it. I had also bought a hard drive for it from eBay that was already set up to dual-boot OS X and OS 9, and also bought a
RAM upgrade for it. In the past, I had opened up a Mac Mini to do
similar upgrades myself (though that was with an Intel Mac Mini), so I thought I could handle doing the same for the M4. I got it open, put
the larger RAM module in, and swapped the hard drive, but since then, it has been failing to boot. It starts up but shows the ? icon that it doesn't recognize the drive. I tried swapping the original hard drive back in, but it's still showing the ? boot icon. I'm not sure what's happening with it, but I've been meaning to try to find a place that can repair it. I seem to recall emailing Computer Renaissance in my area
here (maybe you've heard of them, since you're in Oregon?) and I think they said they can repair it, so I thought of taking it there.

LOL - are you sure it was a new m4 mac mini??

At any rate - if you'd like this hub I could deliver it to YOU. :P Portland, FTW!



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Just put in a new MacMini M4, and in the next few days an RAID 0/1 dock arrives - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIrDfsgXEQU

Agree that these inexpensive very small MacMinis are awesome!

... If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

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... are there any other M4 Mac Mini users here? I'm LOViNG mine - and
have done a few sponsored product videos on accessories on my YT channel...

Not a mini user, used to be years and year ago.

I use a macbook pro m1 as my daily driver.... I also have a small GMKTek with Debian for personal use...

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Re: Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: paulie420 to Nightfox on Tue Jun 24 2025 09:45 pm

I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying to

LOL - are you sure it was a new m4 mac mini??

No; as I said, it was used.

At any rate - if you'd like this hub I could deliver it to YOU. :P Portland, FTW!

What hub?

Nightfox
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kirkspragg wrote to paulie420 <=-

Also what options have you got for using large arrays of spinning rust i.e. RAID with normal HDDs?

Not a Mac option, but I picked up a Synology chassis for cheap a while
back and populated it with 5 2TB drives I had laying around - 2 from a
desktop that had mirrored drives, 2 I'd shucked from external cases,
and one spare for my desktop system.

If you're looking to use up drives you have laying around, it's a cheap
way to go.



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paulie420 wrote to kirkspragg <=-

Dude - for the $499 student discount, its one of the best PCs that you
can buy right now... it is ON FUEGO; seriously, it performs above its weight class and Apple doesn't check the student discount - at $499,
its the best compute you can buy right now...

Dang - my son just graduated. I wonder if he still has an active campus
email?

Back in the '90s, before webmail was popular, you had to go through
hoops to get an email address. I worked in Berkeley, CA - home to UC
Berkeley. There was a building on campus called "Soda Hall", and people
who were *long* graduated still had "soda accounts" with
soda.berkeley.edu email addresses. Permanent student discounts!

I heard people were in an uproar when they discontinued them.

Another email story, I know I've told this before -- at the same time,
Vivid Studios was an anchor in "Multimedia Gulch" in San Francisco,
when multimedia CD-ROM publishing and online graphics first became a
thing.

Vivid.com email addresses and tilde web spaces stayed active long after
people left, the company kept them active as a courtesy. I'm pretty
sure they were all served by a linux box running POP3 and apache.

Vivid was taken over by an east coast rival, who proceeded to dismantle
the brand under their name. They let the domain vivid.com lapse,
breaking tilde web spaces and email.

Vivid Studios, a porn movie studio registered the domain. Tilde spaces
would go to their 404 page, which if memory serves, had Christy Canyon
in thigh-high boots, a corset and a whip.



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Just put in a new MacMini M4, and in the next few days an RAID 0/1 dock arrives - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIrDfsgXEQU

Agree that these inexpensive very small MacMinis are awesome!

That hub looks cool... and a dual NVME setup is interesting for these; I don't think I need that redundancy for MY Mac Mini setup - but very cool...



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At any rate - if you'd like this hub I could deliver it to YOU. :P Portland, FTW!

What hub?

The OP post was offering my M4 Mac Mini vertical hub (new) to anyone who needed it...



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Dude - for the $499 student discount, its one of the best PCs that yo can buy right now... it is ON FUEGO

Dang - my son just graduated. I wonder if he still has an active campus
email?

No need - Apple doesn't check the student discount... they just ship. HOWEVER, the M4 Mac Mini can sometimes be found @ MicroCenter for $449 even!!!

Its a no brainer...



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Re: Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: paulie420 to Nightfox on Wed Jun 25 2025 05:38 pm

The OP post was offering my M4 Mac Mini vertical hub (new) to anyone who needed it...

Ah, sorry, I must have missed that or forgotten..

Nightfox
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I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying

LOL - are you sure it was a new m4 mac mini??

No; as I said, it was used.

I think you're thinking of Mac Mini G4. As in, the last PowerPC Mac Mini.

M4 is the modern Apple Silicon, ARM based chip.

:)

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Re: Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: Retroswim to Nightfox on Thu Jun 26 2025 09:53 pm

I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying

LOL - are you sure it was a new m4 mac mini??

No; as I said, it was used.

I think you're thinking of Mac Mini G4. As in, the last PowerPC Mac Mini.

M4 is the modern Apple Silicon, ARM based chip.

:)

Ah, yes, I mis-typed.. It was a G4. :)

Nightfox
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Dude - for the $499 student discount, its one of the best PCs that you
can buy right now... it is ON FUEGO; seriously, it performs above its weight class and Apple doesn't check the student discount - at $499, its the best compute you can buy right now...

I'll definitely look into this, thanks for the tip RE student pricing. Where did you buy yours? Directly from apple's website or elsewhere?

So - the USB-3 hubs are around 1000mbps/sec. Thunderbolt 4 is even faster around 3000mbps/sec - for the M4 Mac Mini PRO Thunderbolt 5 is even m0re fast....

How picky are these mac mini's RE usb 3 hub support? Do you need to be careful in checking which hubs will work & what MacOS versions they support?
Although I use a Mac at work, I'm not that familiar with it or what the 3rd party hardware support is like, this is one of the things thats holding me back from buying to be honest.

I love it. Buy one - you'll be happy.

I'm coming around to that point of view pretty quickly. As my other team member's Windoze laptops continue to crash, blue-screen and die, my opinion of MS windows 11 & x86 based laptops continues to decline.

... Friends don't let friends BBS at 2400!

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Not a Mac option, but I picked up a Synology chassis for cheap a while
back and populated it with 5 2TB drives I had laying around - 2 from a
desktop that had mirrored drives, 2 I'd shucked from external cases,
and one spare for my desktop system.

So did you setup synology to serve the array up as an NFS share & mounted that? Or did you do it with iSCSI? NFS should work just fine with a Mac, not sure about iSCSI...

... Entropy isn't what it used to be.

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paulie420 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

No need - Apple doesn't check the student discount... they just ship. HOWEVER, the M4 Mac Mini can sometimes be found @ MicroCenter for $449 even!!!

We just got a MicroCenter in Santa Clara. It's been a long drought since
Fry's Electronics closed down.

We do have a local chain called "Central Computers" that's pretty good,
but they're tiny compared to MicroCenter/Fry's and seem mostly centered
around Windows gamers nowadays.





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Re: Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: poindexter FORTRAN to paulie420 on Thu Jun 26 2025 06:18 pm

We just got a MicroCenter in Santa Clara. It's been a long drought since Fry's Electronics closed down.

I keep thinking MicroCenter should move into the old Fry's Electronics building in my area. If they did, I imagnie they'd do pretty good business here.

Nightfox
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Re: Re: Any M4 Mac Mini users?
By: paulie420 to Nightfox on Tue Jun 24 2025 09:45 pm

I bought a used M4 Mac Mini a while ago, with the intention of trying to

LOL - are you sure it was a new m4 mac mini??

I was thinking G4 rather than M4.. A bit of a different thing. Sorry. :)

Nightfox
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