The quote is a bit out of context. The sentence right above it:

>It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age.

So, no, it's not "yayy" because it "hasn't gotten worse", it's "yayy", because "[it makes] almost everything better".

Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these.

And now the top thread is dominated by an argument about laptop keyboards, for a device that isn't a laptop and doesn't even come with a keyboard.

But to be fair, the device is made by Apple and the discussion speaks to how Apple treats its consumers.

I'm pretty happy with mine, but thanks for speaking for us all with your sweeping generalization.

I work at a company where most of us use Macs. Everyone that has upgraded from a 2013-2015 MBP to the touchbar model absolutely hates it, including me. There's gotta be someone around here that actually likes it, but I haven't met them yet.

Its OK if you like it. I'm sure lots of people do, but you know damn well significantly more people have had issues with this laptop than normal, so I'm not sure why you're implying otherwise.

The keyboard is by far the worst I've ever used, and I've owned a variety of $200 Wal-Mart black friday laptops and a couple of netbooks, in addition to some high end stuff. I had a friend with an older MBP attempt to show me something using my computer and he could barely type on it without frequent mistakes. Within a minute he was getting frustrated. It just feels terrible. I never thought anything would be worse than typing on a touch-screen but Apple's engineers have accomplished a horrifying miracle. Its like they intentionally tried to design something that's as loud as a mechanical keyboard while still having worse tactile feedback than a $5.00 rubber dome keyboard.

On top of that, its not noticeably faster, after 4.5 years it still maxed out @ 16GB Ram (They fixed this in 2018 but its too late), which is not enough for my use case + it died after 3 months (Not the keyboard, it was a power issue).

This is both the most expensive and the worst computer I've ever owned. The 2013 MBP I'm using now as a loaner while I get my new one fixed is, to quote Steve Jobs "Like getting a glass of ice water in hell." It just works.

The touchbar made me realize that I have a habit of resting my fingers up there. I came to this realization because when I didn't think I was typing anything, stuff would happen. Eventually I realized I was touching virtual buttons on the touchbar.

I don't hate it, but I wish more of the tools I use took advantage of it.

I think it could be massively improved by shortening it a little on the left to make room for a physical escape key. That's about 95% of my problem with it.

Consider mapping CapsLock to Esc (and Ctrl when long-pressed) with Karabiner. I haven't used my physical Esc key since 2014 or something. Might help with your issue.

You don't need a third party tool; System Preferences does this for you already. (Maybe not the long-press, but I'm vim, not emacs).

If you remap CapsLock to Esc, what key do you use for Control for doing Control A, Control E, Control K, Control Y, Control N, and Control P in every application?

I tried to address this in my parentheses, but Karabiner specifically lets you bind CapsLock to both: Esc when tapped alone, and Ctrl when held down in combination with other keys.

And your post also answers you sibling comment: Ctrl modifier is useful outside of just Emacs.

Try it out. I believe the API changed in the macOS release before Mojave, so they relaunched Karabiner under the name Karabiner Elements. This option is under the "Complex Modifications" tab.

If I was writing a list of tricks for macOS power users to try, this would be my number one. Up there with binding a global show/hide hotkey for iTerm (I use Ctrl-Space, thus CapsLock-Space).

I prefer Magic Trackpad 2 (or native MBP 2015 trackpad) to any other way of navigation but Vi keybinds -if available- work as well.

I currently use Karabiner for this as well, but a slightly different configuration.

The two rules I use are:

* R-Cmd + hjkl are arrows (which works great with HHKB but even on native MBP it requires less movement of hand from trackpad or typing hand than the arrow keys)

* Caps solo is Esc while Caps with another key equals Ctrl.

Is there a way to do this in Linux as well? I currently have to use Linux regularly and I rebind Caps to Ctrl however for Vim it isn't ideal. So I'd like to have the same functionality I have with Karabiner on Linux (Xorg / console).

You can use xcape on linux to do this. I use it to map CAPS to CTRL/ESCAPE, and right shift to RIGHT SHIFT/COMPOSE

I use Karabiner Elements to bind backtick (grave accent) to Esc, Command-backtick to Command-backtick as normal (so you can switch between windows of the same app), and Option-backtick to backtick.

It's not optimal, but I do it because backtick is about the same position as a hardware Escape key. It makes using vim feel ok again.

This option is available from the KE Complex Modifications tab.

Note that this means you lose the ability to use option-backtick for diacritic marks. Normally option-backtick followed by a makes "à", Option-backtick followed by e makes "è", etc

This isn't working for me in Mojave; you haven't had a problem?

In this mode... if you hold down CapsLock as Ctrl and then don't decide to press another modifier... does it still fire CapsLock as Esc?

Are you denoting control+shift+a as control-A?

No, I was just typing on a phone. I meant control+a (start of line), control+e (end of line), etc.

Capslock is ctrl for most developers I know (because it's by far the most used key in terminal/Vim/emacs/etc).

Yes. Although in a Kinesis Advantage keyboard (the "official" Emacs keyboard), because the Control is under the thumb, it is useful to remap the CapsLock to Esc.

You should snag an app called BetterTouchTool. Makes the TouchBar an amazing addition to the laptop. It's just a shame that Apple didn't build in a tool like it but I hope the developer gets lots of love.

I have BTT for my machine at home, but the IT security department won't approve it for the work machines.

Doesn’t BTT require enabling unsigned kernel extensions?

Yes! I am constantly holding down the escape key without realizing it. Not a problem very often but occasionally causes some really confusing things to happen.

Doesn't it also get very distracting with how often it flashes into different states? I've heard this drives people crazy.

When you remap it it doesn't flash at all.

The touchbar? I find it more amusing than distracting.

> Its OK if you like it. I'm sure lots of people do, but you know damn well significantly more people have had issues with this laptop than normal, so I'm not sure why you're implying otherwise.

Yup, that's exactly what the HN groupthink would like to believe. What is by definition a small user demographic complains repeatedly/loudly that their problems are the most important, indicative of "everyone", and Apple is doomed because so-and-so bought a Surface Pro/Dell/System76. The hyperbolie is kicked up a notch here, as clearly any $200 Walmart laptop keyboard is better.

As is typical, there's never any data to support the claims and a significant number of counter anecdotes are dismissed absent critical reasoning ("you know damn well...!"). Instead, the echo chamber resonates unabated by logic.

Throw in an out of context Steve quote and you can identify this drivel pretty uniformly. It's usually best to ignore, though at times a response is merited when it's completely off topic and unhelpful (as it is here, the new Mac mini seems awesome regardless of a hater's two year old take on the tbMBP).

I like the feel of the keyboard. I did not like the trip to the Mac store at 8 months whereby they very gingerly lifted the spacebar and removed whatever crumb was under there making it mushy.

I also like the touchbar. The touch-slide volume is a nifty improvement...I use the touchbar for the occasional screengrab...and that's about it. As someone mentioned above, I too would really like a physical Escape key

If you go back and read my comment, I didn't say that out of Apple's entire customer base, more people dislike the keyboard than like it. I said that more people are having issues with this computer than a normal Apple MBP.

Just like your comment, this is an anecdotal opinion on the Internet. I didn't read your response and come away with the conclusion that you were attempting to represent it as a peer reviewed white paper, so I'm not sure why you're holding my random Internet comment to the same standard.

My anecdotal evidence is that all of the typical places people go to talk about technology on the Internet(reddit, hacker news, blogs, etc.) seem to have to more complaints about the keyboard on the new MBP than I recall seeing about the old model, which was almost universally hailed as the best laptop on the market.

Included with that anecdotal evidence is my own experience in a company with hundreds of people that use MBPs. There might be other companies where everyone loves them.

It would be really helpful if we could trust Apple to publish accurate, relevant data on the new MBP vs the old one, but they have a history of hiding, denying and/or lying about issues with Apple products.

>The hyperbolie is kicked up a notch here, as clearly any $200 Walmart laptop keyboard is better.

This isn't hyperbole. Its just my opinion and it was presented as such. I've been using computers since the early 90s. I've never used a keyboard that felt worse to me than the MBP. When I say that I don't mean that its one of the worst keyboards I've ever used, I mean that its THE worst keyboard that I have ever used, which is obviously just my opinion.

>Throw in an out of context Steve quote and you can identify this drivel pretty uniformly

This isn't a case where reusing a quote is changing the context of what he meant. I wasn't saying that Steve Jobs agrees with my opinion of the new MBP. This should be pretty obvious. The original context was that Steve Jobs felt one product was so superior to another one that getting the former was like getting a glass of ice water in hell. Its a perfectly relevant quote used in the same way that he did. I just happen to be comparing different products.

>It's usually best to ignore, though at times a response is merited when it's completely off topic and unhelpful (as it is here, the new Mac mini seems awesome regardless of a hater's two year old take on the tbMBP).

1. Its perfectly on-topic to discuss the quality of Apple products in a post about an Apple product. The reputation of their products is pretty valid when people are discussing whether to buy a newer product.

2. I didn't bring up the MBP, someone else did and I responded.

3. Not liking a single Apple product doesn't make me a "hater". I loved my 2013 MBP, I loved all of my iPhones/iPads, and I love MacOS. Apple released a product that I have an issue with. Lots of other people are having the same issue. I'm not sure why you have to react to that like a personal attack.

There's this phenomenon where if lots of people have an issue with something and then a random person buys the product and has a good experience, that person decides to dismiss everyone that has had an issue, pretend its impossible the issue existed, and then act like there must be something wrong with the people that had the issue. I don't really understand that because with any product that sells thousands or millions, its typical for some people to have issues even if most like it. In this case, it just happens to be a product where a slightly larger percentage than normal is having an issue.

I don't understand all the hate for the touchbar. I can never remember the functions performed by the function keys, so having icons indicating which functions are available seems really useful.

The problem is that most serious computer users use a laptop docked, so it’s useless 70-90% of the time, which means the software can’t rely on it, which means it’s an afterthought in all apps.

A Scotsman would be to say “No true computer user ...” - this was a generalisation. An apt one IMHO

No it wasn't. Define "serious". What makes one computer user more "serious" than another. The point of the no true Scottsman is that the term is never defined by the statement and so it's completely subjective.

That’s not how it works.

Actually it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Refuting the initial generalization by saying that no "serious" computer users use their Touch Bar because their computers are closed is nearly a textbook example of the fallacy.

that's not what he (or she) was doing.

Do you have to look down to use those icons on the Touchbar? This is something I don’t have to do as a touch-typist. Repeatedly craning your neck to look down will result in RSI. I spend a little effort to learn new hotkeys every so often and the benefit far outweighs the cost: I’m much faster and keep my good ergonomics.

I don't use the function keys much, so yes, i do look at the keyboard when using them.

Comparing the keyboard with a $200 walmart netbook is a joke. It might not be everybody's taste, but it's far from terrible. I actually like it and at my company where 95% of engineers have one, there is not more complains than usual about the new model. People that really can't stand the keyboard will usually use external peripherals at their desk.

I share in the hate. It’s the worst keyboard I’ve used in memory. The trackpad is first rate however.

The touchbar is so much less functional than the keys it replaces. Some key combinations now require serious acrobatics, and you can’t touch type as easily.

We’re not buying any more macs until it improves.

>the touchbar model absolutely hates it

What kind of work do you / your teammates do? I walked into an Apple store last week prepared to hate the keyboards and touch bars, but was very pleasantly surprised. My ladyfriend wanted to see the Air, but was so taken with the Touch Bar for photo work that she will be buying an MBP instead. While it might not be everyones cup of tea, I think Apple may have figured is demographics correctly on this one.

I don't have a problem with the touchbar, its the keyboard that they introduced on the same model.

I also think the new MacBook Pro is the worst laptop I've ever had. I hated it so much I switched to a Thinkpad. Thankfully these are company issued laptops and I could do this pretty easily. Had I bought a personal one I'd be quite distraught.

Anyone who hates the touchbar has never chased a chat window for the mute button (it's there). Also, no need to leave the keyboard to click on dialog box buttons - they also get there.

It could be better - it could require a bit more of pressure to press buttons and could have haptic feedback like the touchpad, but I bet someone is working on that, even if it means extending haptic feedback to the whole chassis (which is not a bad idea anyway).

I have a 2013 15" MBP, a 2015 13" MBP, a 2016 15" MBP w/ Touchbar, and a 2017 15" MBP w/ Touchbar. I vastly prefer the 2013 and 2015, even though they are bare-bones specced and the newer MBPs are top-of-the-line. The touchbar MBPs are provided to me by my employer. I just bought my 2015 13" this year, after considering getting a newer model, and I'm planning for it to be my main personal laptop for years to come.

I don't like the touchbar, I don't like the new keyboard, and I don't like the new ports.

I think there is something wrong if, now two years later, there are still people like me who not only don't see a clear benefit to upgrading, but see it as a net-negative.

Ideally, there should be nearly no one (if anyone) who prefers the previous iteration.

It makes things universally worse imo. Everything was by touch for me previously, including adjusting sound. I had the keyboard memorized. Now I constantly have to look down. A keyboard shouldn't require me to change my focus, that defeats the entire purpose.

Same. I bought a 2018 MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar this July. Before that, I owned a 2014 MacBook Pro, the last one with the mechanical trackpad. My new machine is absolutely better than my old one.

In what ways is your new machine better, apart from being thinner and just a bit lighter?

The dimensions aren't really a selling point for me at all. Both laptops are thin enough and light enough for me to carry them to and from work comfortably.

Performance is better across the board (6-core i9 vs 4-core i7, 32GB vs 16GB, faster SSD). It has a larger, pressure-sensitive track pad. The display is better.

I have a slight preference for the old keyboard, but I don't dislike the new one. I could take or leave the TouchBar. I was never a big user of the F keys and IntelliJ, where I spend a lot of my time, has good TouchBar support. I like having Touch ID. I'd prefer to have a real escape key, but the button is still in the same place so I haven't had to retrain my fingers to hit it.

USB-C with a Thunderbolt 3 hub is marginally more convenient than a Thunderbolt 2 hub plus a MagSafe power cord. I do miss MagSafe though.

These are almost exactly my thoughts as well coming from a 2015 MBP. I would only add that for me, I actually like the new keyboard. The low/firm travel of the keys is actually preferable for me. I felt like the old keyboards were "mushy". That's obviously a personal preference, however.

I'm terribly unhappy with mine and so is everyone else I know, so i'm pretty pleased with it

I like the Touchbar more than most of my other colleagues like the Touchbar. And I hate the Touchbar.

The new macbook pro keyboard is flimsy and easily broken. I bought my own macbook pro, delete key stuck.

Got a new one from my new job, keyboard stuck.

My brother bought a new one, keyboard stuck.

You are liking it wrong :)

McDonald's also makes record sales in Japan right now. So by your logic that must be the best hamburger in the market.

Would you suppose that price and convenience might be factors aside from food quality?

This is the thing - narrow single issue analysis that doesn't even acknowledge that other factors of consideration even exist, inevitably will result in conclusions with very limited applicability.

I don't mind the touchbar. It has it's moments. I just wish they had included it in addition to the normal keyboard, rather than replacing the top row.

I think really the goal was replacing the top row in the first place - the function keys are generally useless except for ancient legacy compatibility, advanced user's macros, and media control.

But the sides of the function keys are the escape and power keys, so the row itself couldn't go away

I wish the Touch Bar was farther offset, 50-100% taller for a better display area, and that the escape and touch id/power buttons were distinct. I also wish there was a standard way for applications to advertise functions for it (I have some really useful tools that are third party, such as mic mute).

I don't dislike the touchbar, I'm just annoyed at having to pay so much for something I'm ambivalent about.

I don't understand why it isn't just an option. If you want it give you can pay for it.

Hate it or not, Apple has to make it relatively commonplace if they want macOS apps to bother developing for it instead of ignoring it. Their short-term goal is 100% of MBP users, and surely, eventually 100% of all macOS laptop users.

Keeping it optional indefinitely, then, defeats this goal.

Then is it going to come to desktop machines too, where people often use battery-powered Bluetooth keyboards, or peripherals not made by Apple? What about the tiny 12 inch Macbook?

I don't see how this thing is practical across the entire Mac line.

The 12-inch Macbook has an F-key row which is what gets replaced with the touch bar.

I only estimated that they were going for 100% laptop coverage. But I can imagine a future where Apple keyboards have a touch bar option. Though not as important because Macbook touch bar penetration can drive developers to integrate with it, alone.

At which point it's not much different than gestures when it comes to answering your questions. What happens when you use a Logitech mouse on your macOS desktop instead of a Magic Trackpad?

Note that touch bar integration cannot have unique features, so it's never required. The challenge is to get developers to care about it which is the prerequisite for users to care about it.

From Apple's perspective, extending this to desktops kills two birds with one stone.

    1. Widespread touchbar adoption
    2. Increased sales of Apple keyboards

I don't see how you can add the Touchbar to desktops without creating a wired keyboard or adding an expensive big battery to it and jacking the price to $200.

Actually, I do: They'll raise the price of the cheapest iMac configuration and include the keyboard in the box. After seeing the starting Mac Mini prices, it makes total sense.

Probably because it can't be made to be "just an option".

Having seen teardowns of a MacBook, I'm pretty sure that one without a touchbar would be more-or-less a completely different computer - different keyboard, yes. To accomplish that, though, you'd need to also make a different housing to accommodate it, and a different motherboard, too, because this stuff's all soldered together as a single unit these days.

And for all that, people would still be griping about the keyboard and the monoport.

They sell a version without a touchbar.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro

A low end 2-port version, yes.

They ignored those for the 2018 MBP refresh, probably because the new Macbook Air was coming. I'd bet on the full keyboard MBP getting discontinued now that it's out, or best case having the 2017 hang around while the touchbar models continue to see updates.

I doubt the "MacBook Escape" (13" non-touchbar) will be revved, because it will either be met by the air or an eventual revved MacBook focusing on ultraportable demographics.

The Escape has higher powered CPUs than the Air or MacBook, but I don't think anyone is buying from those three based on horsepower.

Right. But, echoing what I said, it's not "just an option" - it's a whole different model that they happen to be selling under the same name. Different CPU options, different monitors, different port configuration, etc. They don't even have the same number of microphones.

I don't have a problem with the Touch Bar. It's kind of handy for occasional things that are context specific and normally involve using the mouse.

It's taking me some time to get used to, I'll grant you that.

I'll be getting a 2018 Mac Mini once they're available for order here, so this machine will see much less use then, just basically if I need to be able to do something while travelling (which isn't that frequent).

Chiming in to agree that it wasn't a problem here. Though I also never understood why someone would be crazy enough to leave ESC as the default keybinding anyhow.

You'd think that Courage Incorporated would have had the gumption to officially move Escape to where Caps Lock is.

Some people use both ESC and Caps Lock all the time.

How else would you bind ESC?

Well, tbh, if it's simply a choice of which key to map to the currently-Caps Lock key then Escape should be the winner even if exiling Caps Lock to the Touch Bar would cause significant annoyance to some heavy users.

However, while users are mostly just faced with perhaps-hard choices about how to remap the given keys, the keyboard manufacturer and integrator Apple had many other options. Caps Lock is currently 2U wide on both ISO and ANSI layouts https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3tJagPz-xIw/maxresdefault.jpg , so it could fairly comfortably be split into a 1U Esc and Caps Lock. You could even give Escape the outside position: that's not a big reach, just the mirror-image of the ISO English # key and more convenient than Esc's existing position in both ANSI and ISO, and there's an arguable case for not putting Esc on too much of a hair-trigger position near the home row anyway. Alternatively you could carve a 1U key out from the right of the right Shift, which is pretty uselessly overlong on both ISO and ANSI.

Caps-Lock is a waste of a key. NeXT had it right by using Command-Shift (without any other keys) to turn on/off Caps-Lock.

I learned high speed touch typing in the eighties, with included heavy use of the caps-lock.

There is nothing wasteful about it when you've been trained that way.

I don't think that really changed the implication. Regardless of whether he's speaking specifically about the Mac Mini, about Apple products in general, or about the entire industry; he's still saying that it's bucking the trend of "being a series of compromises and disappointments sold as innovation" and that almost everything is genuinely an improvement.

I'm going to hold on to my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro for dear life.

I'm hoping it will be good for 3 more years.

You might be alright - I'm still on a 2009 MBP 13" (4Gb SSD) and a 2010 17" (8Gb, SSD) hands down the best money I ever spent.

I'm using a 17" 2010 at work with an i7, SSD upgrade, and 16Gb of RAM and its plenty fast still. At home I've got a 2010 Air that begs for more RAM yet still runs as well as when I bought it including 3+ hours of battery life depending on if I am surfing or writing. 2010-2012 was a high point in Mac laptops.

You're not alone. I actually bought one refurb from Apple this year and I plan on extending the AppleCare to the full 3 years.

My mid-2012 MacBook Pro works like a dream and has never had a problem, FWIW.

Given the use of the word "donglage" I suspect it was a somewhat snarky reference to the iphone and the disappearing head phone jack.

It's actually a reference to the USB-C ecosystem for the laptop line; Marco and his cohosts on the Accidental Tech Podcast have burned a lot of time griping about the state of connecting things to a laptop. Not so much time on the head phone jack, which was mostly a no-op for them (since it was paired with the airpods).

No, that quote is not out of context at all. The expectation that Apple would in some way ruin the Mac Mini in the next update is the topic of several of the first paragraphs in the article. The gist is indeed "It hasn't gotten worse! Yayy!"

Granted, that's not all of it. He is celebrating that it's gotten better, but he is also specifically celebrating that it hasn't lost many advantages.

> "Unless you used optical audio, audio input, or the SD-card reader"

Craftily hidden in a footnote for that paragraph.

They probably figured that people who want these are acceptably served by USB.

Yeah. For SD cards in particular, having the reader slot on the back has always made it useless for me.

External card readers are more flexible. You can get more options with multiple slots, or card sizes, or whatever.

Similarly with audio... I don't know if this is true with Macs too, but on PC laptops I've often found the mic quality sucks or has interference, and I started using USB inputs.

Ha. I completely forgot about the SD card reader. Probably because I plugged it in and never looked at the back again. Having an SD card reader on the back of a device just isn't practical. I've just been using a USB hub with an external reader.

The SD card reader was the first thing to break as well. And the cost of replacing it was way more than a SD > USB dongle.

It has four Thunderbolt 3 connectors. Thunderbolt 3 features DisplayPort 1.2

With the old one, you would probably need a mini DP to DP dongle anyway (I did for my displayport KVM on my 2012 Mini), so this isn't really worse, but it might mean you now need a different dongle.

I'm really hoping there's a good/reliable solution for 30" Apple Cinema Display > Dual Link DVI > Mini Display Port > [INSERT PRODUCT HERE] > USB-C

From what I've heard, you'll want a USB-C to DisplayPort+USB-A adapter, and an Active DVI (with dual link) to DisplayPort adapter.

These days optical audio is dying when it comes to home theater systems, primarily due to its lack of codec support. You can't passthrough DTS-HD over optical, you can over HDMI.

I used to use optical audio but it was superseded by HDMI for home theater and USB for hifi.

edit: I'd be curious to see what people are using optical for today (I'm under the impression audio pros mainly use USB interfaces as well)

Pro audio for recording has been shifting to USB over the past few years. They were heavily on Firewire or PCI card formats before, but USB has finally gotten fast enough to do the throughput, and of course it's much cheaper and more standard.

And thus throughput is not enough. In pro audio, we can't afford dropouts or lost data, even when the CPU is under heavy load.

I'm not a pro audio guy, but I think if you want to work with any external audio device and want that connection to be noise-free, your safest bet is still optical.

I have an external DAC/amp, and I had been using optical until I recently upgraded my workstation. Now I am using USB, because the new motherboard doesn't have optical; I assumed USB would be fine, so the lack of optical wasn't something I considered with the purchase.

Unfortunately there's an awful amount of hiss with USB on this DAC. I'm not knowledgeable enough to pinpoint what's causing it, but standard remedies I've found (eliminate ground loop, try ferrite cores, get a usb filter) have not made a difference. It could be the USB interface on the DAC side, I have no idea.

While I don't _need_ an external DAC, I like using one for a few reasons: mine has a low output impedance which is good for some headphones, a convenient switch to toggle between headphone and speaker output, and a big volume knob with really smooth action. I like it. The alternative is to use the motherboard's ports; this motherboard does jack sensing such that the rear line out gets disabled if something is plugged into the front, so switching between headphones and speakers involves plugging/unplugging the headphones all the time. I also don't like adjusting volume through a tray applet.

Since it’s USB, it has to be the DAC generating the hiss. No amount of electrical interference can do anything to the digital audio going Ofer USB.

The electrical interference can't do anything to to the digital audio, but interference on the USB cable can potentially be picked up by the analog amplifier circuitry in the DAC. I had a particular combination of headphone, DAC and amplifier years ago that I could hear electrical noise on when no music was playing.

Absolutely. I work as a sound engineer and have used lots of things of this type, and it's particularly easy to understand how a USB connection to the computer would wreck the sound of a cheap (sub-$1000, not professional) DAC.

Optical digital means perfect isolation from the ground plane of the computer. It's that simple. The DAC can do whatever it needs to manage its own noise levels, but you're pretty much guaranteed a huge difference from entirely decoupling the DAC from the computer's ground plane. That electrical interference can do a surprisingly enormous amount of damage to the analog circuitry of the cheap DAC, which itself is probably not very resilient at rejecting any sort of electrical interference.

But it sounds like its the same DAC, which was hiss free with optical. So it's not the DAC "generating" the hiss. Rather electrical "interference" making it over to the analog side from the digital side.

So it's the DACs fault, but maybe it's fair to say that it's harder to make a good DAC when USB is how the data is being delivered. I'm sure a high end USB DAC doesn't have this issue, but I'm pretty impressed with my cheap offbrand optical DAC that was $11. I'm guessing I would not be so impressed with the $11 USB version.

A higher quality USB DAC either has to do quite a bit of signal clean-up, and may use its own power supply rather than trying to clean up the USB power from the computer.

Optical has the benefit of always being electrically isolated.

I thought so too, but regardless, with this same device there is no hiss when connected via optical. So if I had the option, I'd be using optical vs. USB today, which was what the GP asked.

Logically, it seems like if you had a USB-optical dongle you would have no further trouble. I don't know if there is such a thing, but I do know that in that situation all the 'it's digital, so it should be perfect' talk becomes somewhat true.

You'd be converting from USB to optical, at which point you'd break the ground connection which would be where your hiss is coming from (assuming it's still noiseless when still being used with optical). Then, your concern would be jitter and whether the added conversion is adding lots of jitter to the equation. Your DAC might (or might not) be good at rejecting jitter noise. I've got a Lavry DA10 that's exceptionally good at rejecting jitter (in crystal mode), but that's mastering grade and maybe overkill for you.

It wouldn't add literal noise, but it's also possible for the USB connection to be more jittery than a different computer making the optical connection. That's partly hardware and partly software design (controlling how the data stream is buffered, and associated things that might slightly modulate the audio data clocking). So a change in computer feeding the DAC could also substantially affect the 'sound' of the DAC, as well as the noise issue you observed.

I agree, that should work. I haven't seen USB-optical devices that weren't straight media converters though. Everything that converts USB to spdif is advertised as a DAC, so I'd have two DACs.

This isn't a huge issue for me, it's just an example of where I'd prefer to use optical. If it ends up bothering me such that I need to fix something, I'll 'fix' the motherboard.

> Unfortunately there's an awful amount of hiss with USB on this DAC.

If you used optical before, it can be reasonable to use USB->optical. A lot of USB audio interfaces already have this. I'm not making use of it, but the USB interface I have on my Mini has an optical out.

I bought a soundbar for my TV a couple months ago. Recent Samsung model. Has optical. I beleive the only other option was 3.5mm jack.

Interesting. I bought a pretty cheap soundbar this year (from Yamaha) and I think it had optical as an option (along with 3.5mm and Bluetooth) but the main interface was HDMI-ARC.

And it works great over ARC! The TV remote's volume buttons get passed through automatically, and it turns itself off and on along with the TV. I don't even know where the soundbar's own remote is anymore.

The easy answer is: same thing I was using it for 10 and 20 years ago. Audio equipment doesn't age nearly as quickly as personal computers. I'm not going to replace my entertainment system just because there's a new Mac.

Also, I've had compatibility problems with HDMI between my old Mac Mini and my receiver. I don't know how to troubleshoot those sorts of issues. I do know that optical audio always works perfectly with every device I've ever used it with, though.

Shockingly, I need optical for a $300 set of gaming headphones I purchased within the last year (Astro A50). Maybe it’s the only way they can do pass through, dunno.

Headphones are stereo (okay, there are some exceptions), and optical S/PDIF can do stereo PCM, so there's no quality downside. But for home theater audio, you can't do any lossless multi-channel formats over optical S/PDIF, so the vast majority of enthusiasts will use HDMI.

It’s (likely) because they don’t want to add a secondary hdmi output for audio like a lot of other high end gear uses.

Never would have guessed that for headphones! I guess they have some kind of a dock?

Wireless (non-Bluetooth) Sennheiser headphones also take optical input (as well as 3.5mm). Since they're only doing stereo, and require a digital-to-analog conversion on the headphone side, makes sense to avoid an additional analog-to-digital on the transmitter side.

I'm probably in a tiny niche but I use it so that I can have optical out to my speakers and analogue out to an extension cord with a plug next to my keyboard that I plug my headphones into. This means I can swap between audio devices without touching cables or plugging things in to go headphones -> speakers depending on whether I want to annoy my wife with my music or not.

I have the same setup actually! But my speakers only take analog in so I use a cheap USB sound card.

Sonos, which might be one of the most hyped average user audio things in the last years, only offers optical inputs for their soundbars. Imho it's a pretty huge limitation on Sonos side, but maybe they did it because HDMI ARC is still flaky in many setups and they prefer ease of use. Or simply because of cost savings.

I've got a pre-ARC TV, so use optical for my home theatre. Am hell-bent against smart TVs, so my next display will probably be either a digital signage display or a projector still without ARC.

I want to smash a Sony engineer with a hammer because my goddamned $5000 smart TV keeps insisting on switching from tv audio to external audio to tv audio to external audio to tv audio to external audio.

It doesn't matter that I have my audio preference set to "prefer external audio" because the effing thing decides to switch back and forth between 2 and 30 times on startup, and maybe 80% of the time it settles (properly) on the receiver, and 20% of the time it tries to use the TV speakers, which are off, and of that 20% of the time, at least half of the time I HAVE to power everything down and start all over again. The other half of the time I can go through the menu with the slow-ass on-screen menu, and manually toggle back to receiver.

I just want an effing option that says "never in hell try to use the fucking TV speakers, for the love of god".

My (very low-end) Samsumg soundbar only has optical and 3.5mm in. I think a lot of cheap equipment still uses optical.

Still pretty popular in the 2-channel audio world... audiophiles, in other words.

Somehow HDMI audio is still less convenient for me.

I send HDMI to my TV which sends optical to my sound system, and it still works pretty well. Earlier this year I bought a nice sound system with a receiver for the reasons you mentioned, but it added extra lag to my video games, so I returned it. My current sound system also supports ARC but it causes most of the same problems. Decoding those fancy codecs creates lag on every system I've tried, so sticking to LPCM over optical seems to be the only way to enjoy games still.

says the person who keeps buying products without optical audio ports.

Isn't that little headphone port a combo optical/electrical port that you can plug either headphones or mini-toslink-whatever into ?

Isn't that what it was before ? I swear I had previous mac minis with a combo port like that ... why would they not continue that ?

Yes that is precisely the thing that used to be in all macs that they discontinued

I doubt it -- the number of users who use a Mac Mini as an entertainment center is probably so small Apple barely thinks about them. More likely is that HDMI has superseded the optical audio port for most users, so they save money by removing a port few use these days.

It's still a little weird. I think a lot of people would have a separate A/V receiver and speakers; maybe this is changing as old equipment gets replaced, but I suspect there are still far more homes with optical-capable A/V receivers than HDMI-capable ones.

This is just a standard annoying thing with Apple though. Their designs are very 'forward looking' in that they don't consider what potential customers already have so much as they do what their own future peripherals are going to need.

At this point HDMI is not a particularly new thing; my Marantz receiver from ~2007 had HDMI connections on it. Audio-only digital connections aren't necessarily going the way of the dodo yet, but they're becoming progressively more niche. So are home theater PCs, of course.

Anecdotally: I do have a Mac mini with my receiver, which I replaced this year. But the new receiver not only has USB input, it has wifi and built-in clients for Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, TuneIn, Roon, whatever protocol Windows uses for media sharing whose name I'm utterly blanking on right now, and a dozen or so other services, with Apple Airplay 2 theoretically coming in an update.

The AppleTV doesn't have optical audio either.

Don't judge, maybe the next version of the mac mini will be waterproof!

You obviously haven’t seen Marco complain about the MacBook, Apple Watch, the existing Mac Pro, the 2014 Mac Mini upgrade, etc.

Marco made a few million when Tumblr was sold, has a profitable podcast app and is on either the most popular or second most popular Apple related podcast.

I doubt that he’s hurting so much for money that he has to lie to get a loaner Mac Mini.

Alternatively, lower down the article:

> I Can’t Believe The Mac Mini Is This Awesome, I Can’t Even Say “Again” Because It Never Was

Sounds like his conclusion is that it's better than it used to be.

That's a reasonable expectation from Apple these days. Their "War on Ports" and "War on Repairability" has gotten to groan inducing levels.

I would phrase it more like "Yay it has made improvements without compromises"

The MacMini is a near perfect computer in its category; only thing was it wasn't updated for years. Now it is.

The combination of price and absence of user upgradable M.2 SSD drives make this product un-viable in my opinion. The current price is fine if I could upgrade the drive later. Non-upgrade-able SSD would be acceptable if the price for larger drives was more reasonable.

If SSD could be upgraded buying a i5/i7 would have offered amazing upgrade paths down the road. This machine misses the mark IMHO but not by much.

You can upgrade the drive, externally through tb3. There will be tb3 enclosures that exactly match the mini’s size (historically there always have been) and it won’t even look weird. I did that on a previous mini (firewire).

Having said that, I’m still going to get one with 512gb ssd, because I just want everything neatly in one box.

I believe there was speculation they would stop the Mac Mini line altogether, so perhaps it's more of a comment on the fact that they built a new one.

I was doing some research a year ago or so on which Mac Mini to buy - currently using one from 2006 or so, which can't handle https sites mostly, but otherwise is great.

Everything I read said to get the 2012 model, not the 2014 one, which was slower, less memory, less everything - way worse. So the last one before this new one definitely did get a lot worse.

I have a 2006 Mac Mini that refuses to die. I ended up putting Windows 7 on it and giving it to my mom. She still uses it as a secondary computer when she is tutoring.

And it has got a bit worse. Just not as worse as we'd expect from Apple.

Well, quite a bit faster, in ways that are relevant to my interests. Stands to reason designing a thing like this together onto a bespoke board allows for some optimizations: it's hilarious that it's apparently faster than any other Mac anywhere ever, for single-core things that suit it. Including Mac Pros and iMac Pros… I just think that's amusing.

I'm now wondering if VCV Rack is sufficiently multicore that it will perform better on more expensive Mac boxes, or whether this little thing has now set the bar for ability to run demanding modular synth software live. That would be really convenient.

Building a PC mothership is certainly cool as hell and I'm not knocking it, but there's something to be said for 'this is my live performance rig, it's stable as a rock and it fits in my pocket. And it's cheap enough that if I'm headlining Coachella with my modular jams, I'll buy a second one and clone it so I have a backup, there onstage ready to be plugged in if there's a problem'.

I'm with Marco on this one. Looks nice. I know what I'm getting with a Mac of this type, and this definitely looks nice to me.

And it still has real USB A ports so you don’t have to hop your audio interface through a C to A dongle thing. Though I don’t know if a C->A adapter is just rerouting wires, or has circuits with their own latency - either way, it’s a bit of mess you don’t need with one of these.

(Assuming you use a typical USB A audio interface rather than something more exotic)

FWIW, I also do electronic music, though just as a hobby.

Nah, my audio interface is more exotic. Thunderbolt MOTU 16 channel in and out, 192k/24. So I love that it has so many thunderbolt ports, because they're spoken for. I think you might well be able to run two MOTU 16As and have 32 in, 32 out. You'd start to have issues with drive space but the computer can probably handle it.

"more exotic" :-)

OK, hardcore studio level stuff.

Yeah, that's a bit beyond my hobby "Behringer" type stuff. Recently upgraded from 2-in/4-out to 4-in/4-out. Still plenty of bandwidth on USB 2 for that.

Worse how? There are a couple of directions you can go in, just curious (price/storage)?

Probably price. $800 is pretty steep for the entry version, when you can buy a better equipped Lenonvo ThinkCentre for $200 less.

A Lenovo ThinkCentre is like 10x bigger than a Mac Mini. I wouldn't want one of those sitting in my living room. And my wife would absolutely forbid it.

The only real competition I see for the Mac Mini is the little computers from System76. But they're about the same price.

My Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q is almost identical in size to my old (very) Mac Mini.

I just customized a Lenovo ThinkCentre with a Core I7 (I’m assuming it’s the six core), with a 128GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, Windows Pro, and a WiFi card and the price was $979. The equivalent Mac Mini is $1099.

Are the USB C ports Thunderbolt?

Does that Lenovo have Mac OS?

Obviously it does not. And that's a pity. Whether or not that justifies a more than $200 difference is up to whoever wants to use it.

This is going to best outcome as Moore's Law ends.