Comment by lowkeyokay
2 months ago
I recently bought a Mac mini M4 16 GB - mostly to run Immich. I assumed I needed a Linux box. After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax.
2 months ago
I recently bought a Mac mini M4 16 GB - mostly to run Immich. I assumed I needed a Linux box. After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax.
> After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option
For Immich, the cheapest option will either be a NAS or a used laptop depending on the amount of data you need, I wouldn't buy a mac for that.
Maybe he wants really fast or large AI models inside immich?
(I just run the defaults on my CPU, works for me)
I'm not sure why you would need large AI models for Immich, the face detection is pretty cheap and will run on 10 year old hardware without a blip.
I think the decision comes primarily on how much data you would like to store for Immich, if you want to go cheaply, a 100 bucks used laptop will do the job, if you have too much data, a NAS will be more suitable (and you are certainly not going to get a mac where you can plug multiple internal hard drives for the price of a NAS)
3 replies →
>" After a lot of researched I was quite surprised that the mac was the cheapest option. So not always an Apple tax."
Apple has always been the most cost effective choice for the value you get going all the way back to the Apple II, it's just that the floor of that cost has always been high. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a just a fanboy one way or the other.
That's true only for the entry level macs. My M4 Mac Mini has the best Performance/value. But my workstation laptop with 32 cores, 96GB DDR5, Nvidia GPU costs lesser than Macs with lesser performance; not to mention I upgraded the RAM post purchase.
It really depends what you factor in as value, because wintel laptops like you described tend to require noise canceling headphones when working on them.
1 reply →
RAM upgrade possibility has a downside though - very low RAM bandwidth, which is highly relevant today if you want to run local LLMs
If you're happy with the base model, then Apple has a great value/price ratio, but there's nothing below it and any upgrade is really bad value for the money.
Hmmm, not always. Between at least 1998 and 2005, PCs were just better. Better CPUs.