All posts by Thomas Pindelski

About Thomas Pindelski

The author

6 months with the Mac Mini M4

Hardware, Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

A solid machine.


Still tiny.

I paid $799 for my 16gB/512gB Mac Mini M4 six months ago. B&H currently lists it for $744, at which price it’s a great bargain.

I have had no issues, except that I had to upgrade some applications, most importantly Lightroom Classic with its execrable subscription pricing. Still, at $10 monthly with many enhancements since my ancient version 6 running on the Mac Pro it’s not that bad a deal, but I do not like paying ransom money to a huge corporation. I also had to purchase an external enclosure for the four large hard disk drives and for the BluRay reader/burner which were formerly housed in the chassis of the magnificent Mac Pro. Sadly the latter had to be taken to the recyclers, despite being in perfect condition. A sad event.

Complaints? Screenshots take a few seconds to hit the desktop and sometimes they do not arrive at all. Not that big a deal. And rendering of 20-30mB DNG/RAW image files in LRc (from the Leica M10 and Nikon D800, respectively) can take some three seconds whereas the huge 80gB of RAM in the Mac Pro saw this happen immediately. Again, not a deal killer. And despite having only 16gB of RAM I cannot complain about performance which, in most respects, is of similar speed to that of the 2010 Mac Pro predecessor. And LRc loads in 4 seconds compared with 25 seconds in the old Mac Pro which is excellent, especially given my daily use of the application. Given three daily uses that a saving of over 6 hours a year.

Though there are 5 USB-C connectors (three of those also support Thunderbolt) I had to buy adapters for all my hard wired USB-A devices – keyboard, mouse, BluRay drive, laser printer, ink jet printer and a spare for a removable SDHC/CF camera card reader or an off site back-up hard drive. That’s six connections so in addition to buying USB-C to USB-A adapters, I also had to buy a splitter cord. All inexpensive.

The Mini continues to reside behind the keyboard on a pull out tray where it is not particularly well ventilated, but rarely gets even warm to the touch. I never hear the fan despite the Mini being some 14″ from my ears.


Nestled at the back of the keyboard tray. Open USB-A
connector is mostly used for reading camera cards.

If the Mini fails there’s nothing that can be easily fixed unlike in the Mac Pro which was an assemblage of replaceable hardware components. But there are no reports of poor reliability so far. And I console myself that the frequent software security updates from Apple keep the bad guys at bay. Yeah, right.

Recommended, as long as you avoid Apple’s gouging for higher RAM/SSD versions where the cost quickly goes ballistic.

New England Ruins

Book reviews, Photographers

Dead.

For an index of all my book reviews, click here.

Whereas lamenting dead malls – see the previous blogpost – is hard, as who really cares about their mostly abominable architecture, Rob Dobi’s record of dead theaters, manufacturing plants and, most troubling of all, psychiatric institutions, is poignant and moving. Many of these buildings pose immense issues owing to the presence of dangerous chemicals or asbestos, so tearing them down to build something new is a non-trivial task. So many just sit there, rotting.

The changes in psychiatric care, with greater sensitivity to the needs of patients, saw many 20th century psychiatric hospitals closed, their inhumane treatment of the mentally ill a thing of the past. Thank goodness for that. These are beautifully photographed in this small book which maximizes impact by full page bleed of the excellent photography. The author occasionally struggles with the extreme dynamic range in some of hs settings but that’s a minor quibble.


Click for Amazon. I get no compensation if you do that.

The author’s talent is not limited to photography. He is also a professional illustrator and you can see more of his work at RobDobi.com.