Mac Mini M4 – Part I

Hardware, Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Time to move on.


Tiny.

Upate six months later:. For an update after 6 months of daily use, click here.

Apple’s planned obsolesence strategy has seen to it that my 2010 Mac Pro, a machine as reliable as a hammer, is now no fewer than six generations of OS out of date. That means that those nasty Russkie hackers can have at it to their hearts’ content and next thing you know my credit card will have run up $10mm in charges for caviar and vodka and yours truly will be out on the street.

But a strange thing happened. Apple just released the minuscule Mac Mini M4 at what can only be called a bargain price by Apple’s gouging standards, starting at $600 for the 16GB/256GB model. I paid Amazon $745 for the 16GB/512GB slightly upgraded version as I need a larger SSD to store all my applications and the 80GB of Lightroom preview files which load quickly from the SSD. (The picture files, much larger, reside on a slow, spinning disk drive, where speed is not required).

My Mac Mini M4 arrives tonight and because I will need to move the disk drives from the innards of the Mac Pro I had to procure an external drive enclosure as well as an enclosure for the BluRay DVD reader/writer. Along with a handful of cables the bill came to $1,000, one quarter of the investment in the significantly upgraded Mac Pro.

After doing some reading I have determined that the safest and fastest way to migrate apps from the Mac Pro is to use the Time Machine (sequential) back-up (using Migration Utility) which I always have running in the MP.

While the wi-fi here is fast and reliable I am going for a wired connection of the TM HDD to the new Mini. Wired connections do not go down.

So first I removed the TM HDD from the gorgeous MP (boy am I going to miss that machine). Here it is, all 54 lbs of it, as perfect an industrial design as Apple conceived, and actually Jony Ive’s first major effort at Apple, before he became obsessed with smallness and thinness to the detriment of ergonomics. 5 large fans plus 2 in the GPU, two 3.46GHz 6 core Intel CPUs, Blu Ray DVD, USB3 upgrade, super Nvidia 980GTX GPU and all of 80GB of RAM:


Not tiny.

The new Terramaster disk drive box:


Terramaster drive enclosure.

The other three bays will hold a 512GB SSD to back-up the Mini’s OS and applications, the main Data drive (a 2TB HDD – don’t need speed there) and another 2TB back-up Data drive. The OS/apps and Data drives are automatically cloned daily using Carbon Copy Cloner. Time Machine runs on its own schedule. I copy the photos to an SSD in my car monthly for ‘belt and suspenders’ safety. Of course, should both the home and garage burn down ….

All my photos and documents reside on the Data drive. The Terramaster is nicely made, the drives (either 3.5” or 2.5”) are easily installed, and it has two large and silent cooling fans. It will eventually be moved into the footwell of my desk, out of sight. It’s USB 3.1, so fairly speedy. Even though SSDs are now affordable I really do not need the speed and the old HDDs continue working well at no added cost. I will simply hard wire the Terramaster (USB-C) to the new Mini and have at it for migration.

Next I will remove the BluRay DVD reader/writer from the MP and install it in an OWC separate stand-alone enclosure. One of the nice things about the old MP is that all major peripherals are stored inside the enclosure. No more.

A major issue will be whether my (ancient) versions of Lightroom and Photoshop can have their perpetual licenses transferred from the MP to the Mini. The web is all over the place on this. Adobe is a very low integrity business so I may be finally forced into their subscription model – $38/mth for LR and PS. The advantage is that those latest versions are optimized for the Apple M series CPUs, meaning they run faster, and as we know LR is a real bear. Plus the apps have been significantly enhanced since my 9 year and 12 year old versions. The disadvantage is $456/year and the revolting thought of sending Adobe money, however modest the sum.

The Kensington keyboard (I cannot stand Apple’s designs), Logitech mouse (ditto – the Apple mouse is an ergonomic disaster – what idiot placed the charging port on the underside of this already horrible design?), and Logitech speakers (the Mini has a coaxial socket for those), along with the BenQ monitor, all hard wired, will carry over to the Mini. I had to procure a bunch of USB-A to USB-C adapters because USB-C is all the Mini offers. As the monitor will be connected to the Mini using HDMI, whereas the Mac Pro uses Display Port, I can have both computers connected to the monitor during the conversion period and simply switch inputs when needed. Nice.

More in the next article as I contemplate the horrors of migration.

Eliot Porter – Intimate Landscapes

Photographers

Free, from New York’s Met.

The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a substantial volume of free downloads addressing the work of significant photographers. One of the finest is the catalog of the 1979 show of 55 of Eliot Porter’s landscape studies, the first show of color photographs ever at the Met.

Porter tends to focus more on intimate details than broad panoramas, the images frequently printed on the dark side, and the gentle appeal of his beautiful abstraction is a joy.


New Mexico. Click the image for the download link.

One year with the Epson ET-8550 printer

Epson ET8550

Nothing but good news.


Print count. The fold-out touch screen works well.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

Over the past year I have made over 400 13″ x 19″ prints, many exhibited in photo shows, with the Epson 8550 printer. The machine’s small footprint makes finding room for it easy while the maximum print size of 13″ x 19″ is more than good enough for exhibition sized prints. I mat those 18″ x 24″ for a satisfying result. After 400 large prints I have not had to run any of the maintenance utilities – nozzle cleaning, head alignment and so on,


The Epson ET-8550 photo printer in my home office.

As you can see I’m still using up my large supply of HP Premium Glossy dye ink paper, bought from HP when they decided to get out of the dye printer business for ten cents on the dollar, and along with the tailored profile I had made by the fine people at Freestyle Photo in Hollywood I am making good use of those 600+ sheets of paper.

Issues? Really nothing serious. I had one paper jam early on, likely caused by loading too many sheets into the feed tray. I now limit that to no more than ten and the problem has not resurfaced. Ink use remains extremely frugal at 48 cents a large print though the Grey ink is used some three times faster than the four colored dyes. At under $20 a refill bottle it’s far more economical than its predecessor, the HP DesignJet 90.

Regrets? Well, I miss the ability to make 18″ x 24″ prints but Epson does not make an economically priced printer in that size.

My maintenance box is half full so will have to be replaced in a year or so:


Maintenance box replacement.

B&H carries the replacement and it costs $25. It’s a simple drop-in replacement.

Is there an issue with color fidelity with just five ink dyes compared with the ten or more in the large ‘pro’ printers? Not at all. With a properly matched display like the BenQ PD3200Q print-to-screen color matching is well nigh perfect. The ‘experts’ claiming the contrary have no idea what they are talking about.

One quirk, used with my now ancient version of Lightroom (v 6.4) is that LR does not ‘see’ the printer if the printer is turned on after Lightroom is booted, so I have learned to turn on the ET-8550 before firing up Lightroom. No biggie.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a high quality reliable printer and need nothing larger than 13″ x 19″ prints (though the ET-8550 will also do panoramic prints, which I have not tried) the ET-8550 is recommended. If 8″ x 10″ is the most you need the cheaper ET-8500 is what you need. At $100 less that strikes me as a false economy. I paid $629 for the ET-8550 a year ago and I see that the price has now risen to $750. The premium paid at entry is quickly recovered because of the very frugal ink use.

By the way the printer also has a built-in scanner and it works well. Epson constantly updates the printer’s software and I have been sent four updates over the past 12 months.