Apple launches a Mac Mini with a "huge punch"

[The Hand]

A Mac Mini for £800.. ouch..

[spacein_vader]

It's the emperor's new RGB, only the cool people can see it.

Still, 10Gb ethernet option. More boxes with that please, we have been stuck on 1Gb for what feels like forever.

Can you get a 10gb switch for a sensible price yet though?

[DanceswithUnix]

Can you get a 10gb switch for a sensible price yet though?

No, but until there are ports to plug into them they won't turn up. I've seen announcements for chipsets for small 10GbE switches, and then there are 5GbE and 2.5GbE standards to get costs down, just not seen the boxes turning up.

Modern PCs are bristling with things like USB C, HDMI 2 and DisplayPort which are at that sort of speed so ethernet is becoming one of the slowest ports on the box. With wifi speeds starting to exceed a gigabit, there's currently no meaningful way to plug an access point to a server to make use of the speed.

The cost of modern high end motherboards has gone crazy, you can get them with the pointless "killer NIC" junk embedded but nothing genuinely quick.

At work 10GbE is old hat, 25GbE seems to be the big push. At home, even 2.5GbE would save me some time.

[peterb]

Yes - the easiest way to get 10Gb is with a switch with a couple sfp interface ports - but even then those are really designed for aggregating several 1Gb to a backbone connection.

Or something like this

https://www.msdist.co.uk/mikrotik/sw...05-1g-4splusin

(plus the cost of the sfp+ modules)

[DanceswithUnix]

(plus the cost of the sfp+ modules)

I think that is what drives a lot of this stuff out of consumer price range. Most people just want to plug some copper in.

I was honestly thinking of dropping a 10GbE card into my Linux server and another into my workstation. Most of the house would see no benefit from 10GbE so point to point would work. I got as far as buying some cable, not found Ethernet cards that were cheap enough for me to do it.

[peterb]

SFP modules are available for copper too - and some of the cheap third party ones work well with Microtik gear (less so with Cisco!). But yes, the cards for a PC are not cheap (compared with a standard 10/100/1000 card)

[DanceswithUnix]

SFP modules are available for copper too - and some of the cheap third party ones work well with Microtik gear (less so with Cisco!). But yes, the cards for a PC are not cheap (compared with a standard 10/100/1000 card)

Doesn't have to be anywhere near 1GbE port costs. My first network was 10 megabit on thin coax using ne2000 and 3c509 cards. I think my first twisted pair 8 port hub (not switch) was near £100 and upgrades to 100 mbit and then 1Gb switches were similar.

Right now it looks like to get started I would want one of these switches upstairs at £170 which gets me 2 ports 10Gb, one down to the server and one to my PC: https://www.amazon.co.uk/NETGEAR-XS5...dp/B076P9CTSD/

and a couple of "cheap" network cards. Sounds like they can't manage full speed, but then they don't cost £250 each either: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-90IG04...dp/B071JR2ZW8/

So that's £360 to do it on the cheap. I would like those multi gigabyte transfers to go faster, but frankly I can stick with putting the kettle on until the cost comes down. But I am watching, at half that cost I could crack. Half cost isn't much for tech stuff.

Edit: I wonder what Apple's idea of a cheap 10GBase-T switch would be if the going rate is 3 grand

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A Mac Mini for £800.. ouch..

See you got a "huge punch". Apple PR is accurate!!