Apple wouldn't leave a lot 'money on table' with more expensive NAND so lets say they did 3 different sets of NAND flash: 512, 1TB and 2TB and fused off access to make 128 and 256GB configurations.

That's still 3 x 3 x 2 or 18 different main board variations, which is more than the 2014 Mini, which had 9 motherboard versions (the most for a Mini to that point in time). So not that likely.

I'm guessing Apples bigger plans regarding the T2 Chip and security trumped the streamlining of manufacturing issues and costs enough to make them choose this path.

Now I wonder which of the 28 variations will be the rarest.

Based on the teardown, and fiddling with Apple's online purchase configuration, it looks like they must have 28 different versions of the 201 Mac Mini mainboard.

Options for components soldered onto the mainboard:

3 different CPUs (i3, i5 and i7)

5, 4 and 5 SSD options (128, 256, 512, 1TB and 2TB) depending on the CPU. i5 can't be equipped with 128GB, but i7 can as CPU upgrade from i3

2 different Ethernet NICs ( Gigabit and 10GB )

So ( 5 + 4 + 5 ) * 2 = 28 different sets of components soldered to the mainboard.

Even for Apple, that's a lot of variations. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with docketed storage, which would reduced the Mac Mini to 6 different mainboard configurations.

In the very 90s I worked for a few different tech or engineering / services companies and at more than one I learned that the early days of the company were full of similar stories.

I think it had more to do with the nature of an early tech startup combined people with a white collar office setting and sometimes long hours that allowed for social mixing, goofing off, encounters the left people saying 'check the sofa for stains', etc. Add in some corporate success in lines of business that weren't 'mature' to the point of being cut and dry and it was easy to blur the lines, especially with younger people who were not married / didn't have families (though that didn't stop some).

I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.

When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.

I haven't run across this yet. What sites are doing it?

I see many other posts making the same point, and I'll add my specific story from the 1980s.

In 1987, I was doing some work for a local chain of auto-body shops that had some software to do job pricing. In the process of understanding how the business worked, I got to know some of the guys who did sheet metal, welding, body repair, mechanical, etc. These were your typical blue-collar young males for the most part.

In the corner of the main shop area there was a dedicated terminal (VT100ish) and modem for connecting to the state DMV mainframe, where you could do basic queries. There were a couple legit uses for it, which is why the shop had it, but the only time I saw it used was by a couple of the guys who would enter the license plate number of cars they saw driven by pretty women, to pull up the registration info to find out the names and addresses of the car's owner. No checks or balances or access control; the logon info was taped on the side of the terminal. Any access logs would have been somewhere in Austin.

Totally creepy stuff then, still creepy 30 years later.

Nope, he's describing the LDIR instruction, which was useful for block copying or filling memory.

See: http://z80-heaven.wikidot.com/... for more details

And Initially, programs storage was achieved via saving and loading to/from cassette tap. The use of floppy disks was only enabled later via the Expansion Interface, which needed the Level 2 ROMs (which included a version of Microsoft Basic, not the Tiny BASIC that the Level 1 models had).

I think you're the one doing the babbling.

We're a tiny shop and one of our products is a compression product. Lots of data is processed, and it's worth it to our clients to have beefy hardware, as they run jobs that take hours to complete.

Out top test machine is an Ivy Bridge -era 2 socket workstation that we had Puget Systems custom build for us -. 2x Xeon E7-4650v2 CPUs - 20 cores / 40 threads. Spent over $7K on the CPUs alone.

We're needing a couple more high thread count boxes for our newest product. We're waiting a couple months to see what ThreadRipper systems look like, but almost certainly we're getting one. or two...

Felgercarb!

More seriously though, pancreatic cancer is one of the worst ways to go.

I always respected his efforts to revive the BattleStar Galactica IP when there wasn't much interest in doing so. Reminds me of what I did with AoE 2.

...someone attempts to exert their copyright of "their pictures" of these "public domain artworks"?

This is old news, just newer tech.

I remember in the late 1980s the guys at the auto body shop using the DPS terminal to access the state license plate database and get the name and address info on cute girls they saw in their cars.

The base urges to and desire to gain an advantage if they think there are no consequences have always been there.

I believe it's even worse. He's describing a Soviet gaming culture where "game plays you". Gaming micro-transactions are bad enough today, but this is a whole new level of enslavement where every aspect of my day is predicated on how it affects my game avatar.

I'm not too worried about this yet. We still have to hit the intermediate step where in the next Battlefield 1 update the Turkish army is sponsored by Doritos, the blimps are now Metlife and Goodyear, medics inject you with Mountain Dew and the tanks are plastered with sponsorship stickers.

I don't have the full story - there's aspects she can't share with me, but I gathered that the politics of switching that stuff to Oracle are more complicated than just the SOX issue... but SOX compliance was the nail in the coffin so to speak. And it was a departmental decision, not just her. I do know their projects involves the handling of employee data for tens of thousands of people in many countries, as well as customer data and their compliance department is rather large and scary.

> Not controlling your own security will make things like, oh, HIPAA and PCI compliance problematical.

Add Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance to the list as well.

My wife just dealt with this at her Fortune 500 company. Microsoft will not disclose completely what the telemetry in SQL Server 2016 is phoning home. They have no choice with respect to compliance , and have made the decision to migrate their older reporting from SQL server (older versions) to Oracle.

She wishes she had a recording of their MS sales rep telling her team that it doesn't matter.