I love mine at my home office, with a fairly small desk! I got the 6 core Mac mini after the 2018 update, and got a 34” monitor in December. When I am at the office, an easy-to-carry laptop is more important, because a lot of my time is spent out of the office, giving lectures and presentations, or in meetings. At home, I actually sit down and do focused work a lot more (even outside of the current special circumstances), so a desktop is appropriate. Moreover, having a desktop/monitor/keyboard tray set up encourages me to work at the desk with proper posture, rather than slump with a laptop or an iPad on a couch. Kitchen table is also a no-go: everything is at the wrong height — keyboard too high, screen too low.
I mostly do “office work” on my machine, but occasionally I do some actual computing (as in, scientific computation) — I mostly remote in to the university servers for that, but when I am just testing out an idea, it’s nice to do it locally with a GUI.
Unexpected bonus: turns out, my 20-year-old desk has been space grey all along! (Caveat: these are glamour shorts; normally there are piles of paper, and sometimes an iPad for reading on the desk as well.)
FYI today only B&H is having a sale on 7200rpm G-Tech drives with in-cart coupons of $35-$50 depending on model. You can get the 4Gb external for $115 after coupon, the 6Gb for $165, or the 10Gb for $270.
I’ve got two Mac mini’s both late 2012, one 2.3GHz Quad-core i7 and the other a 2.5HGz core i5. One is a headless server and the other my main machine. I am looking at replacing my main machine with either an iMac 27” or another mini.
Carl, I have a 2012 Mac Mini as my main computer which I’ve been using for quite a few years now. I bought it off ebay second hand as a 2.5GHz i5. with a spinning HDD and I think 4 GB ram. My old iMac was struggling with a graphics fault and I needed something to tied me over whilst I waited for iMacs to be updated. I went for this mac mini model rather than the current batch at the time as it was easily upgradable unlike the newer models. When the mini arrived it was pretty slow, but I had the ram upgrade and SSD waiting. After adding 8GB ram and the new SSD this thing was flying, I did plan to just use this as a temporary solution whilst I waited for the iMac’s to update but its served me well and I’m still pretty happy with it and still haven’t upgraded to that iMac yet. If you can put an SSD in your MBP then it might be worth a try you may be surprised.
Thanks for the suggestion, Phil! I’ve definitely thought about it before, to the point of looking up the RAM/SSD upgrade instructions on iFixit to see what it would entail. It certainly would be a cheaper option to buying a new computer. My concern is that I suspect Catalina will be the last version of macOS that a 2012 MBP will run, and so I wonder if after the MBP’s 8 years of good and faithful service it’s not time to invest in something new.
This makes me feel better about buying one. Just purchased as my iMac was dying (Fusion Drives are bad folks) and my MBP is 7 years old, struggles with installing npm packages and doing other things while that is happening. Using FCPX and encoding video takes 3 hours, and the CPU is basically always running at around 80%. It’s just too slow.
I am a frontend engineer and mainly code, write, podcast, and do some video and screencasting and because I just recently got axed in a large round of layoffs, I needed something cost-effective and fast enough.
The Mini is a totally bona fide little workstation.
I used a G4 Mini back in the day when Ruby on Rails was all the rage and it made for a perfectly fine development environment. That mini lasted from 2004 to 2012, when I replaced it with a i7 2012 mini that is now working as a home media server with no issues --just replaced its failing HD with a Seagate Scorpio HD. Not a screamer, but still perfectly useful after 7’5 years so I guess I got ROI on this one too.
You can get better value for your money with other options, but then you are giving up macOS.
My tip: as the mini’s product lifecycle takes many years, get the best CPU you can afford if you buy it new. HD and RAM are user replaceable which is what makes them future proof.
Not completely true on the 2018. The CPU advice is solid, of course.
The SSD is soldered on (i.e. not user-replaceable), so you need to get what you need from the get-go. I shopped the refurbs at Apple and splurged on the 1 TB option because I wanted maximum longevity (even though I don’t have even 500 GB that lives on my primary drive!).
RAM is user-upgradeable, but is much more inaccessible than the 2012 - so you have to be a little bit more confident when dismantling the thing.
It’s still a great machine. And of course if the SSD died, you could just boot from external Thunderbolt 3. But it’s worth noting the changes since the 2012.
