Mac mini: the fan favorite returns
After four years in the wilderness, Apple’s screen–less desktop is back
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he new mac mini marks the return of a beloved Apple computer, one that packs a lot of power into a compact, square aluminum shell. The specs, and our brief hands–on time with this mighty Mac, tell us it’s a big upgrade.
It’s five times faster than the previous Mac mini (though that was not a hard feat to achieve given that it hasn’t been updated since October 2014), and while that computer maxed out at 16GB of RAM, the new Mac mini goes all the way up to 64GB. Apple is also kicking up the speed and capacity of its onboard storage, going SSD–only up to 2TB. That’s, literally, a big deal.
Sure, the design changes over four years basically amount to a color change — it now comes in space gray — but the real overhaul is under the hood, with up to six cores on an 8th– generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 chip.
The Mac mini is being positioned as a tool for creators, with Apple claiming that it’s 30 times faster at encoding HEVC video. And it has a bunch of ports on the back — there’s just one HDMI port, but there are four Thunderbolt 3 USB–C ports to take up the slack.
The Mac mini starts at $799 for a quad–core 3.6GHz 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, or you can go for a $1,099 version with a six–core 3.0GHz processor and 256GB SSD (also with 8GB of RAM). Of course, you can tweak it further, with a higher–speed processor, loads of RAM, bigger SSDs and even the option for a 10Gb Ethernet port. They’ll add up, though.
Through its many ports, you can add up to two 4K displays, and even an external graphics card using Thunderbolt 3, so pro–level 3D rendering is easily on the table here.
Although we only had a short time to play around with the Mac mini, it felt plenty speedy on the performance front. macOS Mojave was incredibly responsive, and processor–intensive apps, such as Final Cut Pro, appeared to run without any hiccups.
We’re also extremely happy that Apple went with SO–DIMM memory, which should make it
easy to upgrade this machine with more RAM on your own schedule, not when you order it.
Apple has some interesting ideas about advanced uses for this machine — several can be stacked together thanks to a clever new thermal design, and turned into a powerful bank of computers than take up little space. Apple even gave the example of using a MacBook Air as your machine for coding an app, then outputting to the Mac mini’s multiple cores for actually compiling it into an app.
We’re mostly interested in it being Apple’s cheapest Mac, though. With decent 4K monitors now available for about $250 if you hunt around, you can get this and a high–res screen for about the same price as the entry–level iMac, which is only dual–core and has a Full HD screen. That’s a tempting proposition.
Buying the new Mac mini looks set to equip you with a pretty future–proof machine, thanks to its power and range of Thunderbolt 3 ports. And we’re just happy to see it back again.