The company didn’t reinvent the wheel in an effort to sell you a space-age-looking computer. The most obvious judgement you can make about the new Mac mini is that Apple has smartly retained the design in its entirety. After all, costing pretty much the same amount of money as a Mac laptop, with its built-in display and keyboard, is a much different value proposition than a Mac that used to cost half as much as the next most expensive Apple computer. So the important questions now are whether the new Mac mini justifies its higher price, and even in the event it does, whether it offers enough value for the right kind of consumer to still be considered a viable budget option. (This time around the RAM is user replaceable, while the SSD is not.) You can spec out a lowly Mac mini all the way up to $4,199 if you really desire. In fact, Apple’s cheapest Mac has moved from a sub-$500 purchase to a $799 one, and much more if you want a larger solid state drive, a faster processor, or more memory. It is much more powerful - it is, without hyperbole, a miniature Mac Pro - and as a result, it is no longer all that cheap. So well, in fact, that it took on a second life for many owners as a home media PC, a NAS server, and even as part of a compute cluster.īut the 2018 Mac mini is a different beast. But the Mac mini was simple, it was cheap, and it did its job well. You could of course just buy an iMac, or a display stand for a MacBook Air or Pro. The Mac mini has historically been the budget option Mac for consumers who lived in Apple’s ecosystem, but liked the aesthetics of mini PCs, as well as the benefits of a full mouse, keyboard, and monitor setup. I’ve been using a Mac mini as my primary home computer for the last half-decade, and I love it for its simplicity and the tiny corner of real estate it takes up on my desk.īut that’s precisely what makes evaluating the newest iteration of Apple’s smallest desktop computer so difficult. But the Mac mini has always had a special place in the hearts of Apple fans. And it’s never been the versatile product of choice for the coder class, the modern office worker, or the well-off college student. It’s not the preferred workstation of graphic designers or video editors. For years, the Mac mini has been the black sheep of Apple’s computer lineup.

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