Lots of good reading material here, but this on the Mac Mini stuck out:
> And while they even updated the venerable MacBook Air (a bit), the Mac Mini is sitting there in its ancient and increasingly “what about this then?” glory. I have to admit, I can only think of one reason for this: that they still plan to replace the Mac Mini down the road, and that it’ll be done with a lower end version of the Mac Pro. Here’s hoping, because I’d buy that thing in a femtosecond. But for now, the Mac Mini continues to be an enigma of “why is is not updated and still on the price list?” — I’m a little surprised it didn’t get a CPU refresh with everything else here, but I’ll bet our friend the Thermal Limit problem is the reason, and replacing it will require the stuff being done on the Mac Pro. At least, I hope so.
The Mac Mini does have an audience, it’s throw in the suitcase portable, and is Mac Pro-level long in the tooth. Here’s hoping we see a new one sometime soon.
Mac mini has long since ceased to be just a portable desktop to become jack-of-all trades for people who needs machines for “headless” macOS, multimedia hubs, lab computers, desktop for small offices, rack OS X servers, etc. It’s a versatile, energy-efficient computer and practically a must-have to use with OS X Server. Unfortunately those who rely on these machines have been suffering from the antiquity of the models that are still sold by Apple. IMHO It’s a mistake to kill the Mac mini because the iMac and MacBook do not replace the Mac mini completely.
I own, or am otherwise responsible for, 3 of them. I would LOVE to replace one or all of them, but there’s nothing comparable. We all have displays that are perfectly good and not in need of replacement – a Thunderbolt Display and space-constrained monitors.
Let me buy a space grey mini with current specs, a space grey magic keyboard and trackpad and I’ll be a very happy man.
I also own one (a 2011 model with discrete graphics), and was SO disappointed that it wasn’t shown the Kaby Lake and Thunderbolt 3 love. I use my mini for modest video editing and light to mid-level gaming, and really wanted to see a refresh with just those updates and support for the eGPU option. I don’t need 4k screen support or editing capabilities, just enough to play games at 1200 x 1080 at highest settings and edit reasonably long 1080p video taken on my iPhone or Canon Vixia camcorder.
Here’s hoping that Chuqui is right, and sooner rather than later. My younger daughter has gotten into 3D modeling and video editing herself, and we’re both really feeling the age of this Mini.
Hi Alan! Fancy seeing you here! 😉
I had planned on getting what I assumed would be a new revision Mini for my desktop in December and then my boot drive died last month. The repair shop offered me the option of going SSD for the boot drive and I went ahead and did that. Suddenly the machine was lightning fast (I imagine that the failing drive also slowed things down a bit) and I can’t really justify a new desktop mac any time soon. I may replace the second internal HDD (which contains my Users directory) with an SSD (perhaps splurging for 2TB). Until you replace a HDD with an SSD in place, you have no idea just how much performance there is to be gained from such an upgrade.
I have a Mini hooked up to a Drobo as a home server.
It’d be perfect if there was a decent, Mac-ish way to get Plex to start at boot, but that’s surprisingly awkward.
(For that it doesn’t even need a spec bump.)
I was thinking the same thing as Von Rospach. It’d be great if Apple made a low-end Mac Pro with a Core i5, staring at around $1500.
I suspect that the Mac mini market mostly consists of two groups: 1. Those who want a modular machine with some performance, but who don’t need a Xeon. 2. Those who want the cheapest possible Mac.
An i5 Mac Pro would get group 1 to spend twice as much money or even more, which would please Apple. Then Apple could replace the Mac mini with a fanless, flash-only puck. Maybe they could cut the starting price, too.
My perception of the Mac Mini has changed for ever. I have never had a Mac fail on me, ever. This is the first model that simply stopped working that I have ever owned. Researching online made it very apparent that the issue that killed it was a flawed GPU and apparently a common issue with the 2011 model.
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