“It’s Space Grey… our pro customers are gonna love that!”
After facing four long years of neglect and impending discontinuation, the Mac mini today received a substantial update. Whilst “remaining an important part of [Apple’s] lineup”, the Mac mini seemed to be dead, with the last update coming in October 2014, which was seen by many as a major downgrade over the 2012 model due to the lack of after-market upgradability. This new 2018 version features the same basic case design, but now it has a Space Grey finish - of course it does. The brilliant news here, however, is that the enclosure is now made from 100% recycled aluminium.
The base configuration features an eight-generation, quad-core Intel i3 - configurable up to a six-core Intel i7 - making this Mac mini 5x faster than the outgoing model. There’s also now a T2 chip for managing security, borrowed from iMac Pro and MacBook Pro. The base model comes with 8GB of RAM, but this is configurable up to 64GB, albeit costing over $1000 extra. All models come with an SSD, starting at 128GB but build to order options offer up to 2TB of storage. Interestingly the RAM has been confirmed to be upgradable but Apple “strongly recommends” taking it to an Authorised Service Provider to do so.
On the back of the case, the IO situation is nothing short of glorious. There’s still an HDMI port back there, so finding a third party display you like should be no problem at all - no visit to dongle town needed. There’s 2x USB-A ports for ‘legacy’ connections. Of course, there’s 4x USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports and there’s even the option for a 10Gb Ethernet port taken straight from iMac Pro. This is more ports than any of us could’ve expected from 2018 Apple. Oh, and I almost forgot - there’s a headphone jack too.
The new Mac mini starts at $799/£799 but once it’s been maxed out it will set you back well over $4000/£4000. This device can be for the consumers that Mac mini was originally designed for - buy a cheap Mac, you bring the rest. But the price and Apple’s presentation shows this little box off as far more than a consumer entry-level Mac, and appropriately so - over the past few years it’s very much become a machine used and loved by professionals. You can stack them, you can use thousands of them in server farms, you can run a home video server on a single unit, or offload tasks to it from your MacBook Pro so you can get on with the next task at hand. You can spec these things exactly how you want, depending on your use case, and the possibilities are almost endless. It’s tantalising to see Apple revive such a brilliant product after it was presumed dead, and it’s yet more evidence to suggest the Mac is on a good path.
Mac mini goes on sale November 7th.
:))