Apple’s new Mac mini teaches an old design new tricks

“After several years of silence on the Mac Mini front, fans of Apple’s diminutive desktop computing slab had given up hope of ever getting a replacement,” Lori Grunin writes for CNET. “But in the 2018 models, Apple’s delivered a great upgrade, with only one possible drawback.”
“Apple fixed one of the big complaints about the 2014 model: Soldered memory. Upgradable memory is back, and it takes two industry-standard DDR4 SO-DIMMs,” Grunin writes. “But like most Apple products, it’s not really end-user upgradable, requiring a trip to a service center. This undercuts one of the perks, namely being able to buy less expensive memory elsewhere. But if it’s going to be another four years until Apple updates the Mini again, then every little bit of upgradability helps.”
New Mac mini delivers an insane five times faster performance.
 
Mac mini now features the Apple T2 Security Chip, enabling on-the-fly data encryption, secure boot and up to 30 times faster HEVC video transcoding.
 
Mac mini now offers faster and expanded I/O to allow it to connect to almost anything, including four Thunderbolt 3 ports, an HMDI 2.0, two USB-A ports, an audio jack and Gigabit Ethernet, as well as a 10Gb Ethernet option.
 
“Though the price of entry has gone up from $500 to $800, much faster than the pace of inflation over the same period, it’s still not out of line. The comparable Windows configurations in a compact design — and there really aren’t many — are actually pretty expensive in comparison,” Grunin writes. “So what’s the drawback? For many pros, it may be hamstrung by Intel’s integrated graphics processor. I’m not saying it needs a powerful gaming or rendering GPU. A Kaby Lake G CPU, for example, would be a nice alternative to the i3 simply to make the system low-end VR ready, to take some of the video decoding burden or to help reduce overhead in audio production.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you need it, an external GPU is an option, of course.
SEE ALSO:
Macworld reviews Apple’s new $799 Mac mini: ‘A huge improvement that’s well worth the cost’ – November 6, 2018
Hands on with Apple’s all-new Mac mini powerhouse – October 30, 2018
Apple unveils all-new Mac mini with a massive increase in performance – October 30, 2018