Ars Technica reviews Apple’s new Mac mini: ‘A jack-of-all-trades system’

“With the newest Mac mini, gone is the two-core, four-thread 28W Haswell processor with up to 16GB soldered RAM,” Peter Bright writes for Ars Technica. “This machine boasts Coffee Lake processors, either a four-core, four-thread Core i3 base model or the six-core, 12-thread Core i7 chip as found in my review system. This processor is paired with up to 64GB socketed, user-serviceable RAM. Storage has also been shaken up. Instead of a range of hybrid and SSD options, the new Mac mini is all SSD, from 128GB to 2TB. There are four Thunderbolt 3 ports, one wired Ethernet port (usually gigabit, but optionally upgraded to 10 gigabit), an HDMI 2 port, two USB 3.1 generation 1 ports, and a 3.5mm headset jack. It turns out that hardware can get a lot better when you wait four years between upgrades.”
MacDailyNews Take: Chuckle.
“The Mac mini is a kind of jack-of-all-trades system, with everything that implies. For some use cases, Apple already has better systems,” Bright writes. “For others, the Mac mini isn’t a great fit, but it’s the only hardware that Apple is actually offering that’s even vaguely suitable, so Mac users can like it or lump it. It’s just… it’s not portable; it’s not a full size, upgradeable desktop PC; it’s not particularly cheap; it’s not a great building block for server or render farms.”
“Instead, the new Mac mini is a compromised box that’s engineered to be quite small. If you’re wedded to macOS, then it does the job well enough,” Bright writes. “It’s not bad as such, and it’s certainly a solid upgrade over the 2014 system. But there’s nothing this device particularly excels at, and there’s no real scenario where it leaps out at me as being the ideal, obvious choice. It’s the Mac you buy when you know you need to buy a Mac… and you’ve already ruled out all the other systems Apple has on offer.”
Tons more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That’s about the size of it.
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