Apple - Mac mini - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - 256GB Solid-State Drive - Space Gray

Bought this to replace a 2011 Mac mini and I'm glad I waited. I'm using it for my work desk at home. I still use the MacBook Pro for Mobile use and setup the 2011 Mac Mini at work instead. It's fast enough for what I need it for. I might upgrade the memory in the near future. Mac Mini's still offer the best value for Apple computers.

If you need Mac and have monitor/keyboard already it is very good choice! Yet 8gb is too small for serious work like software development, but totally enough for non memory hungry tasks. Very energy efficient device and very fast CPU at the same time. Even though i5 does not have hyper-threading you still have full 6 cores!

While the Mac Mini (3.0ghz 6-core, 8gb ram. That one.) does just about everything I’d intended it for, it’s pretty slow with some things (rendering vectors in Illustrator, for example) and gets cuh-razy hot. I slapped some external fans on ‘er and am upgrading the RAM myself in the near future.

Pros: small, quiet, powerful, flexible, and love the color. Cons: Expensive when you add matching "stuff" like keyboard, mouse, monitor, track pad and external storage. Wires are more cluttered. I replaced a 9 year old I-Mac that still operated well for our use. I am sold on paying a little more for a Mac and have it last 3 times more than a PC or Laptop. The mini is small, really quiet and with the update will last me another 9 years. I like that I could match my own monitor, which is wider than an I-Mac. My only complaint is that I have too many wires and have to figure out how organize them - not too bad of a complaint. (external drive, external back up drive, speakers, etc..) I rated as a 4 because of the overall cost and is a little more complicated than my all in one i-mac.

I use to have a Mac Pro with 4 cores and 16G RAM and an after market SSD drive. Due to its age the hardware was no longer compatible with any of the updated macOS releases, so I looked for a new Mac replacement. I wanted a small foot print like the Mac mini, but the mini at that time was an old design that Apple hadn't updated in years. So I waited for the Mac mini to be redesigned and I am glad I waited as I have used the Mac mini for 3 months now and I am very satisfied with its performance. I would recommend the upgraded 6-core unit with the 256G SD drive over the 4-core unit. It is plenty fast, and I have parallels desktop running Windows 10 as a virtual machine on this new Mac mini as well. With 4 thunderbolt ports (USB-C), 2 USB 3.1 ports and HDMI port as well as an audio output, I had plenty of ports to plug in multiple monitors and external SSD drives, DVD burner, etc. The small size of the Mac mini means I don't have that large space being taken up like the old Mac Pro and I still have a relatively fast machine.

...you’re a Mac user, and a user who hasn’t upgraded their Mac Mini since 2011. Upgrades bring a much welcomed abundance of speed increases, from both a processor, Memory, and storage perspectives. Argue and hate as much as you want, but there’s no denying the deep hardware and software integration as a result of Apple’s Draconian ways, has an end result of incredibly fast processing and data accessing speeds.

This is the best way to get into the apple eco system, and it's totally worth every penny. This computer has more I/O than nearly every other computer they offer, and you can grab it for a lot less than the others. It's powerful, fast, and easy to hide away on your desk. I've been using this to edit 4k videos with no issues, and it renders video footage about the same time as my 2017 5k iMac. I wanted to use my favorite monitor, which is a 34 inch wide screen. So having owned the 5k iMac for a while, I got tired of not being able to be flexible. So I got this little guy, and I couldn't be more happy. I've got huge speakers (thonet and Vander), 34 inch wide screen monitor, external mic, external hard drive, 4k webcam, DSLR (camlink), and more connected with no issues. You'll enjoy this computer if you decide to buy it, it's very solid.

Eighteen months ago I acquired from Best Buy a 500GB Mac Mini then available to do heavy mobile programming using XCode and Visual Studio. The old mini was incredibly slow, sometimes requiring hours to do a compile. Correcting a single coding error and retesting could take half a day. And OS updates took a day or more. The new Mac mini now has the responsiveness I've longed for and makes the old one (now returned for rebate credit) seem like a toy. I was worried about the decreased storage area (256GB SSD instead of 512GB HD), but needn't be. Got a compatible LaCie drive to extend storage and programming is a breeze, at last! As I already had an external drive functioning as a "Time Machine" data transferal from the old mini to the new worked pretty well, but when the new reported it had run out of storage space I just revised my transferal choices to exclude my own coding, placing that instead on the LaCie. I am very pleased with how all this works seamlessly together with alacrity,