Mac Mini was the affordable Mac at just $499 for a long time. However, Apple changed the whole scenario by increasing the price of the machine heavily. Now, the Mac Mini starts at $799 which is a $300 increase over the previous generation model.
It was just last year that Apple released the revamped Mac Mini which features a black color. Prior to that, the company had ignored the Mac Mini for straight four years without any updates to the machine.
The Mac Mini is powered by Intel’s 8th generation Coffee Lake chips with support for upto 6 core processor. The base model of the machine use Intel i3 chip with 6 cores. However, the machine does not use dedicated graphics but instead relies on Intel’s integrated UHD 630 Graphics.
Fairly decent internals
The base model has 8GB of RAM which is the minimum amount of system memory required in 2019. However, the same can be upgraded to upto 64GB for smooth operation of memory intensive tasks.
All the machines use SSD with support for upto 2TB of storage. However, the base model packs just 128GB of storage which is just peanuts and useful for nothing, especially when the machine is priced at $799.
The Mac Mini features Apple’s T2 chip which is used for security purposes. The chip enables on-the-fly data encryption, secure boot by making sure that the software has not been tampered with the help of a secure enclave and also enables faster HEVC video transcoding.
The Mac Mini is 1.4” thick and 7.7” wide with an aluminium unibody enclosure that Apple says is made from “one hundred percent” recycled aluminium. The machine features four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports, a single HDMI 2.0 port, two USB-A ports, Gigabit ethernet port, and the good old 3.5mm headphone jack.
Is the Mac Mini worth the price? Not at all. It uses fairly low-end internals and requires a separate display, keyboard, mouse setup. We would have recommended the Mac Mini if it was priced below $600.
