- Hey guys this is Austin.
Apple has been releasing a lot of major new products lately
but something they haven't touched is the Mac Mini
which has not seen an update in three years.
Why does this still exist in 2017?
I will say the Mac Mini comes in a tiny box.
So today small form factor PCs really aren't anything
all that special.
But, the Mac Mini was kind of ahead of its time.
Oh, all right, I will say one thing, even though, yes,
there are a lot of problems with the Mac Mini
that I will get into the actual sort of unibody
aluminum design still feels pretty nice.
You don't exactly get a lot in the box, though.
Pretty much all we get is a little bit of paperwork
with Apple stickers and a power cable.
It might sound weird to say considering that
this design originally came out in 2010 but I've
actually never held the Mac Mini and I'm kind of impressed.
So, like I said it's an all aluminum unibody design
and you actually have a fair few ports in the back.
Not only is there an SD card reader but there are also
four USB 3.0 ports, as well as even a couple of
Thunderbolt 2 ports.
Now, this is a far cry from current Apple devices
which have some would say fewer ports.
Earlier models of the Mac Mini
were actually fairly upgradable.
So, on the bottom you could actually screw off
this sort of plastic piece to get at stuff
like the hard drive and RAM.
However, this it's a little bit more difficult
and to make things worse the memory's actually soldered in.
That is a far cry from when Marques built
the ultimate Mac Mini back in 2012 where he
loaded it up with a ton of memory as well as an SSD.
At first glance though this actually doesn't look
like a bad way of getting yourself a cheap Mac.
So, this is a base Mac Mini which runs $500
and that's exactly half the price of the next
cheapest model the Macbook Air.
However, take a closer look and the Mac Mini
might not quite be such a great value.
Performance might just be the most outdated
part of this system as 2014 specs will only
take you so far.
This is the base model Mac Mini with Core i5-4260U
four gigabytes of RAM and a 500 gigabyte
mechanical hard drive.
To put things in perspective Intel is just launching
their eighth generation of Core processors
whereas the Mac Mini is using a fourth
generation Haswell chip.
Even when you spend the extra $500 to go to
the higher end model with the Core i7 you're still
limited to a dual core processor, which is bizarre.
They actually used to ship quad core versions
of the Mac Mini.
Take, for example, the leaked benchmarks for
the iPhone X that is showing a score of around
4,000 on single threaded and about 10,000 on multi-threaded.
Way, way faster than this Mac Mini is.
You're also stuck with a 500 gigabyte hard drive.
Now yes, you can spec up the Mac Mini with not only
a Fusion Drive but as well as pure SSD options,
but that raises the price significantly.
- Hey guys, this is Austin and today I'm back
with another tech under video this time talking a look
at tech under $60.
- So, to be fair the Mac Mini is powerful enough
to handle stuff like HD video as well as web browsing,
but the issue is with only four gigabytes of RAM
and you can't upgrade it you're going to run into
some serious usability issues on Mac OS.
So, take for example the HP Pavilion Wave,
this is a much more modern system.
You're getting more memory and almost more importantly
it's gonna cost you about $130 less than the Mac Mini.
It just doesn't make sense.
One of the reasons I can see somebody being interested
in the cheap Mac are for the Mac exclusive apps
such as Final Cut Pro X, which is what we use
to edit all of our videos.
- Hey guys, this is Austin.
- Wow, this actually, wow.
So, to give you guys some context on this this is
a triple stream 4K video being played back
and edited in real time on the Mac Mini.
In fact, it's actually the intro to this video right now.
So, yes this is not maybe the most demanding thing ever.
We haven't done stuff like color correction,
which would definitely slow things down.
But, as far as being able to do a sort of basic cut
this is three streams of 4K video playing back
in real time on the Mac Mini.
The only thing that's not totally stock here
and one of the reasons why it's not stuttering
is we are editing off a USB based SSD, but that's what
we do for all of our edits anyway.
Although, I think this says more about how
solid Final Cut is optimized and less so about
how powerful the Mac Mini is.
There are better alternatives if you do want
a cheap Mac though starting with
building yourself a Hackintosh.
Now yes, building a Hackintosh from scratch
is going to be more complicated than pulling
a Mac Mini out of the box but what you're going to get
is much much better hardware for the same price
if not even less.
Even used options can make a lot of sense.
So, a few minutes of searching on eBay found
multiple Mac Minis that are maybe only a generation
or so behind but could be found for as little as $200.
Look, most of the time there's at least someone
who I can say that a product will make sense for
when it comes to the Mac Mini it just isn't
a good idea to buy one of these in 2017.
There are just simply better options out there.
Now, before we get outta here I wanna give
a shout out to a few really good friends of mine
over at Vsauce.
So no, this is not a sponsored spot, but they've
been working on the Curiosity Box for over a year
now and I honesty feel like it is getting
really, really good.
This is a quarterly subscription box that comes with
all kinds of cool science stuff including
this incredibly attractive Vsauce beanie.
This box even comes with a Voyager One t-shirt
and a portion of the proceeds go
to benefit Alzheimer's research.
So, if you guys like VSauce and you want some cool
science stuff to show up every few months
check out CuriosityBox.com.
And, as always, thanks for watching.
(mellow funky music)