(ambient music)
- Yo guys, Jonathan here,
and I bought a Mac Mini in 2018,
and you're probably wondering why.
Now, before I explain myself, I get it.
From the outside looking in,
this probably seems like a really, really dumb decision,
especially since Apple hasn't updated the Mac Mini
since 2014.
That was the same year Apple debuted the iPhone 6 and 6S,
the Apple Watch, Austin Evans had spiky hair,
Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store,
Guardians of the Galaxy debuted in theaters
and Ellen took that giant-ass selfie.
The crazy thing is though,
you can still buy that 2014 Mac Mini online
and in the Apple Store right now,
but you absolutely shouldn't.
They start out at $499 and go all the way up
to 999 bucks for a dual core machine.
I can hear the PC master race making fun of that,
and they should, that is ridiculous.
The other downside with the 2014 Mac Mini
is that you can't upgrade the RAM,
so that's why I went back a little further in time
and scooped up the 2012 Mac Mini,
which is what I consider to be
the greatest Mac Mini of all time.
This is what Apple considered to be a server Mac Mini,
which essentially meant that it just shipped
with a special Server Edition OS,
but what made this awesome was the hardware.
This packs a quad core i7 processor,
dual one terabyte hard drives, and, the RAM is upgradeable.
Plus, on top of that, it is jam-packed full of ports.
Gigabit ethernet, FireWire 800, rest in peace,
HDMI, Thunderbolt, four USB 3.0 ports,
Audio In, Audio Out, and an SD Card slot.
So I picked this up for about 600 bucks on eBay, used,
and that's $400 cheaper than the most expensive
current Mac Mini,
and that's dual core, while this guy is quad core.
So what kind of kickstarted this entire project,
is I've been preppin' for an office tour.
So behind me is a little sneak peak
of a completely-redesigned media center.
We got an 85 inch TV, brand new soundbar,
Philips Hue everywhere,
and as much as I love the Apple TV,
I went down this crazy deep rabbit hole
of ripping Blu-rays, using it with a Plex,
and it works amazing with the Philips Hue Sync App.
So yeah, that freakin' blew my mind, it's amazing,
I'll actually be dropping a video
on how you set that up tomorrow, so definitely stay tuned,
and drop a like if you're looking forward to that.
So, back to the Mac Mini, it's compact,
it's powerful-ish, and with a couple of upgrades,
it makes the perfect little compact Plex server
for this setup.
Now, the dual one terabyte hard drives
that come with the Mac Mini, storage-wise, they're cool,
but, they're 5400 RPM,
and moving disk drives absolutely crushed my soul.
It's 2018, and no one should be using a mechanical drive.
So with that, and because there are dual drives,
the main upgrade here
is to upgrade those hard drives to SSD,
so I got a two terabyte and a four terabyte SSD,
which combines for a massive six terabytes of fast storage
on this tiny little Mac Mini.
RAM-wise, it's only shipped with four gigabytes of RAM,
but you could max that out at 16
which is exactly what I did.
So, upgrade time.
RAM, super simple, first hard drive, super simple, but,
to get to that main hard drive,
you have to take the Mac Mini entirely apart
which is a little more challenging than I anticipated.
(upbeat music)
Now, this isn't a tutorial or a how-to, and in fact,
I will link the OWC video
that I used to reference this upgrade myself down below,
and even though it was a little challenging,
the upgrade was successful.
So out of the box, it's shipped with OS 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Little bit of a throwback, and normally,
I could've upgraded directly from the computer,
but, because we installed new SSDs,
I had to start from scratch,
and install a fresh copy of High Sierra,
which is actually a pretty easy process,
and I'll reference that also down below.
So what did the upgrades do for the Mac Mini?
Firstly, the original 5400 RPM hard drives,
those are about 100 megabytes per second read and write
whereas with the SSDs,
those are about four to five times performance,
just about 500 megabytes per second read and write.
Now as far as Geekbench,
the Mac Mini got a single core score of 3415
and a multi core score of 11,274.
For reference a current-gen 13 inch MacBook Pro
with a sweet dbrand skin
got a single core of 4495 and a multi core score of 9378.
So even though the MacBook Pro
outperforms this Mac Mini on the single core side,
the multi core score is really strong
and still holds up really well six years later.
Now probably the biggest surprise performance-wise
is prior to the Mac Mini,
I was ripping Blu-rays directly from the iMac Pro,
and for reference, to rip The Dark Knight,
it took 22 minutes and nine seconds on the iMac Pro,
and 22 minutes and 31 seconds on the Mac Mini,
so they're just about the same.
That tells me two things, one, the program MakeMKV
really isn't optimized for the iMac Pro,
but, two, and probably more important,
I don't have to rip on the iMac Pro and then transfer,
I can do it directly on the Mac Mini,
and that saves me an entire step.
So, that is why I bought a Mac Mini in 2018
and also why I consider the 2012 Mac Mini
to be the greatest of all time,
Michael Jordan, not LeBron James.
Again, tomorrow I'll be dropping a video
on this insane setup, don't miss out.
This is Jonathan, and, I will catch you guys later.
(upbeat music)