The 2014 Mac Mini reviewed | Hacker News Reader

The 2014 Mac Mini reviewed

arstechnica.com

67 pointsbane68 comments

Ugh. This is the trend that will finally push me off Apple desktop/laptop hardware:

"you'll finally see that the new Mac Mini's RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard. It's no longer user-upgradeable, so make sure you order all the RAM you need when you buy the computer in the first place."

I wonder why they did this? In the case of the macbooks and iMacs at least, it can be somewhat justified as a space saving measure. However the new mini is the same size as the old one and it's already quite tiny.

I think that's what lots of people are wondering. There doesn't seem to be a good reason here, from the customer's point of view. It looks like they're just trying to push people to buy new machines instead of upgrading the old ones, which is disappointing. I was waiting for the update, and I even bought one, but I returned it a few days later; too much about it just wasn't acceptable.

It looks like they're just trying to push people to buy new machines instead of upgrading the old ones, which is disappointing.

Or getting power users to buy the non-base models. I have a 2012 Mac Mini base model, and upgraded it to 16 GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for little cost. It should go without saying that I'll keep it for a while and probably double the SSD in some point in the future.

If Apple were just trying to get people to buy upgraded stuff from them, I'd understand. But they're not even doing that very well; the $699 configuration minis still come standard with a 5400 rpm spinning disk, for example, and SSDs and 16GB RAM are both considered "customized Macs" that you can't just walk into any Apple Store and buy.

A) Most users will never open their computer for any reason, including upgrading RAM.

B) Apple wants to capture the cost of upgrading their hardware in the future.

C) Apple wants to capture the cost of more RAM in the present.

The "most users" thing might be technically true, but I bet a lot of the minis belonging to those users were still being upgraded after being sold by the original owners.

I think "capture" is the key word. They're not trying to create wealth for their users with this action; they're trying to capture it for their company and its shareholders.

Presuming the market for Macs is relatively fixed, and that soldered RAM was the "status quo" configuration previous to recent iterations, it's plausible that the change to user-upgradable RAM to impacted sales for other, higher margin Macs in a noticeable, provable way.

Of course the other comments are true, but I could easily see Apple justifying this as a reduction in power draw. They made a big deal out of the mini's efficency at the keynote.

Justification or excuse? For a desktop machine it is not that much of an issue. And since Mac Minis are already using mobile CPUs, they were already very low-power compared to other desktop machines.

There is always an excuse. In reality, they have changed their model to 'upgrades only at purchase'. Unfortunately, their machines are so good that we all accept this...

Hackintosh on a NUC seems like the way to go at this point. It'd be interesting if Apple just started using actual NUCs instead of making their own inferior version.

Does non-soldered RAM draw more power??

One tangible reason is support costs. A new Mac mini is never going to the Genius Bar because of bad third party memory, or badly seated memory, or a static shock administered to the mother board while the memory was being changed.

Even if those are quite rare, support incidents can be expensive, so it could be a dollar or two average per mini being saved.

Those situations might be less rare than you think, the savings tens of dollars and contributors to the lower price.

I know I'm not the typical consumer, but I would be /so happy/ to pay a dollar to have removable memory.

I remember when CMOS was new and static really did damage just about every part you handled if you weren't careful. Little conductive wrist band connected to steel desk, carbon coated conductive foam to work on and so on. But for the life of me I can't remember when a part failed due to static in the last decade or even longer. If anything broke it was either a cable or a soldered connection to a board.

Sure, I've had RAM break, but that was factory installed RAM that was several years old. This is definitely anecdata but it would be interesting to know how much damage static really does these days. If you're going out of your way to pet your cat prior to installing your RAM chips on a glass floor or something like that then you're probably asking for it. But regular precautions (place RAM container on the case before opening package, hold the case while inserting the RAM) seem to be more than enough. On chip ESD protection has come a long way since the 80's.

http://www.amazon.com/On-Chip-Protection-Integrated-Circuits...

Presumably everything they do is to make more money. Let's just say that customers who buy base models then go on newegg and add memory or replace hard drives, put on their static arm bands, open cases and match connectors and so on, are not their target audience.

They would like people to go buy a higher end model. The profit on RAM is probably pretty good given performance boost vs the cost of RAM. It is an opportunit they would be silly to waste.

It undermines/reinforces their brand though. These misleading sticker prices with car-salesman trim levels piss off users except the Mercedes class who enjoy conspicuous consumption.

Probably for ease of design and manufacturing. Apple raids the corporate parts bin: the lowest SKU, like the base iMac, is a MacBook Air in a box. The mid and high tier SKUs are repackaged 13" MacBook Pros.

This was the deal breaker for me. I ordered it on the release day and only found out the truth a few days later. I returned it unopened (I only ordered 8GB - was going to just add my own RAM).

Instead of spending $1300 for marginal improvements, I bought a $125 256GB SSD and upped my 2012 Mini to a fusion drive.

The maximum RAM this model accepts is 16GB. 3 years down the line it's more likely you'll just buy a new model instead of hunting deprecated RAM modules. And for the people who need a lot of RAM, they need it now, not later.

I know the benefits of RAM upgrades - I even had a Pentium MMX with 128mb in the old days - but I don't see it making sense nowadays for consumer hardware like the Mini.

Are you sure about that? My work MBP is a mid-2009 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo; upgrading the RAM to 8 GB means I can keep Chrome (with 30+ tabs open) running while working in Xcode or Android Studio.

This wouldn't have been possible if I was stuck with the 4 GB it shipped with. It probably cost a lot more to configure it with 8 GB in 2009 than it did to upgrade the modules last year.

Please notice you're comparing the 2009 hardware with the 2014 market - 5 years. The Mac Mini has a RAM cap that is just 2x the amount you have right now, which you already judge is enough.

What's the logic in making it upgradeable? Just buy it maxed out now. It's not like you would be able to upgrade it to 64GB in 5 years if it had a slot. Actually, it's likely you won't even find a RAM module with the right specs in 5 years, the industry is changing specs every 6 months.

I also have a 2009 macbook pro. I bought it with 2gb ram (or was it 1gb?--can't remember) upgrading to 8gb at the time would have cost me like 3-400. I upgraded to 4gb for about $50 in 2011, and upgraded to $8gb in 2013 for another ~$50.

I did something similar too. This is actually very bad for Apple - because I've now had the same Macbook Pro for 5.25 years, and it's remaining serviceable thanks to RAM upgrades and a modern high-capacity SSD. I'm sure it will end up lasting 5.5 years and it seems like there's a fair chance it will (Apple software support and wobbly ports permitting...) last for 6.

But if they'd forced me to pay for all the upgrades up front, I'd probably still have bought the same spec (the 8GB RAM option was eye-wateringly expensive at the time, and the SSDs were comically pricey) - and then I'd have had to buy a whole new one after 2 years. Which probably wouldn't have had an SSD, because they were still expensive back then. So I'd probably be buying another one round about now, if not before, and Apple would have had 3 purchases out of me rather than just one.

The point is that you essentially have a group of people who are 100% content using 50% of the max RAM cap today and for the next 3 years and aren't looking to dump hundreds of dollars extra to cap it out, but are perfectly happy to pay just $50-100 to upgrade their ram 4 years later when software requirements necessitate it for them.

Multiple people have posted in this thread they were fine with 1-2 GB in 2009, and are happy to upgrade to 4-8gb today, but wouldn't have had the money or even the need for 4-8gb 5 years ago.

And the Mac Mini just removed that option, one of the cool things about PCs that we'd all love to see in laptops and phones: modular hardware we can switch out, increasing the lifespan of hardware, reducing costs and giving users autonomy over their own machines.

Saying soldering RAM is fine because you can just max out your ram when you don't need it, paying a high price to do so, because you will need it a few years later, instead of simply buying some a few years later for much less, just sucks.

I mean I agree with your point completely in that it's not the end of the world. And I agree that a lot of people who want to upgrade after 5 years probably will just want a new machine. But the soldering of parts still sucks, and even if it's got a small impact, it goes against some of the principles I think we should be cautious with to throw out. Don't want to get into a big slippery slope argument here but for a manufacturer to act as if soldering parts is imperative and unavoidable to me has a high burden of proof. You need to make a case for it. In phones I see that imperative mostly. In a Mac Mini? Not so much.

I started Web development on a Mac Mini when my team switched to a VM based development environment an a more memory intensive JEE Server. I don't have numbers how much Mac Minis as working machines are in use, but I would definitely say a later RAM upgrade is not unlikely, once you encounter a limit.

Well since it is (for some) a gateway machine from the pc world, where hw modding and upgrading is more common the appeal of buying it and upgrading is lost.

Apple is probably well aware they were losing money on premiums like upgrades and decided to lock people out of that option. I'm sure the loss of sales is probably offset by the increase in profit from forcing people to upgrade via the factory or not at all.

In short I believe this is a conscious decision on Apple's part to maximize profits.

I think what frustrates me most is not the RAM, but the hard drive. I feel that the future will be kind to 4-8 GB of RAM, and I guess I'm willing to pay extra for RAM, but the hard drive options puts the price too high for me, and the options themselves are meh when I'd rather have my own SSD.

It's frustrating to know that I am probably a minority customer, and thus Apple will probably never cater to me again. All the while I know that if only I had enough money, then I could be a happier Apple customer (I think the happiest Apple customers live in the middle-to-upper price tiers). If and when I get more successful, I'll consider Apple, but until then, I can see that Apple is no longer the best fit for me.

I had a similar reaction to changes in the iMac last year that reduced the ability to upgrade. After owning mostly Macs since my 512K Fat Mac in 1985, I decided to build my own PC last Christmas, and I've been very happy with it. I then decided to replace my wife's MacBook with a Toshiba. She has only used Macs, but it hasn't taken her long to get used to and be happy with the Toshiba, and it only cost me $375. I have realized that I can no longer afford to be an Apple customer, and as the margin of any advantage Apple products previously had over the competition has greatly reduced, I don't see the point anymore. It is sad for me because my relationship with Apple began when my dad brought home an Apple II in 1977, but all good things in this world eventually come to an end.

I tried to do this, but I just don't like working with Windows (or Linux). I don't like their current line of hardware, nothing fits me. iMacs: too rigid, I wan't my own screen. Mac Pro: too expensive, too powerful. Mac Mini? Soldered RAM, 5400RPM drive. If I max it out it's cheaper to get an iMac.

I ended getting a PC and throwing OS X on it. It's a pain in the ass when things break but it works for me. I would love a more upgrade-friendly Mini with desktop and not laptop hardware, even if it has to be bigger.

I have been using a 2012 mini as a home server, but recently when I needed to upgrade I decided to get a Dell T20. Cheaper, more and more powerful cores, and lots of internal expansion possibilities. Of course, the trade off is that it's considerably bigger, but it's just sitting in a closet at home so it's not a big deal. Oh, and at idle it only uses 20 watts, about the same as the mini.

I posted this a few days ago:

https://twitter.com/JeremyCMorgan/status/529727399353937922

I was curious because of the differences in the U vs M processor so I went into Best Buy and ran Geekbench on one.

I know CPU isn't everything... but what exactly would be a reason for putting a power saving CPU in something that's plugged into the wall? My current Mini already uses far less power than any of my old stand up PCs of the past.

I'm kind of puzzled what the selling point to the Mini is now. At first it was an affordable Mac for those who don't have the money (or want to spend the money) for a pro, but at this point it seems to just be an underpowered box you can't upgrade for roughly the same price as a macbook air or better powered PC.

> but what exactly would be a reason for putting a power saving CPU in something that's plugged into the wall?

Devil's advocate, but I imagine it'd do huge things to the country's energy bill if everyone's computer was as energy efficient as new Core U-based computers.

It really wouldn't. Your fridge's power usage eclipses any computer you might have, short of a hardcore overclocked rig running Folding 24/7. To say nothing of electric stoves, A/C and heating, or industrial electricity usage. Hell, at the 20-30 W levels of lighter-powered computers, a couple of light bulbs might make a bigger difference.

All of those things you listed are used only intermittently which dramatically reduces their consumption. Many computers are on 24/7, especially Mac Minis and other things used for media servers.

There was a good article recently about the insane energy demand from DVRs -- they use more energy than any other home appliance, excepting air conditioning used in hot climates.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-power-hog-20140617-story...

> they use more energy than any other home appliance, excepting air conditioning used in hot climates.

Hmm... the graph shows 35 W. This standard full-size fridge http://www.danby.com/en/US/our_products/refrigeration/dff100... is rated for 375.6 kWh yearly, that is 42.9 W average. A mostly-idle Mac mini specced around 20-30 W would use well under 10 W on average.

Certainly it sounds like DVRs need to improve.

Roughly 260 kWh for 1 year of 30w on all the time (30 x 24 x 365 /1000). That assumes the media server is using 30w all the time. Probably half or a quarter of that (based on no data). Call it 100kWh.

My electric hotplate takes 3kW used for around 10 min a day for moka pot roughly 180kWh (3/6 * 365).

So not tiny but not huge either. I might try to estimate the on/off cycle time of the fridge. I suspect that the kWh figure will be large!

Thanks for running the numbers. The important question is how many personal computers are currently switched on at this exact moment? What's a small improvement to one person can make a huge difference nationally. Just because there are other devices that use yet more energy still (e.g. kettles, fridges, vacuum cleaners, etc.) doesn't mean there shouldn't be a drive for increased efficiency in all our electric devices where possible (in my personal opinion).

> The important question is how many personal computers are currently switched on at this exact moment?

Less than the fridges switched on.

Here's a standard fridge Walmart sells for $449: http://www.danby.com/en/US/our_products/refrigeration/dff100... The EnergyGuide says it's estimated for 375.6 kWh yearly. That's an average of 42.9 W, including the times it's plugged in but idle.

Then keep in mind that a "30 W" computer will use much less than that in idle, where it'll be for 90+% of the time. Including auto-sleep, which Macs are good at, you'll be well below 10 W on average.

> doesn't mean there shouldn't be a drive for increased efficiency in all our electric devices where possible (in my personal opinion).

Absolutely, but replacing one energy-efficient sub-30 W CPU with another slightly more efficient CPU won't do huge things to the country's energy bill.

Power=heat. If you want a tiny box without a lot of fan noise you need to watch your power.

I think the point of the Mini is "good enough for many people". And great for them. No sense buying RAM sockets you will never use, solder it down. That's a cheaper and more reliable connection.

Most people who purchase a mini never upgrade RAM or persistent storage. Remember that if you are posting on HN, you are an anomaly and live surrounded by similar anomalies so you may not realize it.

Remember that if you are posting on HN, you are an anomaly and live surrounded by similar anomalies so you may not realize it.

Most non-technical Mac users that I know have MacBooks (having worked in a linguistics faculty, I knew many). The only Mac Mini users that I know are actually techies.

Edit: of course, in the end it does not really matter. The Mac Mini is probably a tiny slice of the total number of Macs sold. For other models people (including me) already accept paying much extra for upgrades.

It occurs that I may have an observer bias, since I only see someone's mini if I am in their office or house, but can see their laptop many places.

I was going to use Amazon's Best Sellers to try to ferret out how few Mac Minis really get sold compared to iMacs and laptops. At least at this moment, Mac Minis are the best selling Mac. No doubt from fence sitters waiting for an announcement, but interesting none the less.

#12 Entry level Mini

#21 Middle iMac

#30 Middle Mini

#34 Low end iMac

#42 Whiz-bang 5k iMac

#50 2012 Mac Mini (quad core coveters)

#80 High end Mini

#87 Ancient, used 17" iMac. Really? sort of in the weeds here.

#100 2012 Mini, but volume must be near zero to be under that iMac.

Its actually more expensive when you try to get near what the 2012 model had. They really messed this one up. 2 cores not 4, soldered RAM, and no 2 hard drives.

I wish Apple would throw people who cannot buy the Mac Pro a bone, but that's not the way of a consumer electronics company.

I predict these will be pretty short lived; there will be a Late-2015 Mac Mini with 4K 60Hz which hopefully also fixes the quad core problem (lack of).

Sticking with my 2011 and 2012; I might upgrade the 2011 to a 2012 if I can get a cheap refurb.

We'd been waiting to replace our '12 minis with new ones in the office, but have instead just gone for MBP retinas. Can't see any reason to go with the minis now they're not upgradeable at all, other than price.

Why does it need to be replaced? '12 mini would still be going strong.

I made a quick video with the same conclusion: stay on 2012 and wait until a worthy upgrade comes along. (Well, unless you want PCIe SSD I/O bandwith -- that's much faster. But multicore is sooo much slower that it's not a clear win.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmmkD2rgNgA No need to watch the video, all the info is in the description.

In theory it's off-putting, but in practice I'm not really bothered by the changes. If I were to buy one, it would only be as a home server for iTunes Library hosting (to AppleTV) and as a backup destination for CrashPlan. My current server is an old Dell desktop that draws a lot of power and it's pretty noisy. Even the base configuration of the mini is plenty for what I would want to do with it.

It would appear they are just offering what Intel has available. I'm guess the Intel I5-4260U as it's 1.4GHz w/ Intel 5000 Graphics. It doesn't look like Intel even offers a mobile version of i5 with 4 cores and I couldn't find a mobile i7 with 4 cores and intel 5000+ graphics. This is one area A10 APUs that AMD really has Intel beat.

Intel does offer quad-core mobile chips with Intel 5000+ graphics. Apple's even shipping them in the 15" retina MacBook Pro. Here's the mid-tier chip:

http://ark.intel.com/products/83504/Intel-Core-i7-4870HQ-Pro...

The issue with using these in the Mac mini, as mentioned in the article, is that they require a different socket than the dual-core i5 chips. If Apple wanted to offer both dual and quad-core chips in the Mac mini, they'd need to design and ship two different boards.

It might have been more costly to do so, but I think that Apple's doing their customers a great disservice by not offering something between a dual-core i5 with soldered RAM and the $3K Mac Pro.

ah Thank you for pointing that out. I think the rMBP is actually a great middle of the road option. It supports multiple monitors with 2xthunderbolt,1xhdmi. I've seen lots of companies opting for these over mac minis and just having employees dock them in clamshell mode.

Gigabyte makes a mini system with i7-4770R, which is 4 core, Iris pro 5200 graphics, similar size to the mac mini: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4888#...

It is a bit noisy thought, I'm not sure the design of the mac mini could dissipate this much heat.

I got a Zotac Zbox a while ago instead of a mini and was wondering if anyone else has seen any nifty things in the micro ATX world?

There's a lot of neat small x86 stuff, but a lot of it depends on whether you're going low power or not.

If what you want is something like a Mac Mini but w/ higher end i7's your options are some Intel NUC or Gigabyte BRIX's which will be significantly more expensive than a baseline 2014 Mac Mini (but a bit cheaper when you match high-end RAM/SSD) - no TB2 or OSX (some ugly Hackintosh hacks withstanding) though. Gigabyte's BRIX Gaming is interesting since it has a GK104M based "GTX 760," which is amazing for the form-factor, but the trade-off is in relative cost and jet turbine fans. (The Alienware Alpha, Zotac EN760, and Asus GR8 are other "smallish" devices w/ dedicated GPUs).

You can get some really cheap/small Celeron-based NUC-sized machines (~$150 bare-bones) and throw in RAM/SSD for a very nice low-power Linux system. We use a lot of these at work at the moment, these are great.

Most of the fun stuff going on is with low power Bay Trail processors. Zotac has the C-series, which is between a NUC and Mac Mini in size, but also a Pico series (PI320) which is tiny, much smaller than the ECS Liva or the Minix Neo Z64 (which are also tiny). Also, there's the MEEGO-T01, which is the first Bay Trail HDMI stick I've seen.

My main desktop machine is an Asus Chromebox with an upgraded SSD and Linux installed. Had a hex-core 3.8GHz tower sitting right beside it, but I found I never booted it.

I spend most of my life in terminal windows, but it runs FireFox, the Gimp, and older games like HL2 just fine. Fan almost never goes on.

I'm quite interested in that. What model/cpu/ram do you have? And when the fan goes on how loud is it?

It's a M004U (AKA CN60). I should also have mentioned that I bumped the RAM to 6G (though 4 would have been fine). CPU is a Celeron 2955U, 1.8GHz dual core.

Fan's moderately loud. It seems to only come on when the GPU is stressed, rather than the CPU (playing 3D games, essentially). Doesn't come on when I'm playing movies or compiling code.

I run Arch with XFCE as my desktop, which I admit isn't very demanding - but it's zippy. Can't say what it'd be like under Gnome/KDE, but if I had to bet I'd say it'd be fine.

Installing Linux isn't for the faint of heart, but there's some good guides and it doesn't take long.

If it's desktop CPUs you are looking for, as opposed to power saving mobile models in desktop shells, I did get the HD-Plex S1 when it came out and I've been happy with it. No moving parts to break down or cause noise.

The $500 Mini is a dishonest lie by Apple.

Look at what happens when you give the 1.4 Ghz model 8 GB Ram and a fusion drive, it costs $850.

If you take the 2.6 Ghz model, you end up with $900 for that configuration. A 50$ price difference for a 1.4 vs 2.6 Ghz processor.

The Mac Mini performance and pricing is just maddening.

They're trying to kill it.

Why try to kill it? Why not just do it by not offering it anymore?

Apple isn't one monolithic creature. I'm assuming that some are trying to kill it (by making it underpowered with low sales) because they can't kill it politically (it's one of Steve's babies.)

It's kinda like the old iPod. They kept making it _long_ after nobody bought one, because it was the iconic turn-around device for Apple. Cook admitted they had to stop making it because they couldn't find parts anymore.

I doubt it. It's just the "bad low-end model" strategy that Apple has used for a long time. You make the base model cheap, but give it some flaws that knowledgeable buyers just can't ignore. This might be a slow processor, or a slow HDD, or not enough RAM. Then you make it so the base model can't be upgraded easily. The "cheap" buyer still buys the base model, but other buyers go up-model and you make more money off of them.

There is nothing wrong with using the base model as is without upgrading RAM or getting a SSD. Sure, it's only got 4GB of ram and a 500GB HDD, but that's fine for a wide range of uses.

Don't forget a second PC at home can always stream your primary desktop so there is little point to getting multiple high end computers for personal use. Leaving things like a secondary computer for guests or streaming music / video and some light surfing. Making cheap, light, quiet, and low power far more important than a quad cores or a high end video card.

Intel NUCs are similar in size to Mac Mini - I've been using for small linux servers and dev boxes. NUCs can handle 16GB ram, quad-core, SSD, GB ethernet.

Small and quiet - a great little device.

What are good retail NUCs?

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