Gadgetory

hey guys doston Apple it's 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's small form-factor pcs really aren't anything all that special but the Mac Mini was kind of ahead of its time alright 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 some papal 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 a fair few ports on 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 in the bottom you could actually screw off this sort of plastic piece to get at stuff like the hard drive in the RAM but we're in this a little bit more difficult and to make things worse the memory is actually soldered and that is a far cry from when marques built the ultimate Mac Mini back in 2012 where he loaded up with a ton of memory as well as an SSD they first list though this actually doesn't look like a bad way of getting yourself a cheap Mac so this is the 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however take a closer look and the Mac Mini might not quite be such a great value performance might just be the most outdated part of this system as 2014 specs will only take you so far this is the base model Mac Mini with a core i5 4260 you four gigabytes of RAM and a 500 gigabyte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 10 that is showing a score of around 4000 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 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 4 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 going to cost you about $130 less than the Mac Mini it just doesn't make sense one of the reasons I can't see someone being interested in the cheap Mac are for the Mac exclusive apps such as Final Cut Pro 10 which is what we use to edit all of our videos wow that's actually a WoW so give us 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 me I'll do a sort of basic cut this is three streams of 4k video playing back and real-time on the Mac Mini the only thing that's not totally stuck here and one of the reasons why it's not stuttering is we are editing off of 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 to 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 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 batman a's there may be only a generation or so behind but could be found for as little as $200 look most of the time if 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 out of here I want to give a shout out to a few really good friends of mine over at Vsauce so know this is not a sponsored spot but they've been working on the Curiosity box for over a year now and I honestly 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 curiosity box calm and as always thanks for watching