Gadgetory

yo guys Johnson 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 a $4.99 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 1 terabyte hard drives and the ram is upgradable plus on top of that it is jam-packed full of ports yet gig Ethernet firewire 800 rest in peace HDMI Thunderbolt 4 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 as dual core while this guy is quad core so what kind of kick-started this entire project is I've been prepping for an office tour so behind me it's a little sneak peek of a completely redesigned media center we've got an 85 inch TV brand-new sambhar Philips you 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 Plex and it works amazing with the Philips hue sync app so yeah that freaking blew my mind it's amazing I actually be dropping in video on how I set that up tomorrow so definitely stay tuned drop a like if you are looking forward to that so back to the Mac Mini it's compact it's powerful ish and with a couple upgrades it makes the perfect little compact plex server for the set up 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 crush 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 2 terabyte and a 4 terabyte SSD which combines for a massive 6 terabytes of fast storage on this tiny little Mac Mini Ram Wise has only shipped with 4 gigabytes of RAM but you could max out at 16 which is exactly what I did so upgrade time ramp 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 now this isn't a tutorial or how to in fact I will link the o WC video that I use to reference to upgrade myself down below and even though it was a little challenging the upgrade was successful so out-of-the-box has shipped with OS 10.8 mountain lion a 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 on a reference that also down below so what are 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 SSD is 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 11,000 270 for reference a current gen 13-inch MacBook Pro with a sweet D brand skin got a single core score of 4000 for 95 and a multi-core score of nine thousand three hundred seventy eight so even though the MacBook Pro outperforms this Mac Mini on this 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 Mac Pro and for reference to rip the dark knight it took 22 minutes and 9 seconds in the iMac Pro in 22 minutes and 31 seconds on the Mac Mini so they're just about the same that tells me two things one the program make MKV 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 it saves me an entire step so that is why about 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 you