Mac Mini 2014 2.6Ghz 8gb is good for daily use?

[Maribel.Mariah]

I live in brazil, here Apple products have proibitive price tags, but as my old PC AMD FX6300, 8Gb DDR3 RAM, 120Gb SSD + 1tb HD is dying and i will hav eto spend money trying to fix it (mobo, CPU, VGA, etc.. etc.. etc..) is easier to buy a new one, and why not a mac? i was already thinking about that before, so i started to search for mac models.

After a long search i found only 2 Mac models at a decent enough price tag that was almost the same i was going to spend to upgrade the old machine, the infamous 1.4ghz Mac Mini, and the 2,6Ghz Mac mini.

I want to buy the middle one, 2,6GHz 8Gb of RAM, and also buy a External 250GB usb3.0 SSD and make the procedure to run the OS on it, as to bypass the slow 5400RPM HD. I plan to use it as my daily machine to use the internet, edit pages documents and listen to music (most of the times at the same time), and to migrate to the apple ecossystem as i found it way more simple to do things in it than windows (you can sync content effortless between devices, shared copy paste! hell yeah!).

would this setup will be good enough for me to do those daily tasks?

obs: and ocassional simple CAD editing and some casual gamming on steam but later on the line (i plan on buying later a Egpu Enclosure and a nice VGA for that purpose, but for now it's basic computer use.)

I know there are better mac machines out there, but there is no way i would be abble to buy them in the sort term (aka 3 years) as the price goes pretty up. so its this model or nothing, and is because of that that i want to know if i will be good with this machine for 2- 3 years and if it will provide me a good mac experience.

 

[einbahnstrasse]

I live in brazil, here Apple products have proibitive price tags, but as my old PC AMD FX6300, 8Gb DDR3 RAM, 120Gb SSD + 1tb HD is dying and i will hav eto spend money trying to fix it (mobo, CPU, VGA, etc.. etc.. etc..) is easier to buy a new one, and why not a mac? i was already thinking about that before, so i started to search for mac models.

After a long search i found only 2 Mac models at a decent enough price tag that was almost the same i was going to spend to upgrade the old machine, the infamous 1.4ghz Mac Mini, and the 2,6Ghz Mac mini.

I want to buy the middle one, 2,6GHz 8Gb of RAM, and also buy a External 250GB usb3.0 SSD and make the procedure to run the OS on it, as to bypass the slow 5400RPM HD. I plan to use it as my daily machine to use the internet, edit pages documents and listen to music (most of the times at the same time), and to migrate to the apple ecossystem as i found it way more simple to do things in it than windows (you can sync content effortless between devices, shared copy paste! hell yeah!).

would this setup will be good enough for me to do those daily tasks?

obs: and ocassional simple CAD editing and some casual gamming on steam but later on the line (i plan on buying later a Egpu Enclosure and a nice VGA for that purpose, but for now it's basic computer use.)

I know there are better mac machines out there, but there is no way i would be abble to buy them in the sort term (aka 3 years) as the price goes pretty up. so its this model or nothing, and is because of that that i want to know if i will be good with this machine for 2- 3 years and if it will provide me a good mac experience.

Yes, it would for those tasks.

 

[treekram]

One thing to be aware of is the monitors that the 2014 Mini supports. 2560x1440 works at 60Hz. Anything above that may require extra work to work well. For example, 3840x2160 (UHD) is officially supported at 30Hz, although people have had success running at 50Hz using SwitchResX.

 

[Ace2617]

It should work fine for those uses, yeah. I use my 2012 Mac Mini (2.5 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB internal SSD) for some of the same stuff you said, writing/editing docs, internet, music, etc. When I got it I planned to just use it as a secondary machine occasionally, but I use it everyday now. It seems that you have the right idea of skipping the base model and going for middle configuration, so you should be fine.

 

[opeter]

The biggest problem with the Mac mini is, that it is actually a desktop with notebook parts. So, don't think, it will be a beast. But yes, it should work.

obs: and ocassional simple CAD editing and some casual gamming on steam but later on the line (i plan on buying later a Egpu Enclosure and a nice VGA for that purpose, but for now it's basic computer use.)

I am not sure, that the eGPU will work with actual or older Mac minis.
It depends, if High Sierra will allow it on these.

 

[macdragonfl]

Yes, the middle model is the best deal and have set those up using a usb3 external drive enclosure with SSD as a boot drive, you then can put video and music on the internal drive and point to that drive it will save you space.