Just call your machine Verbal Kint.
Just as Mr. Kint limped into that cluttered office in the police station, your crippled 2014 came into your home or office lacking essentials like an i7 CPU, SSD storage, and 16GB of RAM.
How does your FD powered mini perform CaptMarvel? What is the boot time on that little gray box?
That i5/8GB/1TB FD mini will certainly be sufficient for all sorts of work. If you use Activity Monitor to check Memory Pressure it should reveal that your 8GB of RAM is adequate for anything that you want to do. Programs like Photoshop and music software should do fine with that much memory. The folks who truly need 16GB are often running multiple (or really RAM hungry) Virtual Machines. This Macworld article claims that 8GB is enough for many virtual machine scenarios. http://www.macworld.com/article/203...ifications-of-additional-memory-on-a-mac.html
I was surprised to see small difference between 8GB and 16GB in some of their test configurations. It was also interesting that the tests showed that the advantage that 8GB had over 4GB in Photoshop CS6 was not automatically shared with other programs. According to Macworld, iTunes, Handbrake, iPhoto, iMovie, and other software showed only minor improvements (if any) when the RAM was increased beyond 4GB!
That $800 for the 1TB PCIe SSD is a premium price for the fastest storage option in Mac mini history. Is it worth that much? Does any particular machine need it? Those are subjective questions that consumers will answer on a case-by-case basis. Your 16GB of RAM question is similar. But…
I think that you could be right in the case of your FD equipped mini. At 4X the price it appears to be “more cost effective” even though the 16GB will not improve performance most of the time. I would prefer the memory upgrade because maxing the memory is much less expensive and you cannot do it later. Despite the performance advantage, the 1TB PCIe SSD from Apple is crazy expensive. Unlike memory upgrades, big PCIe SSDs can be purchased elsewhere and/or in the future for much less $.
Spending the extra $800 would get you a similarly sized storage system that is definitely faster than your FD. Would it be $800 faster?
I'm pretty sure boot time is only a few seconds, but ill be sure to pull out my stop watch to time the cold cranking amps! As far as regular performance, I love it. I guess i had grown so used to my slow windows machine that is still kicking. I'll eventually transfer everything off of that PC and probably transfer to a LaCie storage drive..just contemplating on which one to get...1TB or 2TB, probably the latter. no rush though. I tend to be a file hoarder.
i can figure out a few ways ways to spend $800 on other products for my mac mini.
The knowledge you are sharing is much appreciated.
One question, is the activity monitor you mentioned something in the mac app store? for free?
