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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming
- Thread starter GabrieleR
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A lot of people don't really care about chipsets, GPUs and CPUs.
Computer wakes up from sleep? Check!
Computer fetches mail, Facebook opens, Photos-app opens? Check!
Word/Pages opens, letters print? Check!
iTunes works? Check!
The rest they don't care. And for that, even a 2012 i5 is plenty. I know because my mother has one (with 16GB and the original 5400 RPM rotating rust drive) and has never complained about its slowness - because it isn't. She doesn't do heavy video-transcoding, doesn't play games nor does she need to run a DevOps lab in a couple of Vagrant VMs.
That helps a lot.
Computer wakes up from sleep? Check!
Computer fetches mail, Facebook opens, Photos-app opens? Check!
Word/Pages opens, letters print? Check!
iTunes works? Check!
The rest they don't care. And for that, even a 2012 i5 is plenty. I know because my mother has one (with 16GB and the original 5400 RPM rotating rust drive) and has never complained about its slowness - because it isn't. She doesn't do heavy video-transcoding, doesn't play games nor does she need to run a DevOps lab in a couple of Vagrant VMs.
That helps a lot.
Except it is... extremely slow. I guess she has never used a SSD and doesn't know better, which is OK. But for those of us who have SSDs, we are not going back to 5400 spinners. Not happening.
Well, maybe not all of us.
I enjoy the price per GB of hard drives, and as I ensure all my machines have sufficient RAM for whatever task they are performing, I rarely find myself ever waiting for a drive to complete an operation.Just sayin', an SSD is not everything.
Well, maybe not all of us.
Just sayin', an SSD is not everything.
Wrong
Wrong
I see you are a member of the Cult of the SSD. All hail the SSD! We will reboot our computers every ten minutes! We will restart all our apps every five minutes! Let not an hour pass without spending half of it reading and writing data on the SSD!
I have the 2012 i7 2.3 with 16GB and a Crucial M500 SSD. The i5 is slower. But not that much. I run VMWare Fusion - I wouldn't want to do that without an SSD. But my mother just uses Safari, Mail.App and occasionally some other apps like Pages or Photos. Or Sibelius First. Except for Sibelius, everything launches in maybe two or three seconds. And most of the time, it's in standby and the startup-time is two seconds or three at most. It takes about as long for my old 30" display to wake up from sleep/power off - an SSD doesn't change that.
For her it's enough. If it was faster, she'd barely notice it. If she'd notice it at all.
Have you been to an Apple Store? Seen all the old people? They want good, personal support, friendly staff and above-average product quality (they buy to own, not to throw away). They don't give a hoot about whether the chipset is Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake or Kaby Lake.
I work with 32-core servers, 40G Ethernet and enterprise PCIe-SSDs at work. But I don't really need that kind of power at home.
Neither do most other people.
I hope Apple releases a Mini this year that can drive a 4K display - because that's really the only thing missing from a "normal" user's perspective.
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Perfect fit for iPad
She's got one of those, too. An original iPad Mini. Not really fast either.
I'm glad Apple supported it so long with updates.
I recommend restarting your system every 9 minutes and 30 seconds. That way you lessen the danger of going past the 10 minute mark.
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I have not seen all the old people, but that is probably because I studiously avoid the mirrors.
Yes, guilty! I have wasted so much time when I did tech support in the field waiting for rusty spinners to boot up or update or what have you that I actually am OWED the time saving from SSD's
That is 100% false. Totally and completely false.
Senior citizens who don't know any better, maybe. But to say that the average user can't tell the difference between a 5400 spinner and a SSD is crazy. Using a spinner in 2017 is a joke. It's like walking through quicksand. It totally ruins the experience of personal computing for all but the absolute most basic users.
Is a 5400 "enough" for the users you are describing? Perhaps. But so is 2GB of ram and a core2duo CPU from 2007.
It's funny how many times I've said almost this exact thing.
My father is 71 and my stepmom is 76. I assure you my stepmom only uses the computer for Facebook and looking at news sites. And I can most assuredly tell you even she noticed the massive difference between the 5400 rpm Mac mini they were using before and the 2011 Mac mini with SSD that I gave them when I moved away from the Mac. My dad is a bit more tech savvy and knows the benefits of an SSD. My stepmom just knows it is much faster and more pleasant to use than the Mac mini they had before. Some of that has to do with the processor boost they got in the newer model, but much more of that was the SSD.
Cool! Please, give details! Exactly what was the "massive difference"? How often does she boot up the machine every day? How often does she start up apps ever hour? What else does she do that creates this "massive difference"?
I realize this statement is nothing but snark and sarcasm, so other than to reply with "the user experience is simply much more pleasant for her than before" that's all that really needs to be said.
Hey give @jpietrzak8 a break. He decided that SSD is not a necessity, therefore it is not a necessity. The end. If your mom thinks her experience is better, @CaseyGV, she's starting her apps wrong. /s
Ah, yes. Always nice to spend a bunch of money on a device that enhances the "user experience".
Wish Apple would allow for other devices that enhance the "user experience", like RAM, CPUs, or GPUs. Stuff that I, at least, use a whole lot more than my storage devices...
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SSDs are wonderful! Especially, if your use case involves spending lots of time reading and writing and reading and writing to the storage drive all the day long.
What drives me nuts, is that I don't spend all the day reading and writing and reading and writing to the drive. Even those parts of the day where I do spend a lot of time with the drive, I do it in the background, and go on with life in my foreground apps. My "user experience", then, is not significantly altered by the SSD; certainly, not the way that a better CPU or GPU would alter it.
Ah, yes. Always nice to spend a bunch of money on a device that enhances the "user experience".
Wish Apple would allow for other devices that enhance the "user experience", like RAM, CPUs, or GPUs. Stuff that I, at least, use a whole lot more than my storage devices...
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SSDs are wonderful! Especially, if your use case involves spending lots of time reading and writing and reading and writing to the storage drive all the day long.
What drives me nuts, is that I don't spend all the day reading and writing and reading and writing to the drive. Even those parts of the day where I do spend a lot of time with the drive, I do it in the background, and go on with life in my foreground apps. My "user experience", then, is not significantly altered by the SSD; certainly, not the way that a better CPU or GPU would alter it.
I see. So your position is that how *you* use the computer is the right way, and everyone else must be doing it wrong. Got it. No further conversation is necessary.
Since I can't put 64 GB of RAM and a quad core i7 in a 2011 Mac mini, so they can open all of their apps and never have to close them without spending $3000 on a completely different Mac that Apple doesn't even sell, but I can spend $150 on a very fast SSD, I guess my parents will just have to live with the poor choice I made.
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Ah, yes. Always nice to spend a bunch of money on a device that enhances the "user experience".
Wish Apple would allow for other devices that enhance the "user experience", like RAM, CPUs, or GPUs. Stuff that I, at least, use a whole lot more than my storage devices...
[doublepost=1485441115][/doublepost]
SSDs are wonderful! Especially, if your use case involves spending lots of time reading and writing and reading and writing to the storage drive all the day long.
What drives me nuts, is that I don't spend all the day reading and writing and reading and writing to the drive. Even those parts of the day where I do spend a lot of time with the drive, I do it in the background, and go on with life in my foreground apps. My "user experience", then, is not significantly altered by the SSD; certainly, not the way that a better CPU or GPU would alter it.
I put an SSD in my 2011 MacBook Pro, and even though I also do not spend all the day reading and writing and reading and writing to the drive, I found the change in performance to be very pleasing. I would not go back to the spinner now. Mock me if you like, but that is my experience.
Ok, let me ask again -- in what way are other people using their machines? Nobody ever gives me an answer, other than, "the SSD makes a massive improvement!"
I do know and understand the contents of my computers. I understand the benefits of the SSD, and they are great -- an SSD does provide a massive speed improvement over an HDD (as well as providing better durability).
But I come from the PC world. An SSD is only one tool in your toolbox there, and you have lots of other options to improve the performance of a machine. Options that can make a much bigger impact than an SSD, unless your use-case involves extreme amounts of storage device interaction. It is only here, in the Apple world, where everyone looks to the SSD to improve the performance of your computer. Because it is the only thing Apple allows you to modify...
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Please, please, please give even a fraction of detail about exactly what you find pleasing! Is it the bootup time? Application start time? The reduced vibration of the laptop? What is it?
This. Exactly this. There is no way to upgrade a perfectly good Mac mini and improve its performance other than this, for exactly the reason you just said. I can't *make* an old Mac mini faster, better, more pleasing to use by adding RAM or changing the processor, without replacing the entire machine. I can make it much more pleasant to use by increasing the performance of the I/O device, and I'm sorry, but if my stepmom uses the computer for web browsing primarily, everything that she does relies on reading and writing to the storage device. For the value provided by the relatively nominal cost of upgrading the hard disk to an SSD versus buying a Mac Pro, there just is no question what the better choice is.
I have spinners in my NAS. I just thought I would chime in for the heck of it.