Worth picking up a 2012 Mac Mini i7 2.3Ghz with 512GB SSD?

[MiamiC70]

Tired of waiting on Apple and my late 2011 MacBook Air i7 is getting long in the tooth is it worth picking up a 2012 Mac Mini i7 2.3Ghz with 512GB SSD & 1Tb Fusion drive for about $500.00?
Mainly going to use it to replace the MacBook Air for basic computing, streaming movies to my 4K TV and to do some photoshop editing from my DSLR. My thoughts are maybe it will tide me over a year or two until Apple maybe gets their **** together and releases something I actually feel is worth the money.

 

[Boyd01]

Sounds like a good price, if everything actually works (that price is low enough to make me be a little skeptical). I have the 2.6 ghz version and use it primarily with Final Cut Pro. The main attraction of these quad models is CPU performance, which makes a big difference rendering video. I also have a 2013 MacBook Air with the i7 CPU and the mini renders more than twice as fast. I used to have 2011 MacBook Air, and a quad mini is probably 4 times faster than that. Of course the 2011 MBA also only has USB 2.0 which is a big handicap in today's world.

The HD4000 graphics chip is really showing its age though. For what you describe, I don't know there would be much advantage to a machine like that, and it is not getting any younger. The price is certainly tempting however.

 

[MiamiC70]

Yes, the graphics chip is a big negative but the I have a 27" Thunderbolt display and a G-Raid Thunderbolt storage so the fact that the Mini has the Thunderbolt port to allow me to daisy chain those is good. As it is my Macbook Air basically just sits in a dock running 24/7 for the last few years connected via Thunderbolt.

 

[Synchro3]

Yes, it's worth. $500 is a very good price for a Quad Core Mini with SSD.