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Desktops and mini PCs · Apple Mac mini

Apple Mac mini Intel

6owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
3/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for repairability and value.

What owners wrote

Neutral
I had the following problems. Note my hardware was ageing at the time and was about 5 years old. I know a quality apple specialist that did the work. - Glue'd in batteries on Laptops. I had a Mac Pro with a glue'd in battery. I could have done it myself, however I ended up opting to get someone who knows what they are doing to replace it. Labour and battery replacement cost me about £250. - Official charger made the power lines toast. Another £250 to get it repaired. - iOS Safari browser sometimes stops videos / audio when the screen locks or you switch apps. It is really annoying. Doesn't happen on Graphene OS or Android. - iCloud is kinda required if you use an iPhone even though I don't use it for backups. - Upgrades just aren't possible. Every single on of my laptops I have, I have upgraded ram, disk and even processor on some of the older models I have. I changed an intel Mac Mini drive to an SSD, it was a fiddly to say the least. On other SFF machines it is often a 5 minute job. - MacOS is kinda just weird. While it is a Unix, it does everything it can to hide it. As someone that used both Linux/BSD. MacOS feels like running a weird Linux distro. Brew was kinda weird after coming from Linux world. I would have just preferred to run Linux. - The online account stuff with Apple is somehow worse than Microsoft. These days I buy refurb Business Laptop from Dell or Lenovo. Literally 10% of the price, Linux almost always works and if breaks, I can buy another one cheap for th…
Doesn’t like it
I skipped most of the x86 era. I had the first Intel Mac mini connected to my TV running Front Row in 2006. But after that I didn’t buy another Mac until the M2 MacBook Air in 2023. At the end of the day, I was just not that impressed with the x86 based Macs. They had all of the drawbacks of x86 with all of the added disadvantages of Ive inspired design which led to poor heat dissipation, not enough ports and butterfly keyboards
Likes it
My Intel Mac Mini is still my "tv content" machine. Since it has no problem driving my Samsung OLED TV and keeping up with typical video framerates I suspect I will be holding on to it for many more years to come.
Likes it
That is insane. I mostly buy and use “EOL” devices because they’re cheaper and have no issues. Recently bought my son an old Intel Mac Mini and he loves it. You can easily still secure an EOL device- with the old Mac I just use it with the firewall on, no ports open, and a modern secure browser. There is really no attack surface from the OS which is EOL, and this old device has aged past being worth developing attacks for.
Doesn’t like it
I was an original Mac user (first computer ever bought) and was thinking this type of stuff too. My Windows experience was from schools, friends' computers or later client's computers. Nowadays I had both but use a Windows PC quite a lot (was destined to be a hackintosh, but couldn't put up with the hassle later one) and the reason I use Windows more is precisely because I have found it to be more stable, less annoying and with less bugs usually. I have a loaded Intel Mac Mini along and the audio bugs keeps happening on this system, I have particularly nasty crackling that is impossible to debug and particularly annoying for a machine of this price (and I can't swap the mobo like I could if it were a PC). The Apple reputation is largely underserved nowadays and I find it frustrating because it is one of the reasons they use to justify their absurdly high pricing. Considering those bugs are still not fixed in Apple Silicon Mac's, I am pretty sure this is a combination of bad software maintenance and poor hardware design, even though they pretend they know better. Considering the price of their computers, it is unacceptable but to be honest it won't be my problem anymore because I'm not buying anything else from Apple for the foreseeable future. MacOS is nice and had some cool stuff back in the days, but now Windows can offer an almost 1to1 alternative, at a much better price with much less hardware issues. If you put as much money into a PC than you do in a Mac, the warranty w…