Goodbye mac mini

[JoeTech]

My 2011 mac mini is starting to get a little old even though I have upgraded it to 8gb of ram and a ssd drive. I bought it mainly so that I could become more familiar with apple products when I needed to repair or upgrade them at work. It has been a handy little pc to use in my living room as well.

Then I came across this article where the guy has one from 2009 and was ready to buy a new mac mini without even looking at alternatives until he saw it has been 3 years since the last revision which is actually a downgrade and now is buying something else a lot better and cheaper.

A lot of the comments also suggest that everyone at Apple wants to work on the next big thing and no one wants to be bothered with working on a boring thing like a mac upgrade. That and they love selling old pc's for premium prices without having to spend anything on R&D. I don't really see a need to buy a new mac mini either. I thought it would be nice if I ever wanted to try making apps but then that would require me to always have a mac so I won't be getting into doing that anymore. I guess this guys comment sums up what I think now.

"Nowadays, I kind of enjoy seeing posts about people abandoning Apple ecosystem. Although it's painful, I myself have been yet another avid fan of pretty much Apple offered, it feels like this is not going to last forever.

When they do the math, iPhone might seem the most lucrative (they seem not to care about anything else) but since they are killing the ecosystem with no Mac Pro, no Mac Mini and with so called pro MacBooks, developers will abandon Apple eventually. Even if iPhone becomes/remains the most technologically advanced smart phone on the market, it would be like a distant paradise island with no airports. Airplanes (developers and subsequently the end users) will be landing on alternative airports on emerging islands, letting them prosper. Consequently, Apple island will be deserted."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13505936

 

[sapphirescales]

Apple has always been crap, but since 2012 they just get worse every year. Permanently soldered RAM, proprietary SSD's, slower processors with each new generation (the latest Mac Mini is an absolute JOKE), old nasty outdated technology that they charge an arm and a leg for, crappy keyboards (I'd rather type on a netbook than the new Macbook and Macbook Pro's), horrible mice (NOT their touchpads, which I think are top notch, but their separate mice), their 3 year old Mac "Pro" that lost all modularity and repairabilty and costs even more than it used to, and each new OS is worse than the last.

Sierra is TERRIBLE. It slows down even the newer models (I have a 2014 15" Macbook Pro and I had to roll back to El Capitan because the battery life went from 8 hours to 1 hour and it slowed down by about 40%). And their new naming conventions absolutely SUCK. The big cat names were cool. Places in California? Give me a break. And why choose the dumbest names in California? I think they should just be honest and call their next OS "Big Poo." It would sound better than whatever stupid place they'd name it after too.

Apple has so many recalls it's absurd. And they only do a recall once they get a class action lawsuit going. They have a recall on their 2011 to 2013 Macbook Pro 15" models, but the GPU issues are also on the 13" models and they refuse to admit that. I don't know whether they've done a recall on the "touch disease" issue on the iPhone 6's yet, but if there hasn't been a lawsuit yet then they haven't.

My 2014 15" Macbook Pro will be my last Mac laptop. With no real ports on the newer models and the worst keyboards I've ever used, why would I want one? To top it all off they jacked the price up. I only use my Macbook for doing Mac repairs. Next I think I'll try a hackintosh, or maybe an iMac. I don't know. But the last thing I want to do is screw around with dongles. And I'm doubtful about USB-C's future. They can call it USB, but in reality it needs to see mass adoption. So many other ports have failed. Why would this one succeed? Just because it uses "USB" in the name?

My mother uses a Mac Mini (2012) running Windows 10 connected to her TV to watch Netflix and stream downloaded movies. I'm not replacing it until it dies. Unlike Apple, Microsoft supports their OS's for 10+ years so I don't have to worry about it becoming obsolete due to an outdated OS. Getting her off of Media Center was like pulling teeth and I'm not looking forward to when this system needs to be replaced.

 

[JoeTech]

I wonder if in 2012 was when Apple started their obsession with being thin really kicked in. Of course, it you want to be thin, you have to sacrifice performance and things people like. Now it seems like Microsoft is the one with a plan and apple doesn't know what they want to do with macOs/IOS. Funny when windows 8 came out, I thought Microsoft was toast, and my next pc would buy an Imac, but now there are much better options then there were in 2012.

 

[Markverhyden]

People have always bitched about Apple... And Micro$oft, Adobe, Dell, HP, and list goes on ad infinitum. The Apple volume has been much larger the last few years to do their success.

Back when the mini first came out I was pretty excited. Finally a low price point for someone to get into OS X. And the designs for the first few models were nice and not too difficult to work on. Reliability was good. Recommended many to my customers. When the server model came out is was perfect for small offices. Dual drives, could mirror them, hardware performance was great for low seats counts, say less than 25 for everything but heavy web hosting. I used mine for many years to host, Calendar, Address Book, FTP, VPN, and ownCloud.

But somewhere along the way their reliability started to drop. And the final coup de grâce was when they dropped RAM slots and soldered everything on. But the Mac mini was never a huge revenue generator, especially in the retail market where Apple spends all their efforts.

A customer gave me their old Mac mini server, '11 I believe, and I'll just use it as a lab machine. Maybe toss in a couple of old SSD's I have lying around.

 

[Mike McCall]

I have a couple from '09, one I used exclusively. Neither can really keep up anymore and have been relegated to occasional duty processing the wife's pictures. I've thought about replacing them with another, but as the costs have increased the mini has become less attractive to me. For me, there's just too many cheaper alternatives I could go with.

I also have an iPad 2nd generation that is not compatible with IOS 10. Therefore it won't get the security updates & such anymore. Since I use it for work & for credit cards when on site, I was debating on how/what to replace it with. I was having a hard time talking myself into forking out the price for a replacement iPad, but was unfamiliar with Android tablets (I have an Android phone though) and didn't know which way to go. Then one of my clients gave me a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition tablet. Very nice tablet, easily replacing the aging iPad.

Apple products don't seem to be holding the same quality/value perceptions for me that I once had. Could be just me.

 

[LivHolmes]

Yeah I agree with you all. Many people are misled with using apple and they all think the other way around. LOL

 

[FremontPC]

Just picked up an October 2012 Mini from Craigslist. All the other Macs I have are too old and don't have USB3. As the new Macs have soldered RAM (except for the iMacs, as I understand it) and with aforementioned SSD restrictions, the 2012 Mini seemed the way to go.

One of my clients has a Macbook Pro with bootcamp and I needed to test some backup solutions that would handle both the Mac side and the Bootcamp partition. Still looking at Paragon HDM Mac for this, but while they allow cloning all partitions of a Mac with Bootcamp, I couldn't restore from their archive (pVHD) to a new drive (restoring to the original drive works). Still checking it out and will try it with other than Sierra to see if I can get it to work. Paragon support isn't too forthcoming on this...

Acronis also backs up all partitions in one swoop (Mac and Bootcamp), but won't restore to bare metal unless you create the partitions by hand first. Try setting a 200MB EFI partition with Disk Utility. Nyet.

I wonder how long it will be before the reflow guys start offering RAM upgrades?