If you’d like to take on this task, figure out your specific model of Mac Mini, then go hunting on iFixIt for a guide specific to that model. But if you’re up for a little elbow grease and your Mac Mini is far past its warranty date anyway, it’s well worth the effort. You’ll also need to know how to make a bootable macOS disk drive (and maybe enable TRIM support for your SSD), things that are almost intentionally obtuse in macOS. And the knowledge that $700 (at least) stayed in my pocket is immensely satisfying.Īgain, this particular upgrade isn’t for the faint of heart: Apple doesn’t make it easy to upgrade Macs, and that’s the way they like it. Even Chrome, notoriously pokey on macOS, feels more lively.įor a $100 upgrade, it’s pretty fantastic. Read and write speeds have improved by a factor of five to ten. Booting up this particular Mac takes about four minutes on the hard drive, and about thirty seconds with the secondhand SSD. And before you start, you’ll want to make a Mojave recovery disk, which is a bit tricky too.īut the results are impossible to deny. If you wouldn’t be comfortable, say, popping open your newer smartphone to replace the battery, you might want a local repair shop to tackle this for you. I’ll admit: this is not an easy process, with a lot of tiny, tightly-designed pieces to break. I swapped it out with a 500GB Samsung 840 SSD that I wasn’t using. To test this premise I busted open a 2012 Mac Mini, already sporting an acceptable 8GB of RAM but using a slow, laptop-grade 5400RPM hard drive. Spend $50-$100 for some new hardware and a few hours of your time working on your machine, and it’ll feel like new again. The 20 Mac Mini designs still support user-accessible RAM upgrades, too. All of them use replaceable hard drives that you can upgrade to a cheap solid-state drive-and those drives are going very cheap right now. Mac Mini models rocking the Intel Core i5/i7 architecture are still getting OS updates, all the way to macOS Mojave.

If you’re still clinging on to your older Mac Mini for fear of your bank account balance, there’s a cheaper alternative: upgrade it. Here dies the “inexpensive” Apple desktop. But all that new speed and power comes with a price: $800.

Apple announced a new Mac Mini last week, for the first time in four years.

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