Apple mac mini review cnet

Зачем я купил Mac Mini (Late 2012) накануне 2018 года?

Продать MacBook Pro, которому уже перевалило за 3 года

Сменить 13» экран на парочку 22» и повысить комфорт разработки

Получить мощную машину для быстрой компиляции проектов на Swift

Это основные причины, повлиявшие на покупку Mac Mini. Первые два пункта достаточно очевидны, но вот к последнему пункту явно нужны комментарии.

Предисловие

У меня был MacBook Pro 13» (Mid 2014) с самым мощным процессором в своей линейке (i7-4578U) и 8 GB оперативной памяти. Износ аккумулятора был примерно 1400 циклов и зарядное устройство доживало свои последние дни. Менять батарею и покупать зарядное обошлось бы в 22000₽ у «офицалов» или от 6000₽ в других местах. Но стоило ли продлять жизнь аппарату, который уже не устраивает по производительности?!

За последний год особенно остро встал вопрос скорости компиляции проектов на Swift. Как и многие, я задавался вопросом ускорения компиляции и читал различные материалы на эту тему. Вот, например, полезный скрипт, которым время от времени пользуюсь для поиска «медленных» функций:

Но, несмотря на удачные решения по оптимизации, производительности MacBook не хватало для шустрой сборки проектов.

Оценка производительности

Первым делом следовало разобраться — а что конкретно требуется от компьютера, чтобы он быстро собирал проекты. Интуитивно я понимал, что основная нагрузка ложится на процессор, но полноценные исследования провести все не хватало времени. Пару раз сравнил время компиляции одного и того же проекта на MacBook Pro 15» (Mid 2015) с процессором (i7-4770HQ) и на моём ноутбуке. Разница была очевидной — практически в 2 раза быстрее справлялся с задачей MacBook Pro 15» (Mid 2015). Тогда и заметил, что есть зависимость между временем компиляции и оценкой производительности процессора по версии cpubenchmark.net.

Еще больше подтверждений данной зависимости нашел, когда наткнулся на репозиторий, где люди на одном и том же проекте тестировали время сборки и публиковали результаты.

Mac Mini

Все в той же таблице я и обнаружил Mac Mini (Late 2012), который находился среди лидеров. Мне показалось это явление странным, ведь я неоднократно проверял характеристики самого свежего Mac Mini (Late 2014) и показатели его производительности не были впечатляющими.

Как оказалось, у модели 2012 года было все в порядке с производительностью. 4-х ядерный процессор не оставлял шансов 2-х ядерному процессору модели 2014 года. Помимо достойного процессора, этот аппарат еще допускает замену / расширение памяти. Поэтому, must have набор 16 GB RAM + SSD воткнуть получится.

Покупка / продажа

Все происходило через аукцион. От момента зарождения идеи до полной ее реализации прошло всего несколько дней. Удалось разменять старый ноутбук на интересующий комплект без каких-то особых доплат.

Продажа MacBook Pro 13» (Mid 2014) ≈ 50000₽

Покупка Mac Mini MD388 + Клавиатура + Трэкпад ≈ 25000₽
Покупка 2 x 8 GB RAM Kingston KVR16S11/8 ≈ 10000₽ (Новое)
Покупка 2 x Монитор HP 22w + кронштейн ≈ 15000₽ (Новое)

За сумму ≈ 50000₽ что-то подобное по производительности найти сложно (если вообще возможно). Альтернативой может оказаться Hackintosh, подход к сборке которого достаточно доступно описан в публикации. Однако, в публикации сборка сравнивается с крайне слабым Mac Mini (Mid 2011) c процессором i5-2415M, который покупать для разработки я бы не рекомендовал. Вот если бы сравнили сборку с Mac Mini (Late 2012) с процессором i7-3720QM, то результаты не были бы столь убедительными.

Во время проверки Mac Mini использовал команду для терминала, которая выводит модель процессора, например: Intel® Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz. Ведь целью было приобретение именно 4-х ядерного аппарата и данная проверка давала хоть какую-то дополнительную уверенность при покупке с рук.

Очень долго не мог решиться какую оперативную память покупать. Существуют модели, которые разные фирмы делают специально для техники Apple, но они дороже и ждать долго пока их доставят. Выбор модулей памяти Kingston KVR16S11/8 был основан исключительно на отзывах людей с маркета. Им огромное спасибо!

Я так и не разобрался, сможет ли этот Mac Mini адекватно выводить картинку на два монитора с разрешением превышающим Full HD. Поэтому не стал рисковать и взял мониторы именно с Full HD.

Результаты

После смены старого MacBook Pro на еще более древний Mac Mini, объем оперативной памяти увеличился с 8 GB до 16 GB и маленький 13» экран сменился на два 22». Осталось разобраться с производительностью.

Предварительно, перед продажей MacBook, было измерено время сборки на одном из проектов: 115 сек, 110 сек, 112 сек. Средний результат получился 112 сек. Условия сборки проекта были всегда точно соблюдены: открыт только Xcode, очистка (clean), ожидание индексации, сборка (build). Результаты Mac Mini подтвердили предположения о зависимости оценки производительности процессора и времени компиляции: 75 сек, 70 сек, 70 сек. Средний результат 72 сек.

Заключение

Приобретением доволен, все ожидания оправдались. Процессор действительно играет очень важную роль и старые 4-х ядерные оказываются производительнее, чем свежие 2-х ядерные. Не удивлюсь, если MacBook Pro 13» (Mid 2017) в максимальной комплектации будет собирать проекты медленнее, чем приобретенный мной Mac Mini.

… осталось привыкнуть к отсутствию мобильности и свободы, которую предоставлял ноутбук.

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Mac Mini 2018 teaches an old design new tricks After some time with the long-awaited update to Apple’s mini PC, we’re impressed overall — but still have one big reservation.

Shop for Apple Mac Mini (Core i3, 2018)

The 2014 Mac Mini’s connections (bottom) versus the 2018 model’s (top). Gone are the SD card slot, two of the USB-A connections and audio input. In exchange we gain more Thunderbolt capacity and better venting.

After several years of silence on the Mac Mini front , fans of Apple’s diminutive desktop computing slab had given up hope of ever getting a replacement. But in the 2018 models, Apple’s delivered a great upgrade, with only one possible drawback.

In addition to modernizing the connection options with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, updating to HDMI 2.0 and offering a 10-gigabit Ethernet option, Apple fixed one of the big complaints about the 2014 model: soldered memory. Upgradable memory is back, and it takes two industry-standard DDR4 SO-DIMMs.

But like most Apple products, it’s not really end-user upgradable, requiring a trip to a service center. This undercuts one of the perks, namely being able to buy less expensive memory elsewhere. But if it’s going to be another four years until Apple updates the Mini again, then every little bit of upgradability helps.

I had some time with the «cheap» entry-level model, equipped with an Intel Core i3-8100B, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. There isn’t much to say about how it feels to use it: It’s similar to the old model. It drove the Dell Ultrathin 27 S2719DC display via Thunderbolt without any unexpected issues, and produced HDR on the monitor through the HDMI.

The B series of the Core processors are new low-profile, thermally capped versions of their desktop counterparts designed for embedded systems and mini PCs, which is how Apple managed to switch from the last generation’s mobile processors while keeping essentially the same design, and with no increase in fan noise.

Mac Mini 2018 makes the most of its veteran design

Though the price of entry has gone up from $500 to $800 (£400 to £800 or AU$620 to AU$1,249), much faster than the pace of inflation over the same period, it’s still not out of line. The comparable Windows configurations in a compact design — and there really aren’t many — are actually pretty expensive in comparison. Examples include the HP Z2 Mini G4 workstation (about $1,000 for an i3-8100, 8GB and 256GB SSD) or the HP EliteDesk 800 G4 (almost $1,300 for an i3-8100T, 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD).

But it’s not really an inexpensive system, either. That $800 doesn’t include a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or monitor, so really you’re looking at about $1,000 just for that base configuration if you only spend about $110 on a monitor. The least expensive iMac is $1,100, though it’s a far less capable system.

Apple Mac Mini 2018

Price as reviewed	$799, £799, AU$1,249
PC CPU	3.6GHz Intel Core i3-8100B
PC Memory	8GB DDR4 SDRAM 2,667MHz
Graphics	1535MB dedicated Intel UHD Graphics 630
Storage	Apple 128GB SSD
Ports	Four USB-C/Thunderbolt, two USB-A 3.1, one HDMI 2.0, audio out
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet, AirPort Extreme
Operating system	Apple MacOS Mojave 10.14

Performance of the base model is fine, about what you’d expect given the components, but in general I really recommend you skip the quad-core i3 and head for at least the hexacore i5, not just for the speed boost, but for the futureproofing. An increasing number of applications are taking advantage of more cores, and for premium systems quad core is over. While the Mac Mini is inexpensive for Apple, it’s still essentially premium — after all, you can configure it with up to $4,200 (£3,860, AU$6,660) worth of components.

Plus, the i3 operates at a fixed processor speed of 3.6GHz; it doesn’t incorporate Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which holds it back.

We didn’t rebenchmark the 2014 Mac Mini for comparison, but Apple would have had to actively try to slow it down in order to deliver worse performance than those four-year-old components.

Bigger on the outside

So what’s the drawback? For many pros, it may be hamstrung by Intel’s integrated graphics processor. I’m not saying it needs a powerful gaming or rendering GPU. A Kaby Lake G CPU, for example, would be a nice alternative to the i3 simply to make the system low-end VR ready, to take some of the video decoding burden or to help reduce overhead in audio production. (With only four cores, that CPU may not match the performance of the i5 and i7 eighth-generation hexacore processors.)

Not all software supports the latter, but some notable digital audio editing software, such as Avid Pro Tools, at least take advantage to accelerate plug-ins. (I’ve included benchmark results for a couple of Kaby Lake G laptops to give you a sense of performance and speed.) But that also would require some internal redesign and — gasp! — maybe a few millimeters’ embiggening.

Apple really seems to be betting on external GPUs as a solution for much of its graphics woes. But one of the benefits of the Mini is that it’s mini. Having to make space for a big eGPU just for better-than-basic graphics acceleration kind of defeats the purpose of a tiny system, especially when you’re likely going to be hanging a multitude of external drives and other accessories off it as well. (And with that in mind, a couple of ports on the front would be nice.)

We’ll be back with a final review once we’ve finished all our testing, so stay tuned.

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Apple Mac Mini with Fusion Drive review: A strong, new Mac Mini, with or without Fusion

The new Apple Mac Mini, updated with Intel’s third-generation Core CPUs and a new Fusion hybrid hard-drive option, brings improved value and welcome speediness to the most affordable Mac. The Core i7 chip and 1TB standard hard drive in our review model are both useful upgrades over the previous-generation Mac Mini, and the $250 Fusion Drive, while turning our $799 review unit into a $1,049 purchase, offers a mostly noticeable performance improvement.

Apple Mac Mini with Fusion Drive

The Good

The Bad

The Bottom Line

The Fusion option puts the Mac Mini outside its familiar sub-$1,000 territory, making it either an indulgence, or an appropriate upgrade for those with serious storage needs. Without the drive, the stock $799 model offers a newly invigorated Mac Mini that finally gives Apple a serious competitor to Windows PCs in the same sub-$1,000 price range.

Three versions, plus customized options
The current edition of the Mac Mini is available in three versions:
$599 Mac Mini : 2.5GHz Core i5 CPU; 4GB RAM; 500GB, 5,400 rpm hard drive.
$799 Mac Mini : 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU; 4GB RAM; 1TB 5,400 rpm hard drive.
$999 Mac Mini with OS X Server : 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU; 4GB RAM; two 1TB 5,400 rpm hard drives, OS X Server and OS X Mountain Lion installed.

As mentioned above, we reviewed the $799 with the optional, $250 Fusion Drive upgrade. Unless you need the server version, CNET recommends the $799 model, with or without the Fusion Drive.

The 2012 Mac Mini: What’s new

No visual element of the new Mac Mini has changed from the 2011 model , which itself was almost identical to the 2010 version . The only real difference on the outside of the new Mac Mini is that it now has four USB 3.0 ports, where the previous version used USB 2.0.

Perhaps more interesting than the USB upgrade, Apple has preserved the FireWire 800 port and separate audio-out and audio-in jacks on the new Mac Mini. Having purged FireWire 800 from the new iMac, and reduced the audio-outs to a single combined port, the Mac Mini may attract those who need an OS X system with those specific jacks.

And while the Mac Mini’s new CPU options provide some welcome performance gains, the Fusion Drive is the bigger story here. Apple has rolled out its Fusion option across its new Mac Minis and iMacs, and this review gives us our first chance to test Apple’s take on hybrid storage.

Fusion is really composed of two hard drives in the Mac Mini, a traditional 1TB 5,400rpm mechanical hard drive, and a 128GB flash-memory-based solid-state drive (SSD), but there’s more going on here under the hood than just a simple RAID configuration. The idea with Fusion is that it allows the Mac to dynamically move data that you access most frequently over to the solid-state drive to improve access time. The old-school hard drive is there mostly to provide cheap mass data storage.

The basics of this idea aren’t unique to Apple. Intel has similar functionality for Windows PCs with its Smart Response Technology (SRT) that debuted in 2011 with its Sandy Bridge CPUs. And although Apple does use an Intel chipset in the Mac Mini, it says Fusion is different from SRT in part because it can use large 128GB SSDs. SRT-based solid-state storage tends to be small 32GB or 64GB volumes, which aren’t well suited for hosting both the entire operating system and also dynamically allocated data.

Apple has also designed Fusion to appear seamless. You only see a single 1.2TB drive volume when you look at the Mac Mini’s hard drive, and any data transfer between the two drives happens with no user intervention. When you first start installing applications and loading data onto the Mac Mini, everything you store on the system goes to the solid-state drive automatically. It’s only after you fill up that 128GB of solid-state storage that your data goes to the slower mechanical drive.

Once the mechanical drive does start receiving data, Apple’s Fusion software kicks in to determine which blocks you might be accessing more often (efficiently, Fusion can move individual blocks of data, as opposed to entire files). It makes that call after you’ve accessed a data block twice. After that second ping, as long as you’re within the same user session and you’ve allowed the system to idle for 20 seconds or so, Apple’s Fusion software will automatically move the data over to the solid-state drive, replacing a less active block. From that point on, accessing that particular block of data should be faster.

The extent to which you notice the benefits of Fusion depends on how much data you have on the Mac Mini, as well as the application you’re using. Remember, until you write more than 128GB of data to the Mac Mini, everything you install or write to the disk goes straight to the SSD. Until you overwhelm the SSD, everything feels fast. Once you surpass that 128GB, the benefits of Fusion vary depending on what you’re doing.

One thing Fusion does exceptionally well is accelerate data writing. The reason is that even after you’ve loaded more than 128GB to the Mac Mini, Fusion keeps a permanent 4GB chunk of space available on the SSD for writes. That means your day-to-day write activities, like saving different versions of files and moving folders around, will usually end up on the SSD even if you already have a lot of data on the Mac Mini. It’s only when you want to write more than 4GB at a time that you’ll notice a slowdown.

I was able to measure Fusion write speeds pretty clearly, in fact. To overrun the solid-state drive, I loaded the system with about 150GB of data (via two 75GB backup system image files). Then with my stopwatch, I timed how long it took to copy a single 3.54GB file from one folder to another. It took just under 19 seconds.

I then created another folder with two copies of the 3.54GB file, putting the total folder size at 7.08GB. Copying that 7.08GB folder into yet another folder took about 70 seconds. I repeated the test two times after that and found the same results.

Fusion write speed test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate faster performance)

If the larger file write had occurred at the same transfer speed as the smaller file, you would expect that it would take exactly twice as long. Instead, the larger write started out very fast for the first 4GB according to the progress bar, but for the rest of the transfer it slowed down considerably, ultimately taking more than 3.5 times as long to write as the smaller file. The conclusion is that while fast, the 3.54GB file write landed on SSD’s 4GB write space reserve, and the larger folder write spanned across both the fast SSD and the comparably slower mechanical hard drive.

All of this is to say that once the solid-state drive is full, your file writes should be superfast as long as you stay within that 4GB limit. Go beyond that, and your larger writes slow down.

Mostly this is great. The downside is that Apple gives you no ability to manually manage file locations. If you have a large write incoming and you already have 300GB of data on the Mac Mini, short of moving a large amount of data from the system entirely, there’s nothing you can do to preemptively clear out room for the large write on the SSD.

Tracking down Fusion’s effect on file reads was harder. The idea here was to see how much faster a file loads after it’s been moved over to the solid-state drive. I tried a few strategies, but was never able to find a definitive speed improvement. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

My first idea was to launch a demanding application like Photoshop. The problem is that it launched almost instantly on the first attempt, making it pointless to keep launching it in order to find a speed boost.

With the help of Lori Grunin, our digital imaging editor, I then tried timing how long it took Photoshop to load a multilayered 1.8GB PSD file built from 16-bit raw images from the Nikon D800 . This seemed promising at first, since the initial load into Photoshop took about 30 seconds, but subsequent loads were all over the place timewise, going as high as 49 seconds, and then back down to the low 30s.

We concluded (and Apple did not disagree) that Photoshop has too much of its own file and memory management activity going on in the background, effectively superseding Fusion.

I found a different issue with Civilization V. I tried a few things here — timing how long it took to get to the main menu, timing a saved game load — but the times never changed, even after four or five tries (15 seconds to the main menu, 27 seconds to load a «Huge» saved game, every time). 3D game performance depends largely on CPU and graphics horsepower, but I didn’t anticipate that even loading levels and initial game menus would be so entirely CPU-bound.

I asked Apple if any software vendors had committed to optimizing their data handling for Fusion storage. I was told that as long as the vendors don’t code in any aggressive data management techniques of their own, you should see a benefit. On Apple’s Web site, it points to its Aperture photo management software in particular.

The problem with Aperture in this context is that it mainly involves file importing. Again, though, you only trigger the speed benefit of Fusion (when the SSD is already full) once you access a file two times previously. Importing files is generally a task you only do once.

Although I wasn’t able to find an effective Fusion read test, that doesn’t mean Fusion provides no benefits to file reads. Instead it seems situational. It won’t help with every file read, but there’s no reason to think that it would not speed up the load times of appropriately flagged large files when the application doesn’t get in the way.

Apple Mac Mini (fall 2012)	Apple Mac Mini (summer 2011)	Asus Essentio CM6870
Price (at time of review)	$1,049	$799	$999
Motherboard chipset	Intel HM77	Intel P67	Intel H77
CPU	2.3GHz Intel Core i7 3615QM	2.5GHz Intel Core i5 2520M	3.4GHz Intel Core i7 3770
Memory	4GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM	4GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM	8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Graphics	Intel HD Graphics 4000	256MB AMD Radeon HD 6630M	3GB Nvidia GT545M
Hard drives	Fusion drive (128GB SSD + 1TB 5,400rpm platter)	500GB, 5,400 rpm	2TB 7,200 rpm
Optical drive	N/A	N/A	Blu-ray/DVD burner combo
Operating system	Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)	Apple OS X 10.7 (Lion)	Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

I like Fusion well enough, but I also like the core $799 Mac Mini. By moving to a Core i7 chip, and a 1TB hard drive in that model, the Mac Mini is finally feature-competitive with Windows PCs in the same price range. Yes, you might find a Blu-ray drive, a faster Core i7, or a discrete budget graphics card for that price during a particular sale weekend at Dell or HP. If you research those vendors and others, though, you will find their offerings and those of the $799 Mac Mini at relative parity.

Adding Fusion into the mix complicates things. For a similar price, the Asus system listed above brings a discrete graphics chip, a full 2TB of hard-drive storage, and a Blu-ray drive. Would you rather have all of that or faster file access? You can also get a decent, overclocked gaming PC for the same price as the Mac Mini. The $999 Velocity Micro in our performance charts, for example, provides the Mac Mini with a real performance challenge.

Apple iTunes encoding test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

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