Mac Mini

[quinterro]

Bought a Mac Mini off eBay, it arrived a few days early. It was advertised as having no operating system, but found out it still had MacOS installed - but all user accounts are password protected.

Comparing against my Ryzen mini PC for comparison.


I bought 16GB of memory for it and a 480GB SDD. If I’m going to have to take it apart to replace the hard drive, I want to put a drive in that won’t need replacing anytime soon.

 

[quinterro]

Bought a Mac Mini off eBay, it arrived a few days early. It was advertised as having no operating system, but found out it still had MacOS installed - but all user accounts are password protected.

Comparing against my Ryzen mini PC for comparison.
View attachment 51251

I bought 16GB of memory for it and a 480GB SDD. If I’m going to have to take it apart to replace the hard drive, I want to put a drive in that won’t need replacing anytime soon.

I finally got the recovery partition to load by connecting an Apple keyboard to it. It has Mountain Lion (10.8) on it.

I’m wiping it and reinstalling 10.8 on it, then I’ll upgrade it to something more recent.


It’s a 1024 X 600 panel, but will scale down 1920 X 1080 to fit. Kind of hard to read it though.

 

[LaPorta]

Very nice, what year Mini is it?

 

[olePigeon]

Looks like a 2009 to me.

 

[CC_333]

No, not 2009, but the newer 2010-present Unibody style, probably from 2012 (the 2012 model came stock with Mountain Lion).

Also note the lack of an optical drive slot (the 2010 model was the only Unibody Mini to have one).

c

 

[quinterro]

Very nice, what year Mini is it?

It’s a 2012 model.

Currently it has 12GB memory from my Dell Latitude until the 16GB I ordered arrives. The 4GB it came with wasn’t enough.

After using SSD-equipped computers for so long, a spinning rust drive is extremely slow.

It’s currently running MacOS Catalina.

 

[quinterro]

One thing that annoys me is the plastic cover on the bottom of the unit. It has no grip on the table surface whatsoever.

I may have to stick some rubber feet on the cover so the Mac will stay put.

 

[LaPorta]

Get one of these from OWC:

NewerTech NuPad Base for 2010 and later Mac mini models and Mac Studio

Attach the rubber foot to the underside of your Mac mini or Mac Studio and you will never worry about your Mac skating across the desk again.

eshop.macsales.com

I have it on my 2014 that I use as a server. Stops it from sliding all over the place.

 

[quinterro]

Get one of these from OWC:

NewerTech NuPad Base for 2010 and later Mac mini models and Mac Studio

Attach the rubber foot to the underside of your Mac mini or Mac Studio and you will never worry about your Mac skating across the desk again.

eshop.macsales.com

I have it on my 2014 that I use as a server. Stops it from sliding all over the place.

I have found that a jar lid gripper seems to work pretty well too.

 

[quinterro]

Today I got the laptop equivalent of the 2012 Mac Mini: a 2012 MacBook Pro.



The eBay seller put MacOS Catalina on it, but I’m doing a reinstall just in case.

Since the hardware is almost identical to the Mac Mini, it should be able to use Ventura once I have installed more memory.

 

[olePigeon]

With an SSD, they make for a fantastic Chromebook with ChromeOS Flex. Or as a Windows laptop. I fear hacking Ventura on there is going to be slow as molasses no matter what you put in it. It's dirt slow with Catalina, that last official OS.

 

[quinterro]

With an SSD, they make for a fantastic Chromebook with ChromeOS Flex. Or as a Windows laptop. I fear hacking Ventura on there is going to be slow as molasses no matter what you put in it. It's dirt slow with Catalina, that last official OS.

I did have a 240GB SSD and 12GB of memory to put in it. So far it runs Catalina very well.

With the original 4GB memory and the 500GB hard drive it was really sluggish.

My Mac Mini has Ventura on it, primarily because I wanted to try MAUI in Visual Studio, which requires a recent version of Xcode on a Mac to build iOS applications. The version of Xcode on Catalina wasn’t recent enough.