“After over 1,000 days [without an update], the future of the Mac mini is murky. The 2014 model is still being sold. But Apple made a positive comment or two about it at the April tech reporter roundtable. It was mentioned that some users of the cheapest Mac were pros, and Apple made the point of emphasizing the fact that they just loved pros,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “That was the last we heard of the Mac mini.”
“But if Apple likes it so much, why not invest a small sum in outfitting it with more recent processors and other components?” Steinberg wonders. “Why let it stagnate?”
“A simple refresh could have been released by now” Steinberg writes. “What is Apple waiting for? If the mini is going away, would Apple have even bothered to make positive comments about it at that roundtable, or was that just a holding pattern until they decided what to do next?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mac mini owners love their diminutive Macs and would surely welcome a nice update. What would you like to see in an updated Mac mini? User replaceable RAM? Thunderbolt 3? Would you tolerate a price increase? If so, how much?
SEE ALSO:
Hoping for an Apple Mac mini revival – July 20, 2017
Should Apple make a Mac mini Pro? – May 12, 2017
Replaceable RAM is a must.
Or just ship 32 or 64 GB with all Mac Minis!
There are darn good reasons for Minis in a pro environment. You don’t necessarily want another Mac Pro or iMac, when all you need is a competent machine with a small or shared screen.
As much as Apple charges for memory, I think the cost would be prohibitive. It would boost the MacMini’s cost too high. I’ll happily settle for replaceable RAM. My quad-core i7 MacMini has 16GB and it seems quite sufficient for what I use for. I would like the next MacMini to be able to display 4K video at 60FPS so I can connect it to my eventual 4K HD TV and get the full benefit from it.
It would also be nice if Apple went back to a quad-core variant but I think that’s asking too much of a company who likes to cut corners on desktop computers. I don’t know why Apple won’t at least offer a CTO MacMini for the big spenders.
I’m not sure why Apple neglects the MacMini. MacMinis usually sell out pretty quickly in the refurbished section of the Apple online store. I notice OWC has plenty of quad-core i7 models for sale but unfortunately they don’t support 4K video at 60FPS. They’re useful for other things like a PLEX server.
In modest counterpoint, let’s agree that 97% of the reason why we customers want Replaceable RAM is … because Apple charges too much for it.
YMMV, but I’d be happy to give Apple my RAM business, but only if their price point is Market-competitive.
Yes, I know – – wishful thinking. But most of the time, the pushback is because Apple’s choice of price point makes it a poor value.
I use Mac Minis in my office, we don’t need whizz bang specs, I use them because I hate Windows (although we run it in Parallels for a couple of Windows only things we can’t do without out) for day to day use. As such, even the current specs are technically fine, but as and when I do come to upgrade (probably a good few years yet) I want to buy something that isn’t already years old so as to give me as long a subsequent usage life afterwards. The Mac Mini is hardly cannibalising sales of other models, hardly costs them fortunes to develop, but has definite usage cases where they can surely make decent money. I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t just steadily update it to keep it relevant.
It would be a step forward if they’d just go backward to my quad core i7 mac mini with user-replaceable RAM.
I would have probably bought a couple of them in the past few years if they hadn’t dropped the 4-core model
The Mini was basically the brains of the iMac without the screen so an update shouldn’t be difficult unless there are heat dissipation issues.
Apple gave hope to desktop Mac users earlier this year when they famously issued the mea culpa for the botched trashcan mac pro. In an attempt to slow the tide of high end computer users from moving to Windows, Apple did the minimal effort required to extend the life of ancient hardware. The iMacs got the latest chips. The iMac Pro, a machine that promises to be either thermally throttled during long operations or sound like a wind tunnel with the cooling fan blasting against the wall behind your screen, received surprising response simply by people bored to death of gray computers.
But nobody seems to recall that thin thermally throttled machines are now a longstanding tradition in Cupertino. The Mac mini proudly upholds this trend, ditching performance for the sake of Ive’s fashion. If Apple was to update its entry level relic, they would have to employ a team of hardware engineers and, gasp, manage more than one major project at a time. Apple is too busy patting itself on the back for its exciting iOS emoji.
The bulk of business computers are now thin clients and Apple is leaving a lot of money on the table by ignoring the market. There is also a huge market for work kiosks that would be well suited to the Mac mini. There would be still more if Apple built touch screen support into Mac OS.
I know Apple has had success with iOS in the enterprise market, but tablets and phones are not the only form factors needed.
Had been scouring the Refurbished Mac site but none came up, so I just picked up a quad core i7 max RAM model on eBay. Quad core option and user replaceable RAM would be ideal.
One tries to believe it has, but its not looking good.
i don’t care about replaceable RAM, i always get max ram anyway, and i want 64 gigs. obviously TB3 (two ports) plus 5 more USB-C ports, and i want a quad core with hyperthreads (so it looks like 8 core). nice to have: a couple USB3.1 ports. i’d buy two. please apple? pretty please? pretty please with $5,000 worth of sugar on top? 😉
I love the MAC Mini….I use 2012 i7 2.6GHz Quad core exclusively for a Roon Music Server….there are plenty of them on E-Bay. I put is 1TB SSD so it’s smokin fast along 16GB of RAM…I use a 1TB HDD for in the same Mini with Time Machine…Works great! It can be modified to run on 12VDC to keep AC out of the signal!
I’m yet another owner of a late 2012 maxed out quad core i7 Mini. It is the most stable and efficient Mac I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned a dozen or so since our 1984 Lisa 2-10; the Lisa actually had a 10 MB internal hard drive and 1.5 MB of RAM, outrageous back then). Apple has gotten themselves caught in their own trap, morphing both the Mini and the Mac Pro into something that does not provide the performance, upgradeability, and/or dollar value that would make them attractive to the target market. It is a perfect chicken vs. egg scenario where sales of these lines have dropped off, not because the market isn’t there, but because Apple both misunderstood the needs of the market, and allowed the products to stagnate for years, also contributing to the waning sales. Just look at the HP Z2 workstation. It’s not a Mac, but compared to the current Mac Mini, it is a well priced, engineered and specced product that is serviceable (NOT a sealed box), plus it has a 3 year limited warranty that includes on-site service. I cannot and will not run Windows, but the Z2 makes me wish that Apple would sell (~$100 per seat) a fully sanctioned and supported version of Mac OS that would run on HP’s line of workstations. Apple needs to seriously consider an old quote used by Lee Iacocca – “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”. Please throw a bone to your most loyal customers!
Apple has effectively killed market interest in BOTH the high end AND low end Macs.
Yes, this is deliberate and incredibly S T U P I D .
🙃🤦📉💸👎
Thanks for the coming Mac market share train wreck Apple. Note how this self-destructive act is happening during a continued surge in Mac market share relative to receding Windows PC market share. WTF. (o_O)
💥🚂
Not true at all. Instead, there was never actually much interest in Macs to begin with. Look at the historical usage data, as opposed to quarterly sales data. Macs have never reached 15% market usage share or for that matter have even gotten close.
What happened was quarterly Mac sales percentages rose during the Windows 8/8.1 era. Because of this, Apple fans THOUGHT that there was this mass stampede of Windows users to Macs. It wasn’t. While some iPad and iPhone owners certainly opted for Macs because iOS made Apple as cool as Microsoft was during the late 90s and 00s, it wasn’t that many. Instead, it was merely enterprises and consumers refusing to upgrade their devices from WIndows Vista and 7 to Windows 8/8.1 because Windows 8/8.1 was so bad. After Windows 10 came out, enterprises at least began upgrading their hardware, plus a lot of great devices from Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. – following Microsoft’s lead with the Surface Book – garnered some consumer interest again.
But bottom line: the Mac was never a mainstream device. It never – even during the darkest days of Windows 8 and the biggest boom of the iPad/iPhone so much that it inspired a (very bad) Jason Segal/Cameron Diaz movie around them – reached 20% of quarterly sales. And it never came anywhere near 15% of the number of people actually using PCs in the wild.
Don’t blame Cook and company for killing interest that never existed to begin with. Instead, direct the responsibility to yourself for believing the hype drummed up by this page and others like it. Microsoft just reported their biggest quarter in years, and this site’s editors still insist that Microsoft is on the ropes and will be out of business in short order.
Not true at all. Instead, there was never actually much interest in Macs to begin with.
I know the numbers, both current and historical. You are entirely OFF TOPIC in your zeal to minimize the importance and market of the Mac.
Very old school troll of you. But do enjoy being the victim of Microsoft crapola. I never did. That’s why I went Mac in 1993, eternally thanking myself.
Please spar with me further! I miss the old days of steam-rolling Apple haters.
I work at an animation studio that primarily uses Mac Mini’s in the illustration department. We are currently ready for an upgrade and we may end up switching to PC’s because of the lack of product updates.
How many Mac Minii’s does Apple sell? And how many do they sell if they were to do the refresh? Answer to both: not very many. The Mac Mini is a failed product. It was introduced during the iPod boom – when tons of Windows users downloaded iTunes – as a cheap way to get Windows users to switch. The idea being that folks could pay about $500 and reuse the monitor, mouse, keyboard etc. from their Windows machine.
Two problems with that.
1. The Mac Mini was REALLY underpowered. The switchers would have been getting a middle of the road CPU, not much RAM, cheap video card etc. So Windows users were supposed to switch to Apple machines that couldn’t do much? Why? Especially since in those days – a fact that still persists to this day – software for Windows was far more widely available.
2. They made the mistaken assumption that Windows users were miserable, hated that platform and would jump at a chance to switch. Like people were supposed to be so in love with their iPods and iTunes that they were going to dump the Windows platform that they had been using at home, work, school etc. for years. Basically seeing the world through Apple-colored glasses, and assuming that everyone loves Apple products and hates everything else just like they do. That has never been the case. People loved iPods then, not Apple products generally. Even today, folks like their iPhones a lot, their iPads somewhat less, but have no interest in anything else Apple sells. Which means that they are plugging their iPhones and iPads into Windows PCs today just as before. Windows PCs still have a 90+% market share. It is not so much that people love Windows. Instead, because it is a very capable operating system that meets the needs of pretty much everyone, there is no compelling reason to switch. Apple failed by presuming that people would if they offered cheap hardware. What they should have done was given Windows users a compelling reason to switch platforms. No, “I am an Apple fan and hate Windows” is not a compelling reason for anyone but the less than 10% of the population who buys Macs already.
I agree with the thin client thing. But the Mac Mini is a terrible thin client. It has a desktop form factor for one, and it is merely the same operating system that Apple loads onto their $t5,000 workstations placed on cheap hardware. And no, iPads aren’t good thin clients either … the form factor again plus the OS is limited. A good thin client needs an OS actually designed for it like Chrome OS, Windows 10S and Linux distros created for Cloudbooks. What do they have in common? Where the original thin clients were designed to access mainframes, modern thin clients need to be designed around accessing cloud/virtual resources and delivering web applications and services. That isn’t iOS and it certainly isn’t macOS.
Apple needs to dump the Mac Mini and go to the drawing board with a goal of designing either a great thin client OS or creating a new PC that gives people a real reason to abandon Windows.
True.
The current mini is a complete embarrassment. 3 years without any improvements, now it is easily outgunned by cheap laptops, and not even in the same class as any modern desktop computer. No desktop Mac should ever be so slow compared to the competition. And even those times when quiet low powered machines are appropriate (kiosks, library terminals, extremely lightweight tasks), why would anyone pay Apple’s insane price for it? It’s a poor value. Apple is essentially just ripping off its loyal Mac users who refuse to use a Windows desktop which has twice the power at half the price.
If you are in the market for a Mac mini, my advice would be to buy a used or refurbed trashcan Mac Pro.
Next year let’s hope Apple delivers not just a proper workstation Mac Pro but also takes serious steps to fill the huge gaps in its Mac lineup. Apple needs an entry mini, a multidrive midsize tower (perhaps a repurposed trashcan), a server, a 17″ laptop with serious power. And don’t forget multiple sized displays and airports. Seriously, Apple, how did you forget about your second most profitable division so badly????
My guess: the new Mac Pro will be a series of one or more “blade” computers strung together with a very high speed interconnect – 40-80 Gbps. Infiniband could do this, as could thunderbolt. This will require significant changes to software, to distribute work around, but it needs to happen given the limitations now being encountered by Moore’s Law.
A ‘Mac mini’ becomes just a single blade, so there likely won’t be two product lines – only one.
I run a consulting business and have lots of clients on a Mac mini for small server needs. These also make great VMware ESXi Virtual Hosts. You can easily run 4-5 VM’s with 16GB’s of memory.
I’d love to see an update include…
• Replaceable RAM – not everyone needs 16GB’s but its always nice to be able to upgrade when needed. The ability to go to 32GBs would be a welcome addition.
• Quad Core – a must
• Thunderbolt 3 – at least 2 ports or more
• HDMI – frees up the Thunderbolt port
• User replaceable drives – a must
It would be a shame to see the mini go away from Apple’s lineup.
I wrote a huge paragraph on why Apple is wrong, but I always came back to Money is only thing that runs a corporation. Desktop users (Entry and Pro) simply don’t justify the cost of R/D.
Apple has a user base any company would kill for, and they aim to keep that wide user base. It’s about money. Supporting the Mac Pro line, or the Mac Mini line, simply represents a negative return on investments. So here we are. Outdated models still being sold, for outrageous prices.
Apple is no longer the company I defended for more than 2 decades. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.