MAC MINI REVIEW 1.4GHZ TV

The mini started life as a writing machine but handles its current role well as a Plex server that serves live TV via an HDHomeRun. Of my aged Macs, I was most impressed with the 2014 mini, which has a 256GB SSD, a 2.6 GHz Dual Core i5 processor, and 16GB of RAM.

My three older Macs definitely struggle a little these days, but that was true before the Big Sur update.

MAC MINI REVIEW 1.4GHZ UPDATE

The mini acts as a headless Plex server, the 2016 MacBook Pro is my backup Mac that I also use for traveling, and the 2015 MacBook Pro hardly gets used at all anymore.Īn OS update can’t perform miracles, breathing new life into old machines, but all three of my older Macs are running better than I expected and at least as well as they ran under Catalina. It’s worth noting that I don’t use these other Macs very much. My expectations were lower for the 2014 Mac mini and 20 MacBook Pros, which were already showing their ages running Catalina. However, the vast majority of the work I’ve done on Big Sur has been on my 2018 Mac mini and the 2016 MacBook Pro.įor more on the setup I used to juggle Catalina and the Big Sur betas side-by-side as I tested Big Sur and wrote, edited, and took screenshots for this review, check out this week’s issue of MacStories Weekly, the email newsletter we publish each week for Club MacStories members. I also installed Big Sur on a 2014 Mac mini, the oldest compatible Mac I own, to get a sense of how the update runs on even older hardware. By the time summer turned to fall, I had switched most of my Big Sur work to that MacBook Pro, primarily because it gave me the freedom to work away from my desk. As the summer wore on, I also installed Big Sur on the internal SSD of my 13” 2016 MacBook Pro to get a sense of how the update performs on an older laptop and try the new battery management functionality in System Preferences. I switched back and forth between Catalina and Big Sur on my 2018 Mac mini with a 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 and 32GB of RAM using an external Samsung T7 1TB SSD. I’m very cautious about recording and editing on a new OS until I’m sure the apps I rely on are stable.

As in past years, the primary reason for the setup was podcast recording and editing.

As a result, I spent most of my summer after WWDC straddling Catalina and Big Sur.įor a lot of the summer, I spent about half of my week using Big Sur and the other half with Catalina. Also, third-party apps distributed outside the Mac App Store aren’t prevented from using private Apple APIs that are more likely to break with beta releases. Macs interface with a wider variety of peripherals than iPhones and iPads, which sometimes conflict with macOS betas. Although I have had good luck historically with macOS betas, there’s inherently more that can go wrong than with iOS or iPadOS. Every year, testing a new version of macOS is a balancing act.

Mac mini review 1.4ghz