For friends and family of the most affordable Mac, this new version offers a terrible shock. It’s one of those Doctor Who moments when a friend turns around and… they’re a Cyberman.
Previously in the four-year history of the unibody Mac mini, its base was a black plastic disc with indents for your thumbs. Twisting this off revealed the inner workings. The RAM was right there, with a diagram to help you swap modules, so you could upgrade the memory at any time, rather than pay Apple’s extortionate prices for extra RAM when buying your Mac. If you were more ambitious, after removing a few more components the main logic board slid right out, revealing the power supply and drives.
This, then, was the tinkerer’s Mac. Not merely a low-end consumer machine, it was favoured by the IT crowd, offering decent performance in a headless unit. The Apple Store always listed a server configuration to suit them, with more hard disk space and OS X Server pre-installed. Enthusiasts loved the mini too, because they knew they could modify it later when their needs changed.
Well, it looks like that’s all in the past, because when you finally prise off the indent-free cap from the new model, all you see is a metal plate.
To add insult to injury, this is held on not by just any screws but TR6 Torx security screws – a type so obscure that not even iFixit sells the right tool (they’re working on it). Yes, the only way to attack this Cyberman is to call on someone with a special screwdriver. Joking apart, Apple really, really doesn’t want you inside this machine.
Underneath that plate, it’s even clearer that our old ally has been converted. The two SATA ports, which enabled the twin drive configuration that was standard in Server models and an upgrade project for others, have been reduced to one, with a PCIe socket for the SSD option. Worst of all, sliding out the main board (yes, that’s still a thing) reveals the RAM chips – soldered directly to it. Removing them is impossible even if you go to the trouble of getting this far, and there are no slots for more.
When we asked a helpful Apple technical staffer in Berlin about this backward leap for upgradability, she assured us that most users never upgrade anyway. It’s well known that that’s true of desktop computer consumers in general, but our own long experience of Mac mini users differs. Arguably, anyone who’s serious about modding their Mac can still do so: once you get past those silly screws, the mini comes apart much as it did before, earning an iFixit repairability score of six – respectable by Apple standards. You can’t fit two SATA drives any more, but you can swap hard disks and SSDs, and replace most parts as they fail, keeping your companion alive through time inside its aluminium exoskeleton.
The buyer most likely to suffer, ironically, is precisely the one who isn’t interested in upgrading and just wants an affordable Mac. That’s because, inside its sealed case, the new base specification of the mini is too low for comfort. It’s long been the case that Apple makes mid-range and high-end computers that are good value for their specification and quality. If you want a cheap PC, you can go elsewhere, but if you spend the money to get a Mac, you know it won’t disappoint.
This one may disappoint. We can’t deny that it’s great to see a Mac for £399, but nor can we deny that it’s underpowered. The 1.4GHz dualcore Core i5 CPU and 4GB RAM may match the base MacBook Air, but the Air’s SSD makes everything quick. When your data’s being swapped out to ultra-fast solid state storage, having a bare minimum of RAM (and that’s what 4GB is) isn’t such an issue; only users trying to edit huge files in advanced apps will feel the pinch.
The problem is that the entry-level mini doesn’t have SSD storage. It has a clunky old mechanical hard disk. And the combination of this, a slow CPU and not a lot of RAM is bad news for performance. As luck would have it, it was this configuration that Apple supplied first for testing (we’ll update you when we have results from higher spec models – nag us on Twitter @macusermagazine), so we can asses just how bad the news is.
The mini’s specification echoes the cut-down 21.5in iMac released earlier this year. The Core i5 CPU runs at only 1.4GHz, down from 2012’s 2.5GHz, but it gains from the efficiencies of Intel’s newer Haswell chips.
Scores in Cinebench’s CPU-based rendering tests were far better than a 75% reduction in clock speed might suggest. In the single-core benchmark, the old mini was rated at 1.2; the cheaper new model scored 1.1, worse but not dramatically so. That’s largely due to Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which ups the clock speed when only one core is active. This hiked the 2012 model from 2.5 to 3.1GHz, but the new one gets a bigger boost, from 1.4 to 2.7GHz. In multi-core rendering, the gap is wider, but Haswell stops it growing too large. The old mini, with the earlier Ivy Bridge CPU, scored 2.9; the new one lags a little behind on 2.5.
To hold down the price, Apple has kept Intel’s HD Graphics in this model rather than moving it to the newer Iris chips. The HD 5000 managed Cinebench’s Open GL test at 24.5fps, up from 18.6fps on the old HD 4000. But it isn’t ready for today’s 3D games.
Batman: Arkham City defaulted to a fair 1600 × 900 pixels, but averaged 24 frames per second and maxed out at 33, not really playably smooth. By dropping the resolution to 1280 × 720 we got the average frame rate up to 33fps, but it still fell occasionally to as little as 19.
Tinkering with other graphics settings might just about get you a reliable frame rate at the expense of appearance, but if you’re at all interested in majorleague games you should look no lower than the £569 Irisequipped configuration. Tomb Raider warns that the HD 5000 isn't officially supported, although it runs; we had to put every setting on minimum, and drop to 1280 × 720, to get the average frame rate up to 34.2fps, still dropping at times to 22.6.
The GPU is not even the worst drag on the mini’s performance. That honour goes to the 2.5in hard drive, a component designed for decadeold laptops. A modern operating system is constantly accessing permanent storage, not just when you overtly load or save a file, and all the more so when RAM is tight. The base mini’s 5400rpm hard disk is not remotely in the same league as the MacBook Air’s flash memory, and the result is a usable but distinctly sluggish desktop experience. Even OS X’s own animations, such as when opening Mission Control, sometimes stutter.
Let’s not write off the mini: it’s still a very affordable Mac to which you can add one or more generic screens for a costeffective system. We’ll bring you the verdict on the highend configurations as soon as we can. The £399 headline price, though, masks some unApplelike compromises. As an introduction to the Mac for basic tasks only, it’s fine. Anything beyond that, and you’ll need to spend more – up front, since upgrading is thwarted.