The base price has increased to $800, and that’s not great. (Although, even as someone tired of space-gray everything, I have to admit that the Mini looks fantastic in its new color.) The Mac Mini needs to be a utility product, not a design statement. The point of the Mac Mini is to be as versatile as possible, addressing lots of diverse and edge-case needs that the other Macs can’t with their vastly different form factors and more opinionated designs. I know zero Mac Mini owners who really need it to get smaller, and many who don’t want it to get fewer ports or worse performance. It’s the same size as the old one, which is the right tradeoff. If the previous one served a role for you, the new one can probably do it just as well, and probably better and faster, with minimal donglage.

Number one - and this is a big one these days, especially for this product - is that it’s not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports. It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age. The 2018 Mac Mini is real, and it’s spectacular. It seemed clear then, and for the following four years that it went without an update, that Apple held the Mac Mini and its customers in very low regard. I don’t think this was an unreasonable fear after the 2014 Mac Mini update, which made many key aspects much worse without making anything much better. Until last week, I thought it would be the last Mac Mini that Apple ever made.Īnd when rumors started swirling about an imminent Mac Mini update, I assumed the worst: if it came at all, it would be a tiny box with a slow, ultra-low-power processor and almost zero ports, optimizing for small size instead of versatility. 1 Almost every port on the back is in use, and it runs 24/7, reliably, in total silence. I hardly ever think about my Mac Mini, but it serves a vital role for my family as our home-theater mixer, Plex server, ScanSnap server, Apple Photos backup, and Backblaze host for our NAS.

Photos of back of 2017 mac mini