Building the ULTIMATE 2012 quad core Mac mini – But is it worth it?

this is everyone's favorite Mac Mini the mid-2012 quad core and today we're going to be upgrading it to the max [Music] total a/v is an award-winning antivirus suite that protects against malware and traditional viruses as well as phishing scams that are becoming more and more common across multiple platforms check out the link in the description below to get total AV for just $19.99 per year from 2012 until 2018 this was the most powerful Mac Mini you could buy it's the mid-2012 quad-core Mac Mini and like a lot of things that came out in 2012 they were great and then Apple ruined them in 2014 Apple updated the Mac Mini and removed quad cores as an option it was dual-core only and it was a lot less powerful than this guy so the Mac Mini was basically dead until it got revived in 2018 when they painted it gray and put in much much better processors however while the 6 Core i5 and i7 versions of the current generation Mac Mini are very solid and perform very well the base model comes with a quad core i3 and it's pretty much no more powerful than this 8-year old Mac Mini and it costs $800 so today we're gonna upgrade this mid 2012 Mac Mini to see if it's worth it so the specs of this Mac Mini this one has the 2.3 gigahertz quad-core i7 4 gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte mechanical hard drive so the Mac Mini used to take its processors directly from the MacBook Pro the base model 2012 Mac Mini has the same processor as the 13-inch unibody MacBook Pro and this 2.3 gigahertz i7 is the exact same processor that you would find in a 15-inch unibody and a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro from 2012 and that's one of the reasons why this thing was so popular you could get these same processors as a 2,000 plus dollar retina MacBook Pro at a fraction of the cost given that you were willing to provide a screen keyboard and mouse fortunately the upgrade ability of the 15-inch unibody was also brought over in addition to its processors you can upgrade this thing to 16 gigabytes of RAM thanks to a handy-dandy kit from iFixit we can actually put dual hard drives in this so that's exactly what we're gonna do in today's video we're gonna be upgrading this to install sixteen gigabytes of RAM as well as this one terabyte SSD in addition to the one terabyte hard drive that it already has so with those upgrades this should be a pretty solid machine and the goal is to find out is this worth it is it worth it compared to a new Mac Mini is it worth it compared to a 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro we're gonna find out but first let's do some upgrades the first thing we'll do is twist off the bottom plate and remove the RAM that's immediately accessible you don't even need a screw driver for this part then there are three t6 screws that hold the fan in place so we'll remove those and unplug the fan from the logic board next there's one t6 screw that secures a shroud and we can remove that and move on to the antenna plate 48 screws hold this in place so we'll remove those and take off the plate but don't yank it out because we still have to disconnect it from the actual inside of the machine [Music] next there are a few more connectors on the board and we're ready to remove the logic board once we remove one t8 from the casing and one t6 standoff screw from the board we can grab our iFixit Mac mini board removi tool which slots conveniently in the two standoff holes all you have to do is pull back on it firmly and it'll dislodge the logic board enough that we can unplug the power connector and then remove the board from the chassis [Music] next we can pull out the hard drive which is not screwed in anymore and remove one t6 screw for the power supply to remove this from the case we'll have to remove a retaining bracket and twist the power socket counterclockwise and then pull the PSU straight out it's refreshing to see an enclosed power supply in contrast to the many Mac's with exposed traces that can be very dangerous next we just have one more t6 screw and we can remove the hard drive bracket with that out you can see that the default drive sits on top with empty space down below that's where our new drive is going to live the iFixit dual drive kit comes with rubber grommets that will install before bending the second hard drive cable to fit in the case [Music] we'll install mounting screws in the SSD and install that into the bracket there's a lot of disassembly and we'll have to follow all of those steps in reverse order to put the whole machine back together fortunately there are two hard drive connectors on the board so all of the modifications have been done already and all we have to do is reassemble it exactly the same way that we disassembled it [Music] so now I've got the Mac Mini fully reassembled and before we go into it I want to talk briefly about today's video sponsor total AV traditional malware as we commonly think about it isn't the main form of cybercrime anymore phishing scams are becoming more and more common phishing sites secretly record online activity they look for personal data such as passwords credit card information billing info and more that's often used to conduct identity theft they can run for weeks without you even noticing it so to combat this total Ivy is offering their pro suite anti-virus for just $19.99 annually if you use my link below it offers protection from the aforementioned scams as well as traditional malware and viruses total AV also comes with a VPN for private secure internet access so check out the link in the description below to get total AV for just $19.99 annually and now let's talk about this Mac Mini so the first thing that we got to talk about the elephant in the room is the amount of disassembly that's required to actually perform this upgrade replacing the RAM easiest cake and even replacing a single hard drive if you want to just replace the one that comes by default is pretty simple you don't really have to disassemble the entire computer if you just want to swap out the hard drive for an SSD but if you want to put in a dual drive kit it's a it's a complete gut you have to completely gut this entire Mac Mini on the other hand if you wanted to do this exact same upgrade putting in dual drives in a unibody MacBook Pro it's literally just a couple of screws and it's nowhere near as involved as this process was one caveat of this Mac Mini compared to a newer one is that we're limited to two and a half inch SATA drives the 2014 Mac Mini features an upgrade about nvme Drive and so do you new a retina MacBook Pros however the trade-off in that case is the 2014 Mac Mini as well as every single retina macbook that has ever been made you can't upgrade the RAM where as we can hear the one area where this is really held back we're limited to integrated graphics and because of this old Thunderbolt connection even if you could get a GPU on here you're gonna lose so much graphics performance over that Thunderbolt connection that it's of arguable value so to get an idea of how bad these graphics are let's take a look here at unit in heaven so as you might be able to tell this is pretty much not usable at all it's it's barely oh and it just crashed so yeah this is not a graphics machine this thing has Intel HD graphics 4000 the same integrated graphics that you'll find on the 8 year old 13 inch from unibody MacBook Pro from 2012 they're not gonna cut it if you need to do anything demanding whatsoever you're not gonna buy one of these you got to buy a 20-18 using a GPU that's really the only way to do that with a Mac Mini but then again these Mac minis were never popular because of their graphics performance people were buying this as basically a little quad core box the CPU performance is really where it's at instead of spending eighteen hundred dollars for a unibody or twenty-two hundred dollars for a retina with this same processor you could spend I don't remember the exact price you could spend this amount of money for this it's a lot less expensive however while we're doing this test this actually starts to bring up the first problem that I have with this from a value perspective here's the problem the Mac Mini the quad core 2012 Mac Mini when it was released was undoubtedly a great value you were getting a shrunken down 15-inch MacBook Pro you were getting a shrunken down much more expensive Mac in this tiny little package that was a compelling value but the problem is because this thing was sort of the unicorn Mac Mini it was the only viable quad core Mac Mini it's still supported under katalina it's kind of like this golden child of the Mac Mini lineup so as a result of that the prices are outrageous people are still selling these things with 16 gigs of ram and a one terabyte SSD for 650 $700 it's not a good value at that price point and that's the problem as time has gone on these Mac minis have not gone down in price very much or as the other max have I talked about this a little when I was looking at the 2012 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro how it was a little bit hard to get one of those for under $400 and with decent equipment and after you've upgraded them you're starting to look at late 2013 mid 2014 15 inch retina macbook pro territory so the value started to get a little bit questionable this I think takes it to a new extreme because this one which I ordered in the pretty basic configuration the 2.3 gigahertz processor 4 gigabytes of RAM and a one terabyte hard drive and it was three hundred and fifty dollars personally that's a little bit too expensive for me but it's not outrageous it's actually about what you would pay for a mid 2012 15-inch unibody but that in itself is a bit of a problem because with a mid 2012 15-inch unibody for pretty much the same price you're gonna get you know a laptop the screen the keyboard the trackpad dedicated graphics you're gonna get more value from a laptop than from this so let's take a look at the score here twelve hundred and thirty points pretty much exactly the same as a unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro and I think it's important that we talk about the price the one terabyte SSD that's a hundred and thirty bucks sixteen gigabytes of RAM that's another $60 and it was another thirty dollars to get the dual drive kit so all in all this computer was too expensive I don't think that this is a good buy let's take a look at the Geekbench score so eleven thousand five hundred and forty four is significantly lower than you would get in a twenty eighteen Mac Mini so granted the performance isn't that far off it's about thirteen thousand for the 2018 Mac Mini and we're looking at eleven five forty four but I don't know I think this is too expensive to be perfectly honest so the conclusion here is actually pretty similar to what we were talking about with the 15-inch unibody which is once you start upgrading this thing and spending a lot of money on upgrades it's not really worth the effort because you can get something newer and more powerful for about the same money this once you really upgrade it or pay for something that's already been upgraded it's not really a good value but if you can find a good price upgrade it modestly then I could definitely see there being a point to this so weirdly the moral of this story was that maxing this thing out with the maximum amount of RAM and dual drives actually kind of made the value worse if I had just put in eight gigs of RAM and a half terabyte SSD I think this would have been a better value than what I ended up with here today so the moral of the story is upgrade modestly don't spend too much and keep an eye on your budget when you're looking at these older upgradeable Macs so I hope you guys enjoyed this video and found it useful let me know down below what you think of the unicorn quad core 2012 Mac Mini good deal bad deal let me know all of that stuff down in the comments below and as usual don't forget to Like and subscribe please consider following me on Twitter at Luke biani and I will see you all in the next video [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 326,809

Keywords: Mac mini, Mac mini upgrade, quad core Mac mini, 2012 Mac mini, best Mac mini, how to upgrade Mac mini, how to, tutorial, Mac mini dual drive installation, Mac mini ssd upgrade, Mac mini ram upgrade, ifixit, right to repair, upgrade, apple repair, apple upgrading, mac, new Mac mini, 2012 Mac mini in 2020, mac mini review, mac mini setup, mac mini 2018

Id: kRXtaf6MluY

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020