Mac Mini (2018) One Month Later Review!

hey what's going on everyone Greg here and when the Mac Mini 2018 was announced that Apple's October event I was just taken aback by it because it's been so long since we seen an update to this computer in fact we haven't seen an update to the Mac Mini since 2014 and that update was very controversial that 2014 update Apple did a couple of things that made the Mac Mini less attractive like getting rid of the option for a quad-core processor and other controversial things like soul during the RAM to the motherboard which meant that you couldn't upgrade it yourself but apples back with a new Mac Mini for 2018 and yes this is the reality we live in and if you know what the 2014 Mac Mini looks like you have a pretty good idea of what the 2018 Mac Mini looks like the 2018 Mac Mini is the same exact design as the 2014 Mac Mini on the outside the only big change to the design of this Mac Mini is that it now comes in a new color and in fact it's the only color it comes in a Space Gray finish and that Space Gray finish and I hate to admit it because it's such a small change it does make the Mac Mini look really nice now where Apple did make some changes to the Mac Mini is in its port selection but don't be afraid the Mac Mini still has a pretty robust selection of ports to choose from so you have your standard 2 USBA ports you also get 4 Thunderbolt 3 USB C type-c ports these are superfast ports I've spoken about them tons on the channel but what I really like about them is that they can drive a 5k display with only a single cable and you can connect a GPUs to them as well so if you ever want to do any future sort of expansion these ports are great they're really fast and really capable IO and they use the USB C type connector so it's reversible really easy to plug in a great connector it also comes with an HDMI port which is really great because the Mac Mini doesn't come with the monitor so if you have an old monitor lying around that uses HDMI you can just connect it to that and it's also great for connecting to a TV a lot of Mac Mini users use it as a whole media server or hook it directly to their TV so having that HDMI port makes it super super easy to connect to any type of display you want this Mac Mini also retains the ethernet cord on the back and also gives you the option to add a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port but also notice that it has a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack but unfortunate the 2018 Mac Mini does not have an SD card slot on the back of the device so the Mac Mini is a BYOD km and that means bring your own display keyboard and mouse so unlike the IMAX you don't get a fancy retina 5k display built into the Mac Mini but that doesn't mean you can use any monitor you have laying around or pick the monitor you want to use for the computer for this review i'm using the LG ultra fine 4k display through the USB C port on the back for the other accessories I figured I'd go cheaper and use non Apple products to kind of get a little more experience on how people are probably going to use the Mac Mini for the keyboard I chose a really inexpensive Anker keyboard that tries to simulate the magic keyboard for around $20 it's an ultra slim low-profile keyboard that's about the same exact size as the magic keyboard and it even has a built-in rechargeable battery and for only twenty dollars it's actually a pretty cool keyboard I'll put the link in the description and I'm also using an old razor Gaming Mouse I had lying around because it has a USB a port on the back so why not now you'll notice in that BYOD KM I didn't mention speakers and little-known fact I noticed a couple of reviewers actually got this wrong the Mac Mini has a built-in speaker inside of it now it is a small speaker and although I didn't think it sounded too bad based on my usage for it I wouldn't say it's a great speaker it's certainly too low for what I would like to use it for but I think most people might be able to actually get by with that little speaker inside of it [Music] but again you can add your own speakers through the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack or use the speakers inside of your monitor now what the Mac Mini doesn't come with is a built-in microphone and I kind of found this particularly odd not that it's the biggest deal to go ahead and buy your own microphone there's plenty of cheap USB microphones you can attach the Mac Mini or you could get a Logitech webcam with a built-in microphone but there are specific features in Mac OS like the Siri functionality which come pre-installed on the Mac Mini dock and I just thought it made a poor user experience when you go and click on Siri and it says there's no microphone available to use so I would have liked to seen a little microphone add it to the Mac Mini ok so now while this is mostly the same device on the outside let's focus more on what's inside of the Mac Mini for this review I'm running the core i5 version of the processor that's a 3 gigahertz processor with six cores I'm also using 256 gigabytes of storage and eight gigabytes of RAM and that is the mid tier model and that'll set you back 1099 dollars now at the beginning of this video I mentioned that when the 2014 Mac Mini was revised they got rid of the ability to replace the RAM but on the 2018 Mac Mini you do have the ability to replace Ram now this process is a little tedious and a little bit complex for most users and I'll leave it to the gurus that I fix it to teach you how to replace your RAM but you can replace the RAM on the Mac Mini yourself if you want to and have the ability to now unlike the RAM the storage is soldered on to the board so I recommend picking up as much storage as you think you need or as much storage as you can afford for me I got the 256 gigabyte option which honestly is a little bit low for me but the fact that it has all those ports on the back though having the ability to just plug in a one terabyte solid-state drive into the back of the Mac Mini is a nice big plus for me and especially because it's a desktop and because it's not a laptop that I'm moving around a lot having a permanent hard drive plugged into the back of the device really isn't a deal-breaker but let's get back more to the processor because that's really where the Mac Mini starts to take off and the processor on this Mac Mini makes it one of the fastest Mac's out when you're talking about CPU performance I mean just look at the Geekbench scores here you're getting over 5,000 on the single course score and over 20,000 on the multi-core score now even my 2017 iMac which I got last year does not get into 20 thousand on the multi-core score it's closer to 14,000 and the Mac minis beating that on single and multi core performance now all these Geekbench numbers sound nice on paper but how well does it perform in real-world situations now all your basic tasks run great on the Mac Mini so browsing the web watching a video loading up music editing something in GarageBand using any sort of word documentation and it's great for editing PDFs like from our sponsor a PDF element from wondershare PDF element is an all-in-one smart PDF editor which offers the easiest way to edit PDF documents from text to images links pages watermarks backgrounds headers footers you name it it's a great tool to maximize your document productivity PDF element is really such a great way to edit and manage your PDFs I love the watermark feature having the ability to just quickly store your signatures or edit any part of the PDF the interface is also super nice and looks great on whatever display you're using it on just like the Mac Mini and it really is just a great piece of software to edit PDFs and make sure you check out all of the links in the description because PDF element is now up to 75% off just in time for the holidays and thanks again to our friends at PDF element for sponsoring this video as an entry-level computer of course it's going to be great for just about anyone probably even on that lower end CPU the Mac Mini should be able to perform just fine but how well does it perform on other tasks like video editing photo editing and even gaming so for my needs editing in Final Cut Pro 10 the Mac Mini performs pretty well anything that handled a lot of CPU intensive tasks just did really really well on that Core i5 processor and Final Cut Pro 10 is pretty optimized for CPU as opposed to GPU performance but we'll get more to that later but again for my videos the Mac Mini was more than capable enough of handling them and in some instances again it was faster than the current 5k iMac that I'm using to edit my videos on loading up my photo editing app of choice affinity photo everything seemed relatively fine I was able to edit photos with relative ease any CPU intensive tasks that affinity photo had to do just seemed really really smooth and anything to do with loading on the internal storage on the Mac Mini was just super fast because it's controlled by that custom t2 chip and based on the stat tracking apps that I was using I still had a lot of CPU headroom to use while editing the computer got around eighty degrees Celsius so nothing extraordinarily hot coming out of the Mac Mini - and the fans were relatively quiet throughout all of my use of it now while CPU performance was great there was a problem that I had with the Mac Mini and that was the underpowered graphics card that Apple put in this machine and that's an Intel u HD graphics 630 and for a desktop operating system not having a dedicated graphics card is a pretty big negative in my book you're probably asking Greg what real-world usage did you use that made this graphics card seem really bad and that's whenever I had to do something graphically intensive in any my application so for example in Final Cut Pro 10 I mentioned that everything was running pretty smoothly now that was with the low quality image preview in Final Cut Pro 10 Final Cut Pro 10 gives you the option to have a lower preview image when you're editing your video that can speed up performance quite a bit if you have a lower-end graphics card when I turn that option on to give me a high quality preview while also putting in video effects into the video when I played back the video the timeline bar would lag constantly but for someone like me it almost makes videos impossible to edit if I'm using the high quality preview mode and I'm loading a bunch of special effects into the video now for you Mac gaming fans out there you're probably asking yourself how well does the integrated graphics card handle gaming and it really depends on the game so if you watched previous videos of mine you know I talked a lot about game optimization for the Mac and of course you have all different titles and some titles will utilize CPU usage more some titles will utilize heavy graphics card so again a game like Starcraft 2 which is pretty well optimized for the Mac ran OK on the integrated graphics card now we're not talking about playing the game on high settings you will have to set this game to low to medium settings but you can play it at low to medium at 10 and on low settings at 1080p you'll get above 60 frames per second as well but take a less optimized game and maybe a more graphic intensive game like shadow of Mordor and the framerate was so abysmal that it's basically unplayable on the Mac Mini so if you're looking to play a lot of games on your Mac Mini I would probably stay away from it I also ran into a few bugs which I think might have been related to the graphics card like I mentioned in this video I was driving a 4k display with it and on the login screen I would get the mouse cursor kind of duplicating and just reappearing everywhere so I think this had to be an issue with the video card but once I logged into the Mac I never saw this problem again but if you really really want a better GPU on the Mac Mini not all hope is lost you do have those Thunderbolt 3 ports so if you want to get an external GPU if you want to increase the graphics performance on the Mac Mini you do have that option now when I went into this review I was almost certain based on the raw performance of the CPU that this Mac Mini was going to be a hit for every desktop Mac fan and when I started this review I thought I would ultimately be instantly ruling out the iMac behind me but as I used the Mac Mini I found out that having a dedicated graphics card having the built-in 5k display are still nice features that even having the fast fast CPU in the Mac Mini isn't going to completely make up for and even things like upgrading the RAM in the 27-inch iMac is a lot easier than upgrading the RAM in the Mac Mini with that being said if you don't need the best graphics performance I do think the Mac Mini is a really solid Mac and some people won't benefit from having a dedicated graphics card and if you don't need a dedicated graphics card the processor performance in the Mac Mini is a lot better than the 2017 iMac with its high CPU performance small size in great port selection the Mac Mini is really an amazing computer especially if you need a smaller size Mac or if you're using it for any of the other tasks that people love to use Mac minis for like running live streams music production or even using it for a home media server if you don't need a dedicated graphics card the Mac Mini is versatile and mighty alright everyone thank you so much for watching if you liked the video make sure you give it a like if you want to see more from my channel make sure you subscribe also let me know what you think Mac Mini in the comments below also don't forget to check out the links in the description to our sponsor PDF element and for all the items we talked about in this video thanks again for watching and I will see you all in the next video take care everyone

Channel: GregsGadgets

Views: 77,400

Rating: 4.5486979 out of 5

Keywords: Mac Mini 2018, Mac Mini 2018 Review, 2018 Mac mini, 2018 Mac Mini Review, Mac mini, Apple Mac mini, Mac mini vs imac, mac mini space gray, mac mini egpu, mac mini 4k, mac mini 2018 gaming, mac mini pro, mac mini update, mac mini 2018 ram, mac mini 2018 specs, mac mini 2018 graphics

Id: NXodejSj8Vg

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2018