Cheap Mac Mini - for a tester?

What version of MacOS does it run? Tbh anything that costs £150 is hard not to like!

If you were / are hereabouts you’re welcome to come and prod at my iMac, which’ll be far closer performance wise to an M1 based Mac

ADWsPhotos said

What version of MacOS does it run? Tbh anything that costs £150 is hard not to like!

The 2014 Mac Minis should be able to run Monterey -- so about three years back OS-wise, which means quite good app support. And that spec should be enough to get good results from it with e.g. Affinity Photo.

You might want to swap out the SSD for one that is a bit larger:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Late+2014+Hard+Drive+Replacement/32815 

Moderately complex but not impossible.

But if you keep your files on an external hard disk it shouldn't be that bad.

Worth noting that the 2014 Mac Mini is USB-3 but not USB-C, as far as I remember. 

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

What resolution is the monitor, by the way?

In this day and age, 256Gb drive doesn’t sound much, but if you’re keeping your photos on external drives, it’ll be plenty.

Thanks chaps. ADWsPhotos (Alan?) Bruv & I will have to pay you a visit some time. (I could bring my Zoom and interview you about your photography and Purpleport.)  :-D

Mike, I think the one I was looking at had the Monterey OS on it. I currently use a Dell U2715H which I think is a 2K monitor (fine for my needs currently.)

Paul, my current Lenovo Laptop (which is all I use currently) has a 512GB SSD. I'm very ill-disciplined in managing it, but I do have a bunch of Western Digital external USB drives for backing up my RAW files & edits. I tend not to bother saving large multi-layered edits-in-progress.

As I mentioned the proposed Mac is only tester to see if I want a better Mac.

Edited by Timmee

Timmee said

Mike, I think the one I was looking at had the Monterey OS on it. I current use a Dell U2715H which I think is a 2K monitory (fine for my needs currently.)

I believe that is effectively the same resolution as a 13" Macbook Pro.

You may or may not need software to force macOS to treat that as a (Retina) high-DPI monitor (wherein you end up with sort of a 1024x720 display but with smooth text, smooth images and fine lines -- this sounds rubbish but isn't!) There are apps for this sort of thing. (Basically it's like Windows scaled mode is doing, but actually works properly without randomly leaving some of your windows tiny.)

But your Dell also has a DisplayPort connector, yes? Use that with the Mac, and you should get Retina display resolutions.

There may be other smaller scaling options than 2x; I'm a bit out of the loop. But a scaled resolution will be better on the Mac.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

Cheers Mike,  my newer 27inch Dell is HDMI only (like my X390 laptop), but my older Dell U2412H screen is a DisplayPort monitor with no HDMI option, so that should work. :-)

Timmee said

Thanks chaps. ADWsPhotos (Alan?) Bruv & I will have to pay you a visit some time. (I could bring my Zoom and interview you about your photography and Purpleport.)  :-D

Mike, I think the one I was looking at had the Monterey OS on it. I currently use a Dell U2715H which I think is a 2K monitor (fine for my needs currently.)

Paul, my current Lenovo Laptop (which is all I use currently) has a 512GB SSD. I'm very ill-disciplined in managing it, but I do have a bunch of Western Digital external USB drives for backing up my RAW files & edits. I tend not to bother saving large multi-layered edits-in-progress.

As I mentioned the proposed Mac is only tester to see if I want a better Mac.

 

Edited by Timmee

Yep, Alan.  Bruv and yourself are welcome to come.  Your Zoom perhaps less so.  There's a reason I'm on this side of the viewfinder.  We can discuss fees etc.... ;-)

Timmee said

Cheers Mike,  my newer 27inch Dell is HDMI only (like my X390 laptop), but my older Dell U2412H screen is a DisplayPort monitor with no HDMI option, so that should work. :-)

You can possibly force the 27" monitor into High DPI mode with something like BetterDisplay:

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay#readme

(Assuming your HDMI cable is supporting that higher resolution)

Not sure what the U2412H will do in terms of high DPI -- let us know!

I run Lightroom, PS, Topaz Sharpen and Topaz Denoise all through my mac mini. Some of the latest functions in lightroom don't work with it at times but largely the ai based functions.

Once the machine gets about 12 years old you cannot use the latest OS updates which can stop you using the latest Photoshop versions. I have 3 macs  and just love their ease of use and stability. So if you are buying an old Mac mini ask what Os it is running which will tell you what PS you can run, Big Sur os can only run PS 24.

Image2Art said

Once the machine gets about 12 years old you cannot use the latest OS updates which can stop you using the latest Photoshop versions. I have 3 macs  and just love their ease of use and stability. So if you are buying an old Mac mini ask what Os it is running which will tell you what PS you can run, Big Sur os can only run PS 24.

I believe the OS is Monterey on the 2014 Mini. I haven't used full Adobe PS since the compulsory rental model came in years ago. I currently use Nikon NX Studio (occasionally Affinity & DNG converter) for RAW conversion, and then PSE 2018 & Nik Tools for most of my editing. Adobe have just made all future PSE releases 3 year license only, so I will never update my PSE (I was just about to when I heard this.) I don't currently have PSE for Mac (as I don't have a Mac) so, I guess that if I do go Mac, I will have to drop PSE completely and use Affinity Photo with Nik Tools. The 2014 Mac will just be the tester to establish whether I'll want an M2 Mini on my next computer upgrade.

Edited by Timmee

If you can stretch to an M1 chipset you will have much more performance at your disposal.

The Apple silicon is much more performant with less RAM than its Intel predecessor.

I’ve run various Mac form factors on all chipsets since Core2Duo.

I recently bought an M2 Mini with 16gb of ram but found Lightroom quite slow at batch processing. Upgraded to an M1 Mac Studio and it flies in comparison.

Happy to answer any questions you may have on the hardware etc

Edited by mskeetphoto

Edited by mskeetphoto

Image2Art said

Once the machine gets about 12 years old you cannot use the latest OS updates which can stop you using the latest Photoshop versions. I have 3 macs  and just love their ease of use and stability. So if you are buying an old Mac mini ask what Os it is running which will tell you what PS you can run, Big Sur os can only run PS 24.

Timmee The iMac mini M1 chip set will update to the latest os which is Sequoia 15.0.1

Timmee said

Image2Art said

Once the machine gets about 12 years old you cannot use the latest OS updates which can stop you using the latest Photoshop versions. I have 3 macs  and just love their ease of use and stability. So if you are buying an old Mac mini ask what Os it is running which will tell you what PS you can run, Big Sur os can only run PS 24.

I believe the OS is Monterey on the 2014 Mini. I haven't used full Adobe PS since the compulsory rental model came in years ago. I currently use Nikon NX Studio (occasionally Affinity & DNG converter) for RAW conversion, and then PSE 2018 & Nik Tools for most of my editing. Adobe have just made all future PSE releases 3 year license only, so I will never update my PSE (I was just about to when I heard this.) I don't currently have PSE for Mac (as I don't have a Mac) so, I guess that if I do go Mac, I will have to drop PSE completely and use Affinity Photo with Nik Tools. The 2014 Mac will just be the tester to establish whether I'll want an M2 Mini on my next computer upgrade.

Edited by Timmee

Macs from 2010 onwards can run the latest operating system Sequoia with Opencore Legacy Patcher. I am writing this on a flashed 2009 Mac Pro, with 6 core Xeon 3.46GHz CPU, 56GB RAM USBC and a 8GB RX580 GPU. I have 4 of these for sale if you are interested. It has 4K output and a 1TB nvme M.2. I had a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM but my Mac Pro is superior in every way except I can't use it on the train.