

- Apple mac mini 2018 vs imac install#
- Apple mac mini 2018 vs imac upgrade#
- Apple mac mini 2018 vs imac full#
You have the same upgrade paths available to you as these machines, too: 16GB of RAM and up to 2TB of solid-state storage. For the money, the Mac mini presents the best price-to-performance ratio since you don’t need to commit to the laptop form factor, Apple display, or Magic peripherals. That isn’t a problem for the Mac mini M1, which has comparable performance to a similarly specified 13-inch MacBook Pro and a 24-inch iMac. In designing its smaller laptops, Apple opted to leave the fan out for truly silent operation, but this means that the M1 might have its clock speed limited in some operations that generate a lot of heat. The M1 Mac mini has a fan in the chassis, which allows the processor to run under load without succumbing to thermal throttling as per the M1 MacBook Air. You’ll miss out on Apple’s excellent speakers, and you probably won’t find a 24-inch 4.5K monitor that comes anywhere near what the iMac delivers, but you’ll still get a lightning-fast macOS experience and at a cheaper price point to boot. If you don’t like the styling and would rather have a monitor with thin black bezels, the Mac mini is perfect. Apple also chose to keep the “chin” on new all-in-one models, which isn’t to everyone’s taste. While the white bezels are designed to “melt away” against a light-colored wall, they don’t mesh well with the way that TrueTone adjusts white balance on the desktop. The new iMac styling has divided opinion, too. Not only can the Mac mini provide better performance than a comparable M1 MacBook Air (which already wipes the floor with older Intel models), it’s $300 cheaper.

The Mac mini is also perfect for anyone who’s tired of Windows or Linux, or anyone who’s looking for an easy way to use Mac apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic, or Xcode. Like most Apple hardware, the mini can be easily sold for minimal loss if you decide later that it isn’t for you.

The M1 Mac mini is an affordable jumping-on point for anyone who’s curious about the new architecture. Mac users with older MacBook Pro or iMac Pro models might be curious about the new M1 chips and how they shape up against existing hardware. Most Windows keyboards and pointing devices will work with your Mac, even if the layout isn’t identical. If you already have peripherals and a display and you want an upgrade, the M1 Mac mini is the perfect choice.
Apple mac mini 2018 vs imac full#
The base iMac only has 7 GPU cores (compared to the full 8 cores on the Mac mini), but it also comes with everything you need to get started: a beautiful display, a keyboard, and a mouse. It’s a desktop computer, so it has little appeal if you value portability.Īt the time of writing, the 24-inch M1 iMac is the only other desktop computer that’s been updated with the new ARM-based Apple Silicon architecture. The Mac mini is perfect for anyone who doesn’t explicitly need a laptop.
Apple mac mini 2018 vs imac install#
This provides a single pool of fast memory that the system can use however it wants (no need for VRAM on a separate graphics chip), but it comes at the cost of your ability to buy and install additional RAM yourself. RAM is “unified,” which means that it’s built into the system-on-chip. Unlike the old Mac mini, the new Apple Silicon models aren’t user-upgradeable.
