I Got a Mac mini (Mid 2011) but WWDC 2018 Made Me Cry

I know I’ve been writing a lot of “belated purchase” articles lately, but bear with me. This time, I picked up a Mac mini (Mid 2011).

Primary uses:

– My main machine runs ridiculously hot, so this serves as a secondary machine

– Long text input (live conversion)

– Where I bought it

Janpara

– Price

29,300 yen (Apple Mac mini MC816J/A (Mid 2011))

– Specs

Core i5 2520M (2.5GHz)/4GB/500GB (HDD)/AMD Radeon HD 6630M

I happened to notice after buying it that it came with an AMD Radeon HD 6630M.

The Core i5 2520M has a PassMark score of 3538 and a GeekBench score of 5494.

For comparison with other devices I own:

MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2011) with i5-2467M: PassMark 2337, GeekBench 3764

Main machine (E5-2690): PassMark 13998, GeekBench 21231

Not exactly a fair comparison, but it’s safe to say the Mac mini sits on the lower end of the spectrum.

– Cosmetic condition

B (Scratches on the bottom. However, parts are easily replaceable.)

Included accessories

Everything included

The first thing I noticed when I started using it was how surprisingly snappy it felt. Considering it doesn’t even have an SSD and only has 4GB of RAM, the perceived speed is more than adequate.

Thanks to the GPU (AMD Radeon HD 6630M), animations run noticeably smoother than on the MacBook Air (11-inch, Mid 2011).

Even with High Sierra installed, it’s perfectly usable with just a few compromises.

That said, when it comes to heavy processing, the specs do become a bottleneck.

Then, just a few days after my purchase, WWDC 2018 kicked off with Apple’s keynote, and it was announced that the new macOS Mojave 10.14 would not support 2011 devices… (Mac Pro can be updated under certain conditions.)

To be fair, official Apple repair support for 2011-era devices had already ended, so this was inevitable…

My MacBook Air is also from 2011, so every Apple device I own is now unsupported by the latest OS. Wonderful.

Still, there’s a chance that patches enabling older Macs to run newer macOS versions might appear, and High Sierra should remain usable for at least another two years. So I’m planning to upgrade this Mac mini with an SSD and more RAM.