Is a $75 Mac mini still good in 2022?

in todays video we are going to try to restore or upgrade this mystery mac

mini

i bought for 75 on ebay now i really dont know much about this mac

mini

did you hear that then something is loose inside the mac mini which is a

good

sign and I can also see that the back of the ports that are connected to the logic board aren't seated quite right, so yeah this mac mini definitely has a history, I don't know what its specs are. i bought it all without seeing it let's see if we can make this work be sure to subscribe this should be fun with so much uncertainty in the market these days there is an overlooked asset that has much more stability than other major asset classes fine art the Today's video is sponsored by Masterworks, the only platform taking on billionaire art collectors by offering investments in contemporary art that has outperformed the SP 500 in total return by 174 percent between 1995 and 2020.

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still

huge rme but that's at least you know it fits now so the reason I finally decided to pull out the 30 inch Apple Cinema display for this Video is number one because I really like the way they look side by side from the other and also because this Mac mini has a Thunderbolt port and there was an adapter that allows you to use this thing, so it's a bit complicated to use. a 30 inch apple cinema screen nowadays this thing is like 16 years old but it's actually pretty decent you know it's 2560 by 1600 when this thing came out it was the highest resolution screen in the world as well as the biggest but to really pull That Apple had to do some weird, proprietary stuff, so here's what it looks like: We've got a dual-link DVI connection here, we've got a USB pass-through, we've got a FireWire pass-through, and then we've got their proprietary power that's connected to a special graphics card. which i could get with power mac and mac pro ok let's go ahead and plug in the adapter i got for this which will basically allow me to plug in the dvi here and then the usb. here and then on the other end we have a thunderbolt connection on the mac mini and then the usb that will now go through the mac mini to the display but we

still

need to power the display so i had to go on ebay and buy this power brick that we can plug in here and then we'll connect it to this normal power supply connection so yeah that's what you have to do to use one of these things it's a little tricky okay we have one light on the front a boop another boob oh wait a minute wait a minute this listing said it was working that's why i took the get no ram they ripped me off it said working no ram installed so alright, let me go. find some ram and then we'll try this again ok i have some ram this t It better work.

My expectations for a machine that was listed as functional and turned up without any ram with a rattling screw on the back that isn't really bolted on. My expectations are not high. it sticks for 75 but it works and so we are ha ha looks like we are running mac os sierra. hey look i have the usb from the monitor connected to the adapter connected to the mac mini and then the mouse is connected to the monitor not the simplest user experience but i have to say this screen looks pretty

good

i mean this It's from 2006, the color accuracy looks great, and the viewing angles are ridiculous.

I'm sitting here at a 140 degree angle and I don't see any color change. That's pretty crazy. How much did this cost in 2006? so first o If I was wrong this thing came out in 2004 it's 18 years old which is mind blowing and it originally cost 3300 back in 2004 so let's do inflation on that hey you know what 4869 is that's money pro display xdr so there Wow this is the pro display xdr from 18 years ago. I really like this monitor. Want to see a whole video dedicated to how this came to be 18 years ago? Let me know in the comments below, but now let's go ahead and check. the specs on this mac mini i'm really curious to see what hard drive we have here so omg ok this has the core i7 this little ebay seller said oh i'm going to pop out the ram that's sticking out it's going to think they ripped you off but guess what they used the wrong model number when they listed this and it has the quad core i7 not the dual core i5 so it's actually a pretty solid machine for 75 bucks let's see what the storage so I have a terabyte hard drive ok that's not bad i think what n what we need to do now is good we need to upgrade this machine so let's go ahead and do some upgrades ok so for this update we are going to go from the one terabyte hard drive that is currently installed to one of my trusted favorites, the 240 gigabyte internal professional drives that you can get at microcenter these things are amazing they are really e cheap they are more than fast enough and perfect for a build like this where its an older machine its not something you want to spend a ton of money on upgrades this is exactly what we are looking for now which is really interesting about these 2012 mac minis is that they actually support dual hard drives so if we go ahead and remove this back plate we can open this antenna hatch here and that should give us access to the drives okay here we go there there's drive number one ok there's a little piece of tape holding it down and there we go that's our hard drive so now with the drive out you can see th there's quite a bit of space underneath which is where your second one could go drive now that it's a board removal procedure you have to take everything out and install this dual drive kit so I'll link it in the description below which I didn't understand for today's video because we'll stay os with the 240 gigabyte ssd but yeah theoretically I could move this hard drive to the bottom tier put the 240 gigabyte one on top and then we could have dual drives in this machine which is really impressive capacity for 75 bucks omg , I found what was rattling, this is the little bracket that you slide under the socket here to keep it from turning, but it was sort of wedged in the back, which I'm not too concerned about. the fact that this logic board sticks out a bit doesn't oh you know where we're going now that it's not anymore so we've addressed that concern and I think we're ready to go ahead and put this mac back together with the new hard drive so here we go Go ahead and put these spacers in and put the mac mini back together and there we have it this is now the mac mini with a solid state drive I put in 16 gigabytes of ram we have a 2.3 gigahertz i7 quad core and we're hooked up to a 30 inch Apple Cinema Display I upgraded the Mac Mini to Catalina which is the latest to run natively maybe in a future video we can go in and upgrade this to Big Sur or even Monterey but by the way now this is pretty amazing for a machine i paid 75 for now you can get the ssd or well this is 240 gigabytes nowadays they are selling 256 a little faster too you can get those for 29 and then add on top of that 16 gigabytes of ram, vinc I'll use a few in the description below sometimes you can find it cheap on ebay sometimes it's like 50 or 60 which ironically is almost as much as the total cost of the machine but overall we're doing great here we're easily talking about less than 200 for this whole setup which is pretty I'm crazy or at least that's for the mac mini part.

I'm not counting the movie screen. I think I paid 300 bucks for this now. As far as using a mac mini like this as the main machine, I think it's really cool. idea even though it's not officially supported yet that's a bit of a pain but we're talking 75 or if you want to buy one that you know has ram and an ssd already you can do some hunting and you can find those for around 200 bucks , this type of build is definitely achievable and I think it offers a lot of value that you are getting with the quad core version I have here a pretty solid amount of performance for a Mac in this price range I ran cinebench and got a score of 3228 points which is pretty respectable and honestly not too far off the core i3 mac mini base model score from 2018 which was one of the reasons it was so popular because it was very similar in terms of multi-threaded performance for 2018 but t was 800 and this was less at the time now it's a 200 or less machine and you still get that amount of performance so that's pretty convincing so I reckon you I would absolutely recommend building a Mac mini like this if you get this Even with eight gigabytes of RAM for under 200 you get a pretty good deal especially if you already have a monitor and monitor wise I definitely want to do some more digging with this display of HD cinema because I think it's really, really interesting so my next goal will be to get it to work in native resolution with the brightness controls and everything on newer Macs like Apple Silicon Max so definitely make sure you're subscribed to watch how it goes and of course as usual. be sure to like comment and subscribe and i'll see you guys in the next one