Mac Mini For Photoshop?

Mac mini fans waited a for an update and, upon witnessing Apple’s of the 2014 Mac mini during October’s iPad event, issued a collective sigh of relief. Finally. Sure, the new model sported the same form factor as its predecessor, and there was seemingly nothing radical to justify Apple’s delay in updating the product, but at least the Mac mini could finally get the “new” features that have been available on other Macs for over a year, such as PCIe-based flash storage, Haswell processors, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Apple also cut the entry level price by $100 to boot, bringing the system back to its, psychologically significant $499 price point.

But it didn’t take long for even this arguably consolation prize-style update to begin to unravel. It was soon revealed that Apple was using in the new Mac minis, an unfortunate development that meant that customers would no longer be able to upgrade their memory after purchase. Want the maximum 16GB of RAM for your new Mac?

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That’ll be at checkout, with no option to find a cheaper third party alternative, or upgrade down the road if memory prices decrease. The 2012 Mac mini offered easy RAM upgrades. Lee Hutchinson / Ars Technica Compounding the memory upgrade situation is the company’s choice of CPUs. Yes, they’re Haswell, but they’re not as fast as their 2-plus-year-old Ivy Bridge predecessors.

Nov 07, 2017  Showing what the Mac Mini is good at and struggles with in Adobe Photoshop. Lightning on a Blue Sky by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr.

The old 2012 Mac mini lineup included options for both dual- and quad-core CPUs, but the new 2014 models are dual-core only, and the efficiency improvements in Haswell can’t compensate for the loss of those two cores. Moving in Reverse So, what does this mean? At best, it means only very modest improvements for some models, certainly less than most would expect from a system as old as the 2012 Mac mini. At worst, it means a dramatic decrease in performance, with some 2012 configurations absolutely destroying their 2014 counterparts in multi-core workflows. Apple elected to use an underpowered class of Haswell chips in the new 2014 models, and there seems to be absolutely no reason for it According to, makers of the popular cross-platform Geekbench tool, single-core performance for the 2014 Mac mini is up to about 11 percent better than the 2012 model in some configurations, but a staggering 40 percent worse in comparisons of the top-end models for each year. No wonder Apple hides the Mac mini on the second page of its online store listing.

Here’s a quick overview of the performance difference between the 2012 and 2014 models, based upon the best verifiable 64-bit Geekbench score. We’ll start with single-core improvements using the following specifications: • Entry Level: 2.5GHz i5-3210M (2012) vs.

1.4GHz i5-4260U (2014) • Mid Range: 2.3GHz i7-3615QM (2012) vs. 2.6GHz i5-4278U (2014) • High End: 2.6GHz i7-3720QM (2012) vs. 3.0GHz i7-4578U (2014) Model 2012 2014 Difference Entry Level 2757 2796 1.4% Mid Range 2986 3127 4.7% High End 3208 3569 11.2% Single-core performance is indeed better, but not by much, with only the high end configuration enjoying a modest 11 percent improvement. Here’s multi-core performance, where things get ugly: Model 2012 2014 Difference Entry Level 5666 5354 -5.5% Mid Range -43.2% High End -40.9% Ouch. If you were waiting on a new Mac mini to replace a mid-range editing or production workstation, or if you just wanted a new mini that would make encoding home movies in iMovie faster, you’re completely out of luck. Apple elected to use an underpowered class of Haswell chips in the new 2014 models, and there seems to be absolutely no reason for it.

Apple executives, including the late Steve Jobs, used to frequently tell their audiences that the new Mac-whatever was “the fastest Mac-whatever yet,” and every time I heard that I would think to myself, “No kidding. I mean, if you come out with a new iMac or Mac Pro and it’s slower than the one that came before, you’ve made some kind of serious mistake!” Of course, there are occasions when a reduction in performance from one model to the next is not necessarily a bad thing, and the trade-off between performance and battery life is a perfect example. In fact, Apple has made great strides in terms of battery life on the company’s MacBook line, with new models occasionally slower than their predecessors over the years. But the Mac mini is a desktop, and power consumption is nowhere near the same level of importance compared to a portable device. Even with a reduction in idle power usage (which I’ll touch on in a moment), the 2012 Mac mini was already one of the most efficient desktop computers on the market. Is such a drastic loss of performance worth saving just a few watts at idle? Who Would Buy This Thing?