Thunderbolt is the high-speed data bus that still provides a DisplayPort-type video and audio connection. And it includes a quad-core processor, the same 2.3 GHz chip that appeared in the original 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.įor connecting a monitor to the Mac mini – or television or projector when in its media-centre roles – we have two options: Thunderbolt and HDMI. It does add a whopping £180 to the price, and it only has two material differences from the base model: it has double the storage capacity, so offers 1 TB of storage from its notebook-sized 2.5-inch disk inside. We called in the next model from the range of three to retest. Provided you keep the detail level low of course.

These are not quite the joke they used to be – you can now turn such a PC toward some action games without getting a slo-mo slideshow. Like last year’s entry model, this £499 Apple Mac drives a screen with the graphics controller that’s integrated into the Intel chip. But as a user, all you see is one speedy drive, and OS X’s Core Storage process intelligently moves data from SSD to hard disk as required for best performance. Samsung 830 SSD and a 1 TB notebook SATA disk. In the case of the Apple Mac mini, we’re looking at a 128 GB

The Fusion drive combines a fast but smaller solid-state drive, with a large but slow hard disk. And the storage can be configured as a Fusion drive. The memory is now faster, 1600 MHz rather than 1333 MHz as found on the Sandy Bridge generation. This model also includes 4 GB of memory – enough for most people that don’t edit large media files, for example – and a 500 GB hard disk.

Mac mini 2012 review