Does the 2012 mini run Yosemite smoothly?

Yosemite seems a bit beachball-prone on the mini with the base 4GB RAM and all my apps/settings migrated over from my iMac, Safari being a particular offender.

That said, the problem seems to have lessened with use so I don't know if that's a cache thing or what. Still, it seems clear to me that 4GB is not going to cut it for anything resembling normal use.

I bought an i7 2.3gHz and ran Yosemite in stock form for a while, then upgraded the RAM to 8gb and the main drive to a 512gb SSD.

The initial download/install was horrible. I got nothing but pinwheels. I decided that something must have gone wrong with the installation, so I erased the disk and reinstalled via internet recover. It ran fine, and the pinwheeling was basically gone. 4gb of RAM really wasn't a problem.

After the RAM and SSD upgrade I did another internet recovery installation and subjectively it runs about the same, other than startup and loading programs being very noticeably faster, which is just going from a platter drive to an SSD.

So my answer is yes, Yosemite runs fine on a 2012 Mini.

I had a few glitches a few days ago that caused me to restore Mavericks from Time Machine to another SSD. After poking around on the Internet for awhile it occurred to me that Onyx may have caused the problems.

I reinstalled a few things and all seems OK now. Hopefully the next Yosemite update will offer a Combo version so I can make sure that all of the important system files are as they should be.

Yosemite from an SSD with 16GB RAM works really well to me.

Mind you, I run a lot of crap as part of my standard setup, including things that are well past their use-by date, and the entire migrated environment is now four generations removed from anything resembling a clean install. Not exactly a recipe for optimal performance.

Even with all that, it's running better now than it was initially. Once I max out the RAM I imagine it will be just fine.

Tough Guy said:

That's my only concern. I'd assume it should be fine, but just wanted to check with others who may have it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Yosemite was a slug on my 4GB i5 2012 Mini. I went back to Mavericks as fast as I could.

Perhaps once I upgrade the RAM and put in an SSD, I'll give Yosemite another try. Or not. It was just slower than Molasses. In January.

Mavericks flies on the same hardware.

4GB RAM here, and experienced some glitches as well,
mainly sleep/wake up related; Safari being sluggish
after waking up from sleep, beach ball presented when
launching TextEdit.

Have to restart the mini to correct the issues.
It would be OK if I don't put the mini to sleep.

I don’t think it’s because of not enough RAM
(telling from looking at Activity Monitor).
I know 4GB is not adequate for serious tasks,
but these issues should not happen. May be
it needs some more polishing. I like the UI though.
Glad I can fall back to Mavericks.

Yosemite runs fine on my 2012 quad-core (with 16GB and an SSD though...).

But then it also runs fine on my 2014 Macbook Air (base model). I suppose that also has an SSD, but the CPU is much slower and has a quarter of the RAM.

I have 4GB in my 2011 Air (11" i5) and that is fine with Yosemite. If you are experiencing problems with 4GB in a Mini at least it is easy to upgrade the RAM on the 2012 version and 16GB doesn't break the bank any longer - just max it out and you know it will work. Moderate sized SSD's are even fairly cheap now too.

My advice will be different from all the others.

I've been experimenting with Yosemite installed on an old (8-10 years) 4200rpm IDE drive installed in a firewire400 enclosure. Computer is a 2012 2.6ghz/i7 Mini.

After "beachball city" with Mavericks, I didn't have great expectations for Yosemite, but surprisingly, it runs ok after a few tweaks.

I upgraded the RAM in the Mini from 4gb to 10gb by replacing the top DIMM with an 8gb module. There's supposed to be a slight speed decrease because of the "size mismatch", but it's nothing I can notice.

I've also done the following:
- disabled Spotlight
- disabled compressed memory
- turned off VM & swap (no vm at all)

I realize there will be problems if one "uses up" all the "real memory" in such a situation, but I have yet to encounter a crash from having done this.

All these tweaks are easily reversible if you wish to experiment with them.
I wouldn't recommend doing so unless you have AT LEAST 8gb of installed RAM.
More is better...

Final thought:
DON'T experiment or install Yosemite unless you have a FULLY BOOTABLE cloned backup of your old OS. Having one will make "going back" easy, if need be...

Works great with 16 GB ram and Fusion drive.