Convince me that I need to buy M1 Mini....?

[Heat_Fan89]

You can install a NVME in the 2014 Mini? I did not know that (figured everything was welded to the motherboard and the case itself is also welded shut). Would there be any appreciable performance increase?

Hell yes! I have two Mac mini's and the 2012 Mini had the 5400rpm drive. I replaced it with an internal SSD. The boot times in Catalina were impressive. I went from around 1 minute and 28 secs to 40 secs boot time with an SSD. If you can get a SSD stick in that sucker you should get better results than I was getting.

But you won't pull the speeds I get on my 2018 Mini. I can boot Big Sur in about 7 seconds.

 

[doboy]

I have a 2 yr old i3 version that I'm going to upgrade. So there.

 

[Attirex]

Hell yes! I have two Mac mini's and the 2012 Mini had the 5400rpm drive. I replaced it with an internal SSD. The boot times in Catalina were impressive. I went from around 1 minute and 28 secs to 40 secs boot time with an SSD. If you can get a SSD stick in that sucker you should get better results than I was getting.

But you won't pull the speeds I get on my 2018 Mini. I can boot Big Sur in about 7 seconds.

I could see that an internal SSD would be a UUUGE upgrade vs 5400 rpm platter in 2012 model, but my 2014 Mini has the stock 250GB SSD (not a hard drive)...I'm not sure a NVME would make much of a difference....

 

[ronster22]

I could see that an internal SSD would be a UUUGE upgrade vs 5400 rpm platter in 2012 model, but my 2014 Mini has the stock 250GB SSD (not a hard drive)...I'm not sure a NVME would make much of a difference....

Not sure, but isn’t the factory SSD the NVMe PCIe type, rather than the SATA based SSD?

 

[pritcee]

I mean, the m1 mini will be orders of magnitudes faster than your 2014 mini. The performance gains alone should justify the purchase, especially considering your current machine is already 6 years old.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Currently rocking late 2014 model with 8GB RAM that I use for daily light computing tasks (Web, email, light word processing). I have three external USB drives hanging off of it (for OS, music, and photos/video backups) along with microphone and Webcam, and recently bought a powered 7-port USB hub.

Obviously, the 16GB RAM limit isn't an issue for my use case, and it still runs fine (and can run Big Sur). So does the new Mini get me anything beyond future proofing? I'm not sure it does, although I think mine will be categorized as obsolete in another year or so.

Hm.

If you need the forum to convince you, you don’t need the M1 mini.