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El Capitan on Mac Mini (Late 2012) 2.5 i5 4GB Ram

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gottabegood

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 24, 2014
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Has anyone ran El Capitan on this machine? I am considering replacing Mavericks with it, however I would like to know if El Captan runs better on it despite have only 4gb of memory. I cannot afford to replace memory at this time so if you think it is best to stick with Mavericks please let me know.

Mac Mini (Late 2012)
2.5 i5 Processor
4GB Ram
500 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
 
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I run El Capitan on that machine.

The minimum ram is 2gb.
You have double that.

You do know that apple still sells loads of machines with 4gb ram as standard?
 
I have the same MM Mini as the OP which is still on "Mountain Lion", however, I upgraded the Ram to 16GB last January.

My main concern on not upgrading to El CAP at this time is the 500GB HD which IMO is slower than molasses. I Plan on installing a SSD in the very near future and then i will do this upgrade to the latest OSX.
 
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Meister said:
I run El Capitan on that machine.

The minimum ram is 2gb.
You have double that.

You do know that apple still sells loads of machines with 4gb ram as standard?
Click to expand...

Yes, but my concern as well is the slower hard drive and overall system performance of my machine since it is about 3 years older. Do you feel El Capitan runs better than Mavericks on your machine?
 
I've got a late-2012 i7 2.6ghz Mini with 10gb RAM installed (2gb DIMM + 8gb DIMM).

It runs very well if I boot from an externally mounted (USB3) SSD with El Capitan on it.

The only lingering problem I'm experiencing is during shutdown.
- If I try to run the "shut down" command while logged in, it will experience a kernel panic, and then (without prompting) reboot from the internal drive on the Mini which has 10.8.5 on it.
- However, if I log out first, let it go to the login screen (where you enter password), and then select "shut down" from the choices at the bottom of the screen, it shuts down properly.

I'm -guessing- that this has something to do with incompatibilities between 10.8.5 and 10.11.x. Could be something to do with CORE storage.
Might be a firmware issue.
Not sure.

The workaround is to log out BEFORE shut down is attempted.
Do that, and it's fine.
 
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I have that model - the i5 2.5, 4 GB RAM, but I have a self-made fusion drive. My copy of El Cap runs on the 128 GB SSD.

The RAM is perfectly fine for anything you'll need. More RAM is obviously better for the pro apps, but for basic things, you're more than good to go.
 
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gottabegood said:
Has anyone ran El Capitan on this machine?
Click to expand...

as others have posted, i too have this MM; it runs fine on El Capitan w/ only 4GB RAM. i run several apps, Chrome with many tabs open, Microsoft Office(mainly Excel & Word) and streaming music and run about 3.67 of RAM when i check it on Activity Monitor with no lag. all this before upgrading the internals.

i now have 16GB ram and 1TB SSD(2x Samsung 850 EVO 512GB) with no running issues. boot time is now 12~14 secs.
 
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gottabegood said:
Has anyone ran El Capitan on this machine? I am considering replacing Mavericks with it, however I would like to know if El Captan runs better on it despite have only 4gb of memory. I cannot afford to replace memory at this time so if you think it is best to stick with Mavericks please let me know.

Mac Mini (Late 2012)
2.5 i5 Processor
4GB Ram
500 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
Click to expand...

This mini might be the most expandable of them all. I have a 256gb SSD installed and stuffed 16gb in it last week. It's amazing.
 
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c8rlo said:
as others have posted, i too have this MM; it runs fine on El Capitan w/ only 4GB RAM. i run several apps, Chrome with many tabs open, Microsoft Office(mainly Excel & Word) and streaming music and run about 3.67 of RAM when i check it on Activity Monitor with no lag. all this before upgrading the internals.

i now have 16GB ram and 1TB SSD(2x Samsung 850 EVO 512GB) with no running issues. boot time is now 12~14 secs.
Click to expand...

I reckon I'll get another 10 years from my 2012 mini.
 
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If you can't afford to add two 8gb DIMMs to the Mini, just add one.
You'll have a total of 10gb, and it will run "as fast as" if you had 16...
 
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