Was just looking at MacSales (aka Other World Computing), they sell used Mini's with limited warranties. I got my quad 2012 Mini from them for about $1250 back around 2015 (the 2012 quad was still the fastest Mini until 2018). They are now selling the 2.3ghz quad with 16gb RAM and 500gb SSD for $179. Should be even cheaper from a private seller, since they wouldn't have the OWC warranty or return policy.
Now, if you only have the base model 2012 Mini, they don't have any in stock now but IIRC were selling them for $59 awhile ago.
Someone locally just sold a base M1 8 GB / 256 GB Mac mini for CA$360. That’s under US$250. Thats a better deal than average, but they typically can be found for around CA$400 here, or about US$275. And I just sold my M1 16 GB / 1 TB for CA$625 / US$429.
IMO, that’s a much better value, unless you absolutely need an Intel machine.
Problem IMO with the 2012 is not just the CPU performance, but the lack of official current macOS support and the lack of h.265 HEVC hardware decode support. Even kid videos these days come in HEVC. I am replacing my wife’s 2017 MacBook Air this year because she can’t watch our kids’ dance videos on it, as the videos are sometimes distributed in HEVC format. This started happening around 2023-2024 with some organizations. Before that, everything was h.264 AVC.
As for CPU performance, these days I don’t think I’d be happy with anything less than about 900ish in single-core speed in Geekbench 6, at least for a frequently used machine. 900 is actually pretty slow, but it’s acceptable for basic usage. However, 1200+ may be preferable, which is 2018 Mac mini territory, and the 2018 gains hardware h.265 HEVC decode as well.
2012 quad Core i7-3615QM is about 650 single-core, whereas M1 is about 2400.
