I'm pleased, annoyed and holding my judgment until I see am iFixit teardown.
I think I posted my ideas in some detail for the next mac mini a couple times in the monster thread. Apple didn't follow most of them, yet still did pretty decent. What I wasn't expecting was the shift to 65W desktop CPUs, nor Intel's reaction to AMD by pushing up the core counts in Coffee Lake.
Pleased:
Apple did the right thing by leaving 2 USB Type-A ports - I personally would have left more, but 98% of the time it'll be ok, and adding a USB 3 type-a hub isn't costly. It's a mini - you're going to plug in a USB Keyboard and mouse for starters, and you probably have thumb drives or an external hard drive laying around, perhaps even a webcam.
If they went with only one type-A or none like on the macbook pro's, it would have been a failure to many people. Given Apple's recent track record I don't think any of us thought keeping the type-A ports was sure thing.
The CPU options are nice, and not too terribly priced (unlike RAM and SSD). Right now there are not a lot of SKUs in the Coffee Lake Desktop lineup and it was Intel's choice to reserve hyper threading for i7s only, so Apple just dealt with it. Regarding the loss of hyperthreading - In various testing with game engines and high-end compression, having hyper threading is like getting 1.35 to 1.5 the cores, with some caveats (like if all cores are doing heavy memory read/writes you max out bandwidth even without HT), so under max situations the 6-core i7-8700 is like having 8 or 9 cores total, which combined with the higher base clock and turbos thanks to the 14nm+++ process, is a real nice jump over the i7-3720QM in my 2012. The base i3 is a decent jump over the 2014's i7 - we were that overdue.
RAM is user serviceable again! and up to 64GB! Big, smart win on Apple's part. Big companies like my previous employer are going pay for Apple RAM due to IT policy and that's fine. Power users like you and I are going to be happy replacing RAM on our own terms and schedule.
Overall - It's entirely possible to have a 2018 mini doing heavyweight duty in a build/server/transcoder/etc type of role, because of the combination of components: 10Gb Ethernet (which is probably 2-3 years from becoming more common in SOHO situations), 64GB of RAM, 12 CPU threads, and a very fast primary drive with ~3500MB/s peak through put and thunderbolt 3 additional storage.
I mean, in those types of roles none of the Mini's components/subsystems are "weak links" - a metric crap-ton of computing can be done very quickly without the 2018 Mini breaking a sweat.
Annoyed:
The UHD 630 iGPU isn't that hot, and gamine will remain a weak spot on the Mini, especially given the 4K and 5K montior support (yay, finally!) I do game testing on Intel NUCs, and the Iris Plus 655 would have been nicer, as it benchmarks about double the UHD 630 (which benchs about 1.6x/ 2.7x the GPUs in the 2014/2012 minis), but only the mobile 28W CPUs have it.
What Apple could do, and was a golden opportunity missed IMHO, is offer a special version of the Mini with the i7-8706G CPU - It's a 65W TDP chip, same as the other CPUs, but that 4GB HBM2 Radeon Vega would give it enough punch to do VR work and pretty decent (though not greatest) gaming on. I'm pretty sure I know why they didn't thought - it would have required a different chipset and thus board (but Apple has has multiple mainboards for the same generation of Mini's before), or even convinced Intel to make a Coffee Lake version. I wonder if this means the Hades Canyon NUC hasn't sold well and the -G CPUs will be discontinued soon?
Yes, eGPUs are an option.. but compatible choices are limited and pricey and not that many people are going to want to hook up a second box significantly larger than the Mini itself.
I don't see eGPUs being the popular solution that some people are hoping for.
Holding my Judgment:
Preliminary reports say the SSD is soldered onto the motherboard, but it's not clear if that's true, or the SSD just isn't "user serviceable" like the RAM. The 2014 Mini had it's RAM soldered, but they didn't try to solder the SSD. And to be honest, it doesn't make much sense to do that. SSD fails and you have to replace the entire mainboard, which is now a lot more expensive, much less manufacturing flexibility, Refurb 2018 minis would come with SSDs that might be well on their way to being worn out (lots of Apple Care claims in 2021+), and so on. And I don't see Apple leaving empty chip sockets on the mainboard - given that the difference in storage runs 16x from low end (128GB) to high end (2TB).
And of course... the price. Sure you can add external storage, but it's not the same. In short, it sucks for more reasons that I've mentioned here.
So I'm going to wait for the teardown to confirm if the flash chips are soldered on, or if it's a removable, and thus replaceable SSD. Even if the connector isn't standard like in the 2014, someone like OWC is likely to step in... assuming the T2 chip lets them.
If the SSD can be replaced via an iFixit level teardown, I'll probably get a 2018 sooner than later, otherwise I'll feel pressed to wait and see if a 1TB or 2TB is any better as a refurb due to the high cost.
Whew! that's too much typing. I should wait until we're all waiting for the 2022 Mini before getting worked up again.
