Want cheapest option for mini that fits my needs

[sean barry]

Because of economic restraints, I need to sell my 2012 mini. It has more power than I need now. What I'm looking for is the cheapest mini, thinking 2010, (actually any aluminum body if I have the $$$ to upgrade later) that fits my needs. I now only do simple word docs and spread sheets and surf the interweb
Well, I also do netflix. I am not trying to sell here, just looking for input on the best option to buy. Thanx.

 

[jpietrzak8]

I'm typing this on a 2010 Mini right now. It still is fine for most of my purposes; word processing, spreadsheet, and web browsing work just fine.

There are only two items I would mention. First, recent releases of OS X consume a whole lot more RAM. I originally had only 4 GB of RAM in this machine, and found myself constantly hitting the limits (even with the excellent memory compression provided in this OS). I've since upgraded to 8 GB, but even now I find myself swapping far more frequently than I'd like. So be warned that you may find you need more RAM than you would otherwise expect.

Second, the NVidia 320M GPU is very, very out of date at this point. Many (if not most) modern video codecs will not find any hardware decoding support on the 2010 Mini. You can still play videos using software decoding (and the Core 2 Duo processor is still capable enough to handle that level of processing), but only just.

I suppose both these points will hold for most of the older Minis...

 

[grcar]

Because of economic restraints, I need to sell my 2012 mini.

Not sure how much you will recover. The stock configuration of the 2012 mini came in three levels. The lowest level, which is very capable, sells for about $370 on eBay. The middle level, which is the famous one with a quad core i7 cpu, sells for about $670 on eBay.

You would have to pay at least $170 for a 2010 model.

 

[sean barry]

I'm typing this on a 2010 Mini right now. It still is fine for most of my purposes; word processing, spreadsheet, and web browsing work just fine.

There are only two items I would mention. First, recent releases of OS X consume a whole lot more RAM. I originally had only 4 GB of RAM in this machine, and found myself constantly hitting the limits (even with the excellent memory compression provided in this OS). I've since upgraded to 8 GB, but even now I find myself swapping far more frequently than I'd like. So be warned that you may find you need more RAM than you would otherwise expect.

Second, the NVidia 320M GPU is very, very out of date at this point. Many (if not most) modern video codecs will not find any hardware decoding support on the 2010 Mini. You can still play videos using software decoding (and the Core 2 Duo processor is still capable enough to handle that level of processing), but only just.

I suppose both these points will hold for most of the older Minis...

Thanks, I think I'll look eleswere. Maybe a base 2014
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Not sure how much you will recover. The stock configuration of the 2012 mini came in three levels. The lowest level, which is very capable, sells for about $370 on eBay. The middle level, which is the famous one with a quad core i7 cpu, sells for about $670 on eBay.

You would have to pay at least $170 for a 2010 model.

Thanks. My mini is not stock. I have added 16g of RAM, a 240g SSD along with the original 1t HDD and win 7 running on Parallels 11. I think that might boost the price to around US$850.00.

 

[California]

I'm typing this on a 2010 Mini right now. It still is fine for most of my purposes; word processing, spreadsheet, and web browsing work just fine.

There are only two items I would mention. First, recent releases of OS X consume a whole lot more RAM. I originally had only 4 GB of RAM in this machine, and found myself constantly hitting the limits (even with the excellent memory compression provided in this OS). I've since upgraded to 8 GB, but even now I find myself swapping far more frequently than I'd like. So be warned that you may find you need more RAM than you would otherwise expect.

Second, the NVidia 320M GPU is very, very out of date at this point. Many (if not most) modern video codecs will not find any hardware decoding support on the 2010 Mini. You can still play videos using software decoding (and the Core 2 Duo processor is still capable enough to handle that level of processing), but only just.

I suppose both these points will hold for most of the older Minis...

Those minis take 16 gigs of ram... mushkin apple branded for this Mini