2012 i7 Mac Mini similar performance to my 2015 Macbook Pro?

mug2k · 3 Nov 2019 at 12:48

I've recently bought a Surface Book to use away from home and I'm thinking of selling my 2015 Macbook Pro and getting a 2012 Mac Mini to use as my home computer.

I do web/app design and I use apps like Figma/Sketch and a tiny amount of Photoshop. Right now my Macbook can get a bit loud when I have too many tabs open or watch anything over 1080p60 on Youtube.

I'm thinking about getting a 2012 i7 (2.3 GHz or 2.6 GHz) Mac Mini with 16Gb of RAM and a SSD.

The main reasons is don't need 2 laptops now that I have the surface and I can probably pocket a few hundred pounds/bucks buy selling my Macbook and getting the Mac Mini.

I'm well aware it won't be an upgrade but I'm happy with a sidegrade if it performs relatively similar and generally runs quieter.

My Macbook is a mid-2015 with an i7 2.2Ghz and 16Gb of RAM if that helps.

Feek · 3 Nov 2019 at 13:15

I would imagine the graphics card on the MacBook Pro would be superior to the Mac Mini and you're definitely going to take a performance hit going to a machine that's three years older.

Just take a look a the geekbench scores.

Terminal_Boy · 3 Nov 2019 at 13:21

Any MacBook Pro > Any Mac Mini is a serious downgrade.

mug2k · 3 Nov 2019 at 13:24

Feek said:
I would imagine the graphics card on the MacBook Pro would be superior to the Mac Mini and you're definitely going to take a performance hit going to a machine that's three years older.

Just take a look a the geekbench scores.

The 2.6GHz Mac Mini has 87% of the speed of my Macbook Pro, that's not too bad actually. Nothing I do uses a lot of CPU so I might be able to get away with that. I'm guessing when it's 'underload' the Mac Mini might be a bit quieter. I think my MBP has an Iris GPU whatever that is

Feek · 3 Nov 2019 at 15:13

Terminal_Boy said:
Any MacBook Pro > Any Mac Mini is a serious downgrade.

Oh I dunno, if he were to replace his 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2018 Mac Mini, it would seriously outperform it.

Combat squirrel · 4 Nov 2019 at 00:16

Just use what you have now and get on with it.....you can make your mbp a desktop.

You're probably just bored and want to tinker about.

Do your work with what you have.

NickK · 5 Nov 2019 at 18:28

A 2012 mini would be very slow and possibly be a pain to run new apps.

I went from a 2009 mini / 2011 MBP to a 2019 mini. Goes like stink. Integrated graphics ok but an eGPU is an option.

Feek · 6 Nov 2019 at 08:18

NickK said:
A 2012 mini would be very slow and possibly be a pain to run new apps.

And apart from anything else, I don't know how many further macOS updates will work on it. Catalina may well be the last.

NickK said:
2019 mini

PS - There isn't a 2019 Mac Mini, the last update was October 2018 so it's a 2018 model

NickK · 7 Nov 2019 at 08:29

Feek said:
And apart from anything else, I don't know how many further macOS updates will work on it. Catalina may well be the last.

PS - There isn't a 2019 Mac Mini, the last update was October 2018 so it's a 2018 model

true but I bought mine in 2019

very impressed with performance especially now it’s upgraded to 32GB