With the new Handoff feature, you can start composing a text, email or document on your iOS device and finish it on your Mac (or vice versa) with a single click. The Mac mini ships with Apple's OS X Yosemite, which adds some useful new tweaks to Apple's operating system while allowing your Mac to work seamlessly with your iOS devices.Īs long as your Mac and iPhone or iPad are connected to the same Wi-Fi network (and are logged in to the same iCloud account), you can answer calls and texts from the desktop without reaching for your phone. Apple's computer fell behind the Intel HD 6000-powered NUC (33.57 fps), and mustered less than half of our 54-fps average for all-in-one desktops. The Mac mini registered 22.97 fps on the OpenGL portion of the Cinebench benchmark, which tests a machine's GPU. The NUC notched only 26 fps under the same settings, and both PCs fell to the high teens with the graphics kicked to ultra.
#I5 2.8 ghz mac mini for video editing 1080p
The mini PC ran World of Warcraft at a playable 30 frames per second at 1080p with autodetect on, but stumbled when the settings were turned up. With its integrated Intel HD Graphics 5000, our starting configuration of the Mac mini is far from a graphical powerhouse, but it can still handle a few non-demanding games. The mini couldn't come close the NUC's PCIe x4 SSD or the ThinkCentre's 500GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive, which registered a blazing 309 and 138 MBps, respectively. While this rate is comparable to that scored by the iMac's identical hard drive (38.5 MBps), the Mac mini performed about half as quickly as the 69 MBps all-in-one desktop average.
Our Mac mini's 500GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive copied 4.97GB of mixed media in 2 minutes and 28 seconds, resulting in a file-transfer rate of 34.4 MBps. While it wasn't quite as fast as the NUC (5:02), the ThinkCentre (4:31) or its iMac cousin (3:49), the mini edged out our 6:26 all-in-one PC average.
The Mac mini performed almost identically to Apple's 2014 iMac all-in-one (5,464), which packs the same processor as the mini but with 8GB of RAM.Īpple's mini computer had little trouble with our spreadsheet test, matching 20,000 names to their addresses in 6 minutes and 17 seconds. This score is lower than the Intel NUC's 6,039, (1.6-GHz, 5th-gen Core i5, 8GB of RAM), the ThinkCentre M83's 8,522 (2-GHz Core i5-4590T, 8GB of RAM) and the 7,013 all-in-one PC average. The Mac mini scored 5,443 on the Geekbench 3 test, which measures a machine's overall performance. When playing around in GarageBand while simultaneously streaming HD video from Netflix and YouTube, I didn't experience a hint of slowdown. Packing a 4th-generation, 1.4-GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM, our Mac mini handled basic entertainment and productivity tasks with ease. However, while its rear-facing ports help maintain the sleek computer's seamless design, they sacrifice some convenience I would have preferred to have access to a headphone slot and at least one USB port in the front. The Mac mini's port selection includes everything you'd expect from a modern PC, and the Thunderbolt 2 connections add some welcome productivity options. (Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide)