Officially, no, but you may well get lucky.Īpple Store staff tell us that they have fairly broad discretion to do what they believe to be the right thing for the customer. You can return your machine anytime within that 14-day window without even having to give a reason.īut what if it was 15 days? Or 20? Or 30? Well, that’s when things get tricky. That’s the period of Apple’s ‘no questions asked’ refund or exchange policy. The answer, as in many things, is ‘it depends.’įirst, if you bought the machine from an Apple Store no more than 14 days ago, you’re in luck. The question is, will Apple let you exchange it for the 2018 one … ? Which would be annoying, to say the least, if you’ve recently bought the 2017 model. It was clear that it would need to support the latest Intel processors at some point, but nobody knew the launch date.
#2017 mac mini model number update#
I don’t have GeekBench numbers handy for the G4 Mac Mini, but I believe the new M1 models are noticeably faster.Apple managed to keep the lid on its plans to update the MacBook Pro yesterday.
#2017 mac mini model number full#
A new M1 Mac Mini running at full speed uses about the same power as a G4 Mac Mini did just sitting there with the Finder open doing nothing. Historically, it’s worth noting that the M1 Mac Mini’s maximum power consumption and thermal output are only ever so slightly higher than the idle power/thermal numbers for the original 2005 PowerPC G4 Mac Mini. And that in 2017, Apple bit the bullet and did the best they could with what Intel had to offer, realizing then that they needed another generation of Intel Macs (desktop and laptop) before Apple Silicon Macs would be ready. Apple does not like to talk about stuff like this, so we’re left to conjecture, but it’s not hard to look at this simple table of power consumption and thermal output and consider that those “gap years” in Mac desktop hardware - the Mac Mini in particular - were to a large extent the result of Intel’s chips running way too hot for Apple’s standards. And keep in mind that the M1 Mac Mini is also a much more performant computer. The 2018 Mac Mini has three times the power consumption and thermal output of the new M1 Mac Mini - and much higher numbers than the 2014 Mac Mini models it replaced. It was still an important product in Apple’s lineup! But well-regarded or not, look at the thermals in the table above. Even after the roundtable meeting, however, Schiller’s “the Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup” comment was taken as a sign that even if Apple had a reinvigorated interest in high-end Mac desktops, the Mac Mini was not a priority.īut then came the very well-regarded 2018 Mac Mini. This gap in Mac desktop hardware, from around 2014 through the roundtable mea culpa in April 2017, was viewed by many as a sign that Apple had lost interest in the Mac. The Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup, but nothing more Important product in our lineup and we weren’t bringing it upīecause it’s more of a mix of consumer with some pro use. Schiller: “On that I’ll say the Mac Mini is an Near the end, John Paczkowski had the presence of mind to askĪbout the Mac Mini, which hadn’t been mentioned at all until The basic message was that despite the dearth of recent updates, Apple remained as committed as ever to pro Mac hardware (and software).įrom my piece on that roundtable discussion: The gap between the 2014 models and the 2018 revision felt like “forever”, coincided with the dearth of updates to the “trash can” Mac Pro, and culminated with the small April 2017 roundtable discussion, where Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and John Ternus revealed to a handful of invited press their intention to make a “pro” iMac (which they then unveiled a few weeks later at WWDC, and shipped in December) and, more unusually, laid bare their plans for an all-new Mac Pro, which wasn’t unveiled until WWDC 2019 and didn’t ship until December that year.
Likewise with the 2006 original Intel Mac Minis - there were separate Core Solo and Core Duo models, but they had the same power/thermal specs. the M1 Mac Mini’s actual idle power consumption is 6.8 W), and there were three different 2015 Core i5 Mac Mini models, but all three shared the same power consumption and thermal specs, so I’ve combined them into one item in the table. I’ve rounded a few of the numbers to the nearest integer (e.g.
I’ve taken a few small liberties with my version of this table. The numbers from 2014 onward are rather striking: Mac Mini Power Consumption and Thermal Output Specs Wednesday, 27 January 2021Ī few weeks ago, Apple added the new M1 model to their support page listing the power consumption and thermal output of all Mac Mini models (including the 2005 original, which used a PowerPC G4 CPU).