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Meh...her current computer is from 2011. That's 7 years.

My wife's iMac is the iMac8,1 from 2008 with 4 GB of RAM, and an external Firewire SSD, which she boots from only when remoting into work. Otherwise, she boots from the very slow internal hard drive (running an out-of-date MacOS compatible with software we're not in a rush to replace).

She also has a second monitor, in portrait mode.

This is surprisingly usable for most purposes.

BUT, now that you need 2 GB to open 10 tabs in your web browser, because of all the shit Javascript (very little of which is enhancing your user experience, while much of it is actively disenhancing your user experience) you sort of wince if you need to open a web browser and any other heavy application at the same time.

I was all set to upgrade this to a Mac Mini roughly four years ago, but by the time I got around to it, the good Mac Mini had been replaced by a shitbox with solder RAM.

The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster — 1 December 2014

According to Primate Labs, makers of the popular cross-platform Geekbench tool, single-core performance for the 2014 Mac mini is up to about 11 percent better than the 2012 model in some configurations, but a staggering 40 percent worse in comparisons of the top-end models for each year. No wonder Apple hides the Mac mini on the second page of its online store listing.

Which really makes you feel good about shelling out an extra $300 to add an extra 8 GB of memory (which is then forever capped, for all time). $35/GB. Memory Prices (1957-2018) was showing the street price in 2014 at around $8/GB. A $20/GB marginal price from Apple I could have swallowed, even with the permanent memory cap.

Just who is going to upgrade a 4 GB system from 2008 with an 8 GB system in 2014? What happened to Moore's law? Since when did 18 months turns into 48 months? I know we hit the knee, but that's Tonya Harding territory.

So here we are, in 2018, and we've had the money set aside for this project for a good five years, but Apple wouldn't offer a product didn't make me puke in my mouth (as someone who knows the deep history).

On this one, I might even pony for the 10 gbit ethernet, to future-proof the box against further Apple missteps. Better safe than sorry. A model you're actually willing to purchase might only come along once per decade.

Macs are simply too expensive and locked into a crappy walled garden.

To what "crappy walled garden" do you refer? A user of macOS can bypass Gatekeeper and trust an amateur-made application by Ctrl+clicking it and choosing Open.

I tried to procure Mac Minis for a small office in angel-finance reboot mode—it was a blank slate for changing the mix—and Apple had neutered the quad-core mini with the expansion RAM slot so badly, we bought refurbed Windows 7 boxes instead.

Worse machine, twice as much memory, half the price.

One key executive who has cold feet about making the jump, and you're not going to risk a castrated revamp. So it goes.

The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster

It was soon revealed that Apple was using soldered RAM in the new Mac minis, an unfortunate development that meant that customers would no longer be able to upgrade their memory after purchase. Want the maximum 16GB of RAM for your new Mac? That'll be $300 extra at checkout ...

Compounding the memory upgrade situation is the company's choice of CPUs. Yes, they're Haswell, but they're not as fast as their 2-plus-year-old Ivy Bridge predecessors. The old 2012 Mac mini lineup included options for both dual- and quad-core CPUs, but the new 2014 models are dual-core only, and the efficiency improvements in Haswell can't compensate for the loss of those two cores.

I had 100% buy-in for the Apple solution, had we still been able to get the 2012 spec. Mac mini.

My office mate had brought his own 2012-era Mini into the office and everyone loved it, which is how the option to jump ship from Microsoft entered the conversation in the first place.

Then *bam* the anvil behind the velvet curtain when we specked out the crippled revamp.

I can only imagine that Apple kind of wants to kill off the PC category altogether. Insufficient lock-in. Choice remains.

I honestly think that Apple was running into significant cooling issues with the Quad-Core mini. Now that there are quad-core Skylake's out that are MUCH lower-power, perhaps this year's (2017) minis will be quad again...

I tried to procure Mac Minis for a small office in angel-finance reboot mode—it was a blank slate for changing the mix—and Apple had neutered the quad-core mini with the expansion RAM slot so badly, we bought refurbed Windows 7 boxes instead.

Worse machine, twice as much memory, half the price.

One key executive who has cold feet about making the jump, and you're not going to risk a castrated revamp. So it goes.

The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster

It was soon revealed that Apple was using soldered RAM in the new Mac minis, an unfortunate development that meant that customers would no longer be able to upgrade their memory after purchase. Want the maximum 16GB of RAM for your new Mac? That'll be $300 extra at checkout ...

Compounding the memory upgrade situation is the company's choice of CPUs. Yes, they're Haswell, but they're not as fast as their 2-plus-year-old Ivy Bridge predecessors. The old 2012 Mac mini lineup included options for both dual- and quad-core CPUs, but the new 2014 models are dual-core only, and the efficiency improvements in Haswell can't compensate for the loss of those two cores.

I had 100% buy-in for the Apple solution, had we still been able to get the 2012 spec. Mac mini.

My office mate had brought his own 2012-era Mini into the office and everyone loved it, which is how the option to jump ship from Microsoft entered the conversation in the first place.

Then *bam* the anvil behind the velvet curtain when we specked out the crippled revamp.

I can only imagine that Apple kind of wants to kill off the PC category altogether. Insufficient lock-in. Choice remains.

Or do you seriously think an Apple Intel CPU is more reliable than a Dell Intel CPU?

Never heard of Xeon? At least half of a high-end chip's reliability comes from the post-manufacture test procedure and binning standard.

At Apple's scale, they can negotiate any production standard with Intel that they wish to have. This isn't even uncommon, as companies like Google and Facebook are already negotiating custom Xeons for the datacenter, which certainly involves tweaking some internal chip firmware (e.g. changing cache allocation policies or thermal envelopes), all the way up to possibly adding specialized instructions and/or execution units.

Finally, far more problems arise from the mainboard and assembly quality than the underlying chip quality, but at the end of the day it all adds up.

Welcome to Supply Chain 501. It's not your father's Supply Chain 101.

That said, Apple (the company) is a cult-like Black Box of the highest order. When it serves their agenda, they make good products. When their agenda shifts with the winds of fashion—so long, sweet Mini—caveat emptor.

The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster
Mac Mini 2014 Review: A Terrible Shame

Once upon a time, a very nice product, too bad about the "greatness" removal tool presiding from the glass office.

Either you don't use a Mac, or your skill level is so low that you are exactly the kind of person for whom this change is designed. There is virtually no reason why you *should* disable Gatekeeper because it provides critical front-line security to protect you from malicious apps.

If you want to grant an exception to an individual app, that is still possible. If you want to disable gatekeeper entirely, you can still do that too, although you'd be begging to be exploited by malicious software if you did.

And, oh look! I found this on my very first google search.
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/g...

Clearly you couldn't even be bothered to make the attempt to get more info before invoking the power of your pie hole.

1. Javascript benchmarks. They should be outlawed, period. They test the software (browser) more than the CPU. Also they are probably single threaded or close to be.

2. On-screen 3D game benchmarks. Because they favor phones with low-res display such as iPhones.

None of the benchmarks in TFA even consider RAM size and flash memory speed, which both have real-world benefits.

I'm sure that ALL of these benchmarks are done by Apple shills.

Right.

Oh, and whiner, I found this and this about the memory subsystem in the iPhone 6s. Glad you asked!

I wonder how long it took you to find contradictory figures.

Its just a simple google search.

Naturally, they benchmark beta versions and not the final releases.

Here's one with final releases:

Kraken: Chrome wins!

Octane: Chrome wins!

Peacekeeper: Firefox wins!

WebXPRT: Firefox wins!

HTML5Test: Chrome wins!

http://www.tekrevue.com/spartan-benchmarks-ie-chrome-firefox-opera/

But it doesnt matter that much because you will come up with excuses for its failures anyway. Stop lying to yourself, usage is at an all-time low, user satisfaction is at an all-time low and at best it trades places with Chrome on benchmarks. Wake up for fuck sake. People are pointing this out because they dont want Firefox to fail but you ignore it because you *do* want Firefox to fail or you just want to pretend you are perfect and everybody else is wrong.

1) factually wrong -- it's "if there is an app version available that [the developer has explicitly told Apple they are willing to still support]". Apple let's developers make the choice and the choice defaults to taking away old versions.

Wrong:

The choice defaults to allowing old versions...

http://www.tekrevue.com/ios-la...

"Apple has now clarified the process from an app developer perspective. The company emailed developers this week, officially informing them of the change to App Store policy, and offering options that let developers opt-out of the feature."

Actually, here's a 5 year old laptop (a reasonably high end one at that, the i7 720QM was a pretty awesome chip at the time).
Here's an iPhone 6.

It appears that actually, an iPhone 6 is indeed roughly as powerful as a 5 year old laptop, more powerful if you care about single core performance.

Sorry, but this is actually a bit more about user ignorance than anything else. Not only can you export the photos from iPhoto, as PapayaSF suggests (or drag-and-drop them, btw), but you can also prevent the OS from automatically opening iPhoto to import your camera's photos at all. As this article suggests, you can go to iPhoto's preferences (General section), and in the "Connecting camera opens:" field, choose Image Capture or no application at all. If you choose Image Capture, you can have it import your photos to any folder of your choosing in the Finder. You never have to use iPhoto again.

Should that setting be in System Preferences instead of iPhoto? Yes. Is it therefore kind of poorly implemented? Yes. Is this an example of vendor lock-in? No.

Vendor lock-in is more along the lines of changing the file format to a proprietary one as the files are imported, which iPhoto doesn't do. If you start poking around inside the iPhoto Library package file, you'll find that the original .jpg files are all there. Encrypted music or video files would actually be a much more meaningful example of vendor lock-in.