Going to either buy an old Mac mini or old Mac Pro. Looking for a small model I can put on my desk.
I have a monitor(my tv) and it will be used for music composition and watching movies.
Where I am (UK), they seem similarly priced, any suggestions as to what models to go for/avoid?
Thanks so much.
I take "bin" is UK's English's word for what American English people call "trashcan" and you are referring to the 2013 Mac Pro when you say Mac Pro (bin)?
Personally I would go with a 2018 Mac Mini over a 2013 Mac Pro at this point. The 2013 Mac Pro was a nice if imperfect machine for its time but the 2018 Mac Mini has 5 years on it such that what was a low-end model is now comparable to that higher-end but even older model. At the same time its got 5 years of technology refreshes on it. Official support for the 2013 Mac Pro in MacOS ended with Monetary (MacOS 12) while the 2018 Mini is still supported in Sonoma (MacOS 14). I bet the 2018 Mac Mini will still be supported in MacOS 15 possibly 16.
Key advantages of the 2018 Mac Mini:
-Intel Skylake processors versus Ivy Bridge (the latter can't support software that uses so-called Haswell instructions which are becoming increasingly common in CPU-intense software and may be a requirement of some video decoders and audio processing tools)
-HDMI 2.0 versus HDMI 1.4 -- the former can't do 4K@60 among other limitations
-Thunderbolt 3 versus Thunderbolt 2 -- the latter has less 3rd-party hardware support
-USB 3.1 Gen 2 versus USB 3.0 ports -- the latter is half as fast and some devices may require the former
-Bluetooth 5.0 versus 4.0
-Physically smaller
-Much lower power usage
Disadvantages: The memory on the 2013 Mac Pro is the higher-quality ECC type and the high-end discrete graphics on Mac Pro will be faster for 3D rendering and so-called GPU-accelerated applications than the Intel 630 integrated graphics on Mac Mini. I don't believe either of these will be significant to you.
I have an Mac Mini 2018 with i3 processor and under constantly surprised how well it runs. It was as smooth as butter on Mojave even with 8 GB of RAM. Unlike more recent Macs the memory on the 2018 is upgradable at any time so don't worry about getting an 8 GB model. You can always upgrade to 32 or 64 GB for not too much money though you'll probably want to pay a professional to do the installation since opening the case is harder than the Mac Pro. Also the i5 and i7 versions are of course faster than the i3 but not sure if will be noticeable to you.
P.S.Any Apple Silicon-based Mac Mini will be faster and more future-proof than any 2018 Intel-based one at this point but I assumed with the above that you already eliminated those as an option. But if you do go in this direction I would find the extra money to get a model with 16GB of RAM since RAM is not future-upgradable on any Apple Silicon-based Mac.
