Compact and relatively inexpensive, the Mac Mini computer does not ship with a monitor. You can connect it to an Apple monitor, but Apple does not offer a lot of selection in its monitors and the prices are often higher than those of other manufacturers. Using the right adapter, you can connect the Mac Mini to any computer screen with a VGA port. While the Mac Mini ships with an HDMI-to-DVI adapter for connecting to a monitor's DVI port, few brands besides Apple use DVI.

Best Use For Mac Mini

Read on for our reasons why you shouldn't buy a Mac mini right now. For more general advice, have a read of our Mac buying guide, and our roundup of the best Mac deals. It hasn't been updated in. That distant Mac mini is going to be a server more than a machine for general, everyday working. So if that's you, get a cheap wireless keyboard for occasional use.

Ports and Adapters

The Mac Mini has two ports you can use for connecting it to a screen: Thunderbolt port and an HDMI port. To connect to most computer monitors, which have a VGA port, you can use a MiniDisplayPort to VGA adapter connected to the Thunderbolt port. The Thunderbolt port also supports monitors with a Mini DisplayPort, DVI or Dual-Link DVI port using the appropriate adapter for each monitor. In addition to the DVI cable it came with, the Mac Mini's HDMI port can connect to an HDTV using an HDMI cable.

Connecting the Screen

Because most Mac video adapters are only 2 or 3 inches long, they are almost always too short to reach the screen -- so you'll need a monitor cable, too. After you connect the cable and adapter to the screen and the Mac Mini and power them on, the Mac Mini should automatically detect the monitor. If it doesn't, turn off both the monitor and the Mac Mini, turn on the monitor, and then restart the Mac Mini.

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Configuration

In most cases, the Mac Mini should automatically detect the optimal display settings for the screen it's connected to. If you need to adjust the settings, open System Preferences from the Apple menu and select 'Display.' Under the Display tab, you can adjust the display resolution after selecting the 'Scaled' option. You can also manually adjust the brightness by dragging the slider. To adjust the color settings, click the 'Color' tab.

Older Mac Minis

Mac Minis manufactured between early 2009 and mid-2011 come with a Mini DisplayPort instead of a Thunderbolt port. These use the same Mini DisplayPort adapters as models with Thunderbolt to connect to DVI, dual DVI or VGA screens. If your Mac Mini was manufactured in 2008 or earlier, it has a DVI video output port on the back, which connects to any VGA cable for use on a monitor. If you aren't certain which model you have, you can check on the Apple website (see Resources) to identify the model from its serial number.

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After several years of silence on the Mac Mini front, fans of Apple's diminutive desktop computing slab had given up hope of ever getting a replacement. But in the 2018 models, Apple's delivered a great upgrade, with only one possible drawback.

In addition to modernizing the connection options with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, updating to HDMI 2.0 and offering a 10-gigabit Ethernet option, Apple fixed one of the big complaints about the 2014 model: soldered memory. Upgradable memory is back, and it takes two industry-standard DDR4 SO-DIMMs. Best usb hubs for mac msuci production.

But like most Apple products, it's not really end-user upgradable, requiring a trip to a service center. This undercuts one of the perks, namely being able to buy less expensive memory elsewhere. But if it's going to be another four years until Apple updates the Mini again, then every little bit of upgradability helps.

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I had some time with the 'cheap' entry-level model, equipped with an Intel Core i3-8100B, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. There isn't much to say about how it feels to use it: It's similar to the old model. It drove the Dell Ultrathin 27 S2719DC display via Thunderbolt without any unexpected issues, and produced HDR on the monitor through the HDMI.

The B series of the Core processors are new low-profile, thermally capped versions of their desktop counterparts designed for embedded systems and mini PCs, which is how Apple managed to switch from the last generation's mobile processors while keeping essentially the same design, and with no increase in fan noise.

Though the price of entry has gone up from $500 to $800 (£400 to £800 or AU$620 to AU$1,249), much faster than the pace of inflation over the same period, it's still not out of line. The comparable Windows configurations in a compact design -- and there really aren't many -- are actually pretty expensive in comparison. Examples include the HP Z2 Mini G4 workstation (about $1,000 for an i3-8100, 8GB and 256GB SSD) or the HP EliteDesk 800 G4 (almost $1,300 for an i3-8100T, 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD).

But it's not really an inexpensive system, either. That $800 doesn't include a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or monitor, so really you're looking at about $1,000 just for that base configuration if you only spend about $110 on a monitor. The least expensive iMac ($1,599 at Amazon) is $1,100, though it's a far less capable system.

Performance of the base model is fine, about what you'd expect given the components, but in general I really recommend you skip the quad-core i3 and head for at least the hexacore i5, not just for the speed boost, but for the futureproofing. An increasing number of applications are taking advantage of more cores, and for premium systems quad core is over. While the Mac Mini is inexpensive for Apple, it's still essentially premium -- after all, you can configure it with up to $4,200 (£3,860, AU$6,660) worth of components.

Plus, the i3 operates at a fixed processor speed of 3.6GHz; it doesn't incorporate Intel's Turbo Boost technology, which holds it back.

We didn't rebenchmark the 2014 Mac Mini for comparison, but Apple would have had to actively try to slow it down in order to deliver worse performance than those four-year-old components.

Bigger on the outside

So what's the drawback? For many pros, it may be hamstrung by Intel's integrated graphics processor. I'm not saying it needs a powerful gaming or rendering GPU. A Kaby Lake G CPU, for example, would be a nice alternative to the i3 simply to make the system low-end VR ready, to take some of the video decoding burden or to help reduce overhead in audio production. (With only four cores, that CPU may not match the performance of the i5 and i7 eighth-generation hexacore processors.)

Best Use For Mac Mini