The BTO Mac mini failed to beat the 2011 high-end Mac mini in Portal 2 and Cinebench Open GL tests. The scores would’ve been even higher had Apple offered a discreet graphics upgrade alternative to the capable-if somewhat lackluster-Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. That makes sense, seeing how the high-end 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has the same 2.6GHz quad-core Core i7 processor as the BTO Mac mini and uses flash storage instead of standard rotational hard drives. The BTO Mac mini’s combination of extra RAM, a speedy SSD, and a quad-core Core i7 processor was so good, its performance earned a Speedmark 8 score just below theġ5-inch Retina MacBook Pros. As you can see, our benchmark tests bear that out. Hybrid drive, which houses a SSD and a hard drive in one mechanism.) Data is written to the SSD first, so the idea is that you get SSD speeds but with the capacity of standard hard drives.

(A Fusion Drive is not Apple’s special implementation of a Fusion Drive gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together a separate 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and presenting them to both the user and applications as a single drive. SSDs are fast as all get out, but they have very limited capacity and they cost a lot more than traditional drives. I’ll dig deeper into the Fusion Drive in my next article, but in brief, Fusion Drive is Apple’s answer to the high-price-per-gigabyte problem of solid-state drives.

The BTO Mac mini’s PCMark productivity test score (using VMWare Fusion) was three times higher than the high-end standard configuration’s score. The standard configuration $799 Mac mini with its 5400-rpm hard drive took more than three times as long to complete our copy file and uncompress file tests as the Fusion Drive did in the BTO Mac mini. Fusion Drive that really kicked the BTO Mac mini into overdrive.

Late 2017 mac mini