Oh look, Mr. Inconsistent Blog Poster is back. But let’s not have that conversation right now. I know I’ve promised several times to post more regularly, but I am clearly a disappointment to myself. Just to get a few life updates out of the way: I am currently unemployed, looking for work. I learned French, up to the B2 level and I’m planning to take either the TEF or TCF exam soon. And I completed a 3-year university program with BCS in 2 years. I also created a buymeacoffee profile, but for sandwiches, so if you’d like to support the content creation journey which I’m about to re-embark upon, it’ll be much appreciated. Cool? Cool.
Alright, I need to replace my late 2012 Mac mini. I’ve gone back to doing some React Native development recently (existing codebase, not by choice, but there’s money to be made), especially targeting iOS devices, and the mini just doesn’t cut it anymore. I had heard good things about the M2 Pro processor, and I was considering a replacement Mac mini, but the prices for the configuration are just too goddamn high! I initially thought that the 2012 mini was at the end of life due to the fact that I needed to run XCode 14.2, which only works on the official macOS releases that run on Apple Silicon. However, I was able to actually upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur (using Patched Sur), and then from Big Sur to Monterey (using OpenCore). The bad news is everything runs quite slowly, but I had a lightbulb moment!
The late 2012 Mac mini is a machine with an Intel CPU, which means if I could get the latest release of Apple running on that, then I should be able to get it working on other Intel machines as well. The bigger surprise? I was actually able to get Monterey 12.6.4 running on my AMD build (considering I haven’t purchased Intel for over 6 years now). The spec sheet: Ryzen 2700 with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, ASRock B450M Pro4 motherboard, NVIDIA Geforce RTX 2060 graphics and a spare 500GB Crucial MX500 SSD I had lying around. It actually worked (EFI here if you’re interested), but there’s no hardware acceleration due to the fact that NVIDIA GPU support has been dropped from macOS, so I have to manage until I can afford to purchase an AMD graphics card, which isn’t available locally. The plan is to get a cheap 5500XT which allegedly works great. Thing were looking good, then I decided to try out running an Android emulator, only to be greeted with a nasty error that virtualisation isn’t working, although I have SVM enabled in the BIOS. Turns out I need an Intel CPU to be able to get this to work.
The ideal Mac mini M2 Pro configuration that I was aiming for cost $2,199.
- M2 Pro 12-Core CPU | 19-Core GPU
- 32GB Unified RAM
- 1TB SSD
- Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) | Bluetooth 5.3
- I/O: 4 x Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports, 1x USB-A 3.1 Gen 1, 1x HDMI, 3.5mm headphone jack, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet Port
I put together an Intel build on pcpartpicker matching spec for spec, including discrete graphics which practically costs half, and performs way better with the benchmark scores available online. Look, I get that inflation is crazy all over the world right now, but this Apple tax is just something else! And there’s no way I’m willing to pay anything close to that.
I’ve been growing wary of tinkering (looking at you, Linux) and building software from source as I have become older because things that just work make life easier, but I’m excited to get back into this once again considering what can be achieved. Thanks Apple!