Computer Collection: Late 2012 Mac mini

About

My third Mac, this was. For £250 this was what you could get for a desktop Mac on eBay in probably late 2019 on eBay. With the venerable Core i5 returning once again, it was my main desktop until I ultimately stopped using it in favour of consolidating my usage into one system: Phobos. This was around late 2020, early 2021.

Ultimately, this has been the least troublesome Mac I've owned. No frills, just a big slab of aluminium with Mac components inside, and it's easy to service (for a Mac) too.

This was the last Mac I daily drove until Deimos arrived in April 2022.

It has a slightly interesting history despite the mark of 'least troublesome'. See that down in the trivia section.

The specs below were its final operating configuration.

Specs

CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M (2C4T, 2.5GHz/3.1GHz, 35W TDP)

RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz SODIMM (2x4GB)

GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1.5GB (shared system memory)

SSD: Kingston A400 240GB SATA 2.5"

OS: macOS 10.14.6 Mojave

Monitor: Dell P2210f 22"

Trivia

• One of the sticks of RAM shipped with this system actually failed not too long after I got it, producing the sad beep code for bad RAM when powered on. I swapped it for one of my own spare sticks.
• I scavenged the Kingston A400 SSD from this Mac mini to become the boot drive for Callisto.
• I also scavenged some of the RAM, as Callisto is quite picky about what RAM it will boot with. Typical!
• Once called Xenon, the name has since fallen out of favour because it's not being used, and I also name my systems after planets, asteroids etc now instead of elements on the periodic table.
• I'm too sentimental to sell it.
• This was the third Mac I successfully managed to do a thermal paste refresh on. The first being the Mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro, and the second being Deimos.