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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.