Still a great little machine but...
I'm so glad I got my maxed-out 2012 mini a few months ago. This puppy punches well about its weight. As to the amount of memory it uses, well at the moment I've got 460MB free out of 16GB—that might seem like very little but in actuality, just over 7GB is being used by apps, there's nearly 7GB in the File Cache and when you look at Memory Pressure, Apple's nifty tool for consolidating the various kinds of memory into one easy to read graph, it stubbornly stays green. I've never seen it get to amber even when giving the box a righteous thrashing and the whole machine remains very responsive.
It's a pity that there's no longer a quad core option but I think that's down to the Haswell quad cores having a different socket, which would necessitate Apple building two different logic boards. All in all, it's a pretty good refresh of the line and the lower price points make it attractive for the first-time buyer.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
