What to do with a Mac Mini?

[Bruno_A]

Hello all,

 

The story (You can skip this)

I work for the IT department of a school. The school was replacing some fully working Mac Minis and I grabbed two of them for myself. Understandably, I had to have them without the SSDs, so, I had to provide my own. They are both a massive pain in the ass to get them to work, but one already is, after a long "fight". One of them, when I install the unpartitioned SSD in, and plug everything in (keyboard, mouse, monitor and power), and it will not display an image for several minutes (about 10 minutes) and when it does, it will come with a "No bootable device found - press any key", or something along the lines, basically saying it can't boot, error, and this is with a bootable USB of OS X Mojave plugged in. The other one, however, also takes ages to display an image, but when it does, it actually boots from the USB and allows me to install the OS X to the SSD. Happy days, one of them is fully working and currently updating to OS X Catalina.

 

Long story short

I got two Core i5 Mac Minis for free and so far, only one is working, but I should be able to get the second one to work.

 

What could I do with them?

I might keep one to use as a dektop, as I might come to a point where I need a second "workstation" that will not be used for anything intensive. Any ideas on what I could do with them in the meantime? Any cool projects I could give a try? They could be great low-power servers, but I don't need one now.

 

Many thanks,

Bruno

[Bombastinator]

If you’ve got spare internet bandwidth there’s folding.  If one thinks of them as gigantic overpowered arduinos there is everything people use those for as well.  Are they resellable?

[Bruno_A]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

If you’ve got spare internet bandwidth there’s folding.  If one thinks of them as gigantic overpowered arduinos there is everything people use those for as well.  Are they resellable?

Yes, they are actually still worth a bit of money. Given that I got them for free, I'd rather not sell them.

[Donut417]

56 minutes ago, Bruno_A said:

What could I do with them?

 

Plex server. Heard they work pretty well as one. My i5 3570K does Plex fine, even with transcoding up to 1080p content. So..... Id imagne the Mac mini would do the same. 

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Bruno_A said:

Hello all,

 

The story (You can skip this)

I work for the IT department of a school. The school was replacing some fully working Mac Minis and I grabbed two of them for myself. Understandably, I had to have them without the SSDs, so, I had to provide my own. They are both a massive pain in the ass to get them to work, but one already is, after a long "fight". One of them, when I install the unpartitioned SSD in, and plug everything in (keyboard, mouse, monitor and power), and it will not display an image for several minutes (about 10 minutes) and when it does, it will come with a "No bootable device found - press any key", or something along the lines, basically saying it can't boot, error, and this is with a bootable USB of OS X Mojave plugged in. The other one, however, also takes ages to display an image, but when it does, it actually boots from the USB and allows me to install the OS X to the SSD. Happy days, one of them is fully working and currently updating to OS X Catalina.

 

Long story short

I got two Core i5 Mac Minis for free and so far, only one is working, but I should be able to get the second one to work.

 

What could I do with them?

I might keep one to use as a dektop, as I might come to a point where I need a second "workstation" that will not be used for anything intensive. Any ideas on what I could do with them in the meantime? Any cool projects I could give a try? They could be great low-power servers, but I don't need one now.

 

Many thanks,

Bruno

If they are a 2012 model or newer, they're perfectly usable. Just replace the hard drive and install Catalina or Mojave. 

 

The one that isn't booting up correctly, you need to press and hold the option key (ALT key) and that should do it. YMMV

 

The entire "takes ages to display", without an OS on the system drive probably has it polling for a recovery OS connection to Apple. So it might not do that after an OS is installed to the system drive.