Apple Mac mini 2012 very slow

No matter what upgrades you make to that Mac mini (Late 2012), you cannot upgrade the operating system past Catalina. Catalina is six major versions behind the current version of macOS (Tahoe) – which means it isn't good enough for vendors like Microsoft and Adobe who have a policy of supporting only "the most recent three."

Catalina is enough to run the current versions of the LibreOffice office suite, and of the Firefox browser, although it is no longer enough to run current versions of other major browsers.

If the machine has suddenly become slow, I would suspect

• A failing hard drive,
• A too-full hard-drive, or
• Recently-installed software

as being more likely causes than a lack of RAM. Especially if you keep Activity Monitor open while running a heavy (by your standards) workload, and the Memory Pressure graph contains all greens (no yellows or reds).

If you do upgrade RAM, note that that Mac mini can take a maximum of 16 GB (2 x 8 GB). Macs can be picky about RAM – and I would suggest buying RAM only from OWC. The other "go to" vendor for compatible RAM was Crucial – who seems to have gotten out of that business.

Other World Computing – OWC Memory Upgrades For Mac mini (2012)

Ve2Oz wrote:

have an apple Mac mini 10 yrs old can l update its very slow?

The 2012 Mac mini is going to be 14 years old in a few months. As mentioned you can upgrade the HDD to a 2.5" SATA SSD and add up to 16GB of RAM, but it will still only be able to run Catalina which is no longer supported.

I recommend buying a new M4 Mac mini for $600 instead of wasting $200 or $300 on the obsolete 2012 Mac mini.

see > Buy Mac mini - Apple

The slowness could be caused by your machine being filled with garbage accumulated over the years.

However, I have one which is in good condition but painfully slow by modern standards.

You could increase the RAM and fit a new SSD but that would only make a marginal improvement and would probably be a waste of money.

The best way to improve it would be to purchase a new base model M4 which is £599 (UK) but can be bought on Amazon etc. for under £530.

The difference between the 2 is almost in the region of light years . . . around 10X faster!

PS. My wife now uses my 2012 as she can't tell the difference!

I installed SSD to my Mac mini late 2009 running El Capitan and it is very fine for light browsing with Firefox 78.15.0esr.

And it shines when importing miniDV/D8 via its built-in Firewire to iMovie HD 6.0.3. Then those .dv clips can optionally be archived and post-processed in newer Macs (although also Mac mini 2018 can still import DV/D8 to Final Cut Pro in Sequoia if you have the needed Firewire adapters).