- Joined
- Aug 18, 2012
- Messages
- 57
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 6
- Location
- Orange County CA
- Your Mac's Specs
- MacBook Pro 15" mid 2012 16 gb ram
I bought a second hand Mac Mini mid 2010 about a year ago. It was maxed out to 8 GB RAM by the previous owner, but still has the original 320 GB 5400 RPM hard drive. The processor is a Core 2 Duo at 2.4 GHz.
It is my first Mac. My intended use is for iOS development. But it took me a year to find the time to begin the learning process, lol!. My day job is doing B2B website development w/ MS ASP.NET & C#. In a perfect world, I'd probably dedicate more time to programming in the Apple universe and write it off as my mid life crisis! For the foreseeable future, I'll be Windows oriented in my career, but playing w/ Macs and iDevices in my free time.
That said, I'm now at the point where my Mini doesn't meet my needs processing wise. It is OK with running a few applications, browsing the net and watching Netflix etc. And it can handle development work for now. But virtualization brings it to its knees. I've been running VMWare Fusion off and on since last year. I am now testing out a trial version of Parallels Desktop. Neither virtualization solution runs very well on my current hardware, though Parallels does seems faster.
I've given some thought to upgrading the hard drive to a 512 GB SSD. My other idea is getting a new Mac Mini w/ an i7 and selling my current model. I've also considered one of the new MacBook Air models. But that is too much for now.
I wonder how an SSD upgrade will help, especially with virtualization. My RAM is maxed out at 8 GB. The hard drive is the only upgrade option possible wo/ getting a new machine.
Any thoughts, opinions, advice, etc. ???
It is my first Mac. My intended use is for iOS development. But it took me a year to find the time to begin the learning process, lol!. My day job is doing B2B website development w/ MS ASP.NET & C#. In a perfect world, I'd probably dedicate more time to programming in the Apple universe and write it off as my mid life crisis! For the foreseeable future, I'll be Windows oriented in my career, but playing w/ Macs and iDevices in my free time.
That said, I'm now at the point where my Mini doesn't meet my needs processing wise. It is OK with running a few applications, browsing the net and watching Netflix etc. And it can handle development work for now. But virtualization brings it to its knees. I've been running VMWare Fusion off and on since last year. I am now testing out a trial version of Parallels Desktop. Neither virtualization solution runs very well on my current hardware, though Parallels does seems faster.
I've given some thought to upgrading the hard drive to a 512 GB SSD. My other idea is getting a new Mac Mini w/ an i7 and selling my current model. I've also considered one of the new MacBook Air models. But that is too much for now.
I wonder how an SSD upgrade will help, especially with virtualization. My RAM is maxed out at 8 GB. The hard drive is the only upgrade option possible wo/ getting a new machine.
Any thoughts, opinions, advice, etc. ???