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Discussion on: Making the switch from laptop to desk

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Scott Tadman

One of the nice things about the Mini is you can have fairly capable desktop that's always-on and uses very little power plus a basic MacBook for about the same price as a high-end MacBook Pro.

I bought a base MacBook Pro and a top-end Mini in 2012 and they've served me very well. I'm only upgrading now because of the six-core option and vastly expanded memory capacity.

With Thunderbolt drives you should be able to get really good performance (40Gbit/s!) off of external devices, a rate that's about twice as fast as the best non-enterprise SSD you can buy. Having limited internal storage isn't a huge problem, but it's a shame Apple isn't using a standard m.2 connector here. Being able to upgrade that would be nice.

The best part of upgrading is plugging in your Time Machine drive, giving it an hour or two to restore, and picking up exactly where you left off.