Peter Bright, for Ars Technica:

[…] the new Mac mini is a compromised box that’s engineered to be quite small. If you’re wedded to macOS, then it does the job well enough. It’s not bad as such, and it’s certainly a solid upgrade over the 2014 system. But there’s nothing this device particularly excels at, and there’s no real scenario where it leaps out at me as being the ideal, obvious choice. It’s the Mac you buy when you know you need to buy a Mac… and you’ve already ruled out all the other systems Apple has on offer.

After Apple’s appalling history in keeping the Mac Mini relevant and updated, people are applauding the new model. It does get a lot of things right, but imagine if the Mac Mini managed to fit just the following hardware inside its case:

• the newer Core i9-9900K 8-core 16-thread (95 W) or the Core i7-9700K 8-core 8-thread (95 W) CPU
• a single PCIe slot

Even if Apple decided not to offer user-accessible M.2 NVMe flash storage instead of its proprietary standard (and easily user-accessible RAM), people would go crazy for this machine. I can easily see this Mac instantly becoming one of the bestselling models ever. I know I’d get one.