Originally Posted by
evanking527 I purchased a used Mac Mini that came with OS X Yosemite. Since then I upgraded to OS X El Capitan and MacOS Sierra. It is a 2014 edition, 1.4 GHz Core i5 with 4 GB of RAM. I am primarily an iOS user, so I don’t know as much about the Mac. My iPhone 7 Plus and 12.9 iPad Pro are way faster than my Mac, so I tend to use my Mac less because of that. Since MacOS High Sierra is mostly cleanup and not as much new features, will this in theory speed up my Mac?
I can't answer about High Sierra. I hope so, since I also have a 2014 Mac mini, the one-step-up 2.6Ghz 8GB version. What I can tell you is that an SSD drive upgrade makes the mini a LOT faster in just about all tasks. And you don't have to tear the darn thing apart to achieve it: a good USB 3.0 SSD drive is nearly as fast as an internal swap. My $199 512GB USB drive does 400MB/sec reads and 300MB/sec writes (sequential, of course), which ain't bad for something you just plug in. I have it set as my external boot drive.
It's this one, but there are plenty other options as well.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...mUvbUpU2956655