[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?

[Tinkernaught]

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

[evanking527]

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.

When you turn on your Mac, do you have to do anything special like hold down Cmd R or something, or can you set it to boot automatically from the external drive each time?

[Tinkernaught]

When you turn on your Mac, do you have to do anything special like hold down Cmd R or something, or can you set it to boot automatically from the external drive each time?

It boots right up with no special procedure, just as if it was the internal drive. The latter, BTW, I use as backup boot drive and Time Machine. Slow mechanical 1TB drives are fine for backup use.