I've just finished doing something similar. My mac mini was from 2011 and the harddisk had just died. It was an awkward year in that an SSD can be fitted to replace the mechanical drive, but it would be limited to half-speed on the controller.
The replacement is a NUC from last year (NUC7i5BNK), but there did not seem to be any point installing macos on it - over the years Apple seem to have crammed in a lot of stuff that I don't like and made it much worse as a small cheap unix workstation.
It's running FreeBSD instead and the difference in size / performance / efficiency is remarkable. It's sad that Apple have let the mac mini line die such a slow protracted death, but unless you are determined to be walled inside Apple's ecosystem there is very little reason to get one.
The replacement is a NUC from last year (NUC7i5BNK), but there did not seem to be any point installing macos on it - over the years Apple seem to have crammed in a lot of stuff that I don't like and made it much worse as a small cheap unix workstation.
It's running FreeBSD instead and the difference in size / performance / efficiency is remarkable. It's sad that Apple have let the mac mini line die such a slow protracted death, but unless you are determined to be walled inside Apple's ecosystem there is very little reason to get one.