Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)

Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in it, of course.

I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF. Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.

Yeah smcfancontrol is a must. I keep the fan around ~3000rpm during moderate use and bump it up to 5000rpm or max it out if I'm going to game or render something. I've been tempted to look into TB2 to TB3 adapters and eGPU's but its a janky solution to extending the life of an 8+ year old machine.

11-inch 2011 MacBook Air here. It's my main machine.

I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.

I wish they could just give me that machine with a modern screen and an M1 chip.

Those things are beasts and have incredible ergonomic profile. I just bought one last year, with an i7 and 1tb ssd. Love it almost as much (for other reasons obviously) as my $23,000 Mac pro music rig purchased about the same time.

I have a near death grip on my late 2012 Mac mini i7 (upgraded to 16GB and 2 1TB ssds) It has stood the test of time and to me is an engineering marvel.

Aside from gaming it can last another 10 years.

For longevity, I keep it on its side and replaced the bottom lid with an aluminum mesh lid. This has made it near silent for 80% of my tasks (programmer centric). I also regularly clean out the fan.

Same here - I was tempted to upgrade when the newer mac intel models came out, but the soldered RAM / SSD bullshit kept me off them. I've hear that the 2012 mac mini can theoretically support 32 GB RAM (as other similar i7 processor devices can) - I think I'll try that 5 years down the lane for the heck of it. For now, 16 GB RAM and an SSD disk make it a very capable machine, that can (as you rightly pointed out) last for another decade.

My 2012 MacBook Pro (the very first retina model) is 100% usable as daily driver. Only problem is it needs a new battery.