Older Mac Mini make for excellent Roon Core’s based on my experience. I have Roon Core setup on (2) Late 2012 Mac mini. Both Macs were upgraded to have the same specs.
16gb memory
500gb internal SSD
1tb external Thunderbolt SSD
Differences is that one machine is dedicated to run Roon. It has been setup with the optimizations that have been recommend on the the web. Mainly auto updates for Apple and Roon are turned off and Wifi disabled. Reason being when updates are available from Roon and Apple they are allowed to run on the second Mac which is set up as a typical Mac ie auto updates, cloud service wifi and all other fluff is turned on. This allows me to insure stability of Roon with updates before allowing them to be run on the dedicated machine.
This setup allows rock-solid performance to the nine zones that include Meridian, Apple IOS, and SBox3 around the home. A further note is that I have not had any of the issues that have been reported using IOS devices as remotes. Currently have 1st gen iPad Pro, iPad mini, iPhone X, and X1 as remotes. Most of my listening is via Qobuz followed by local library stored externally with Flac files imported with DB Poweramp.
Hoope this info helps with your decision.
