then the 2014 can be superior, as it has the nice advantage of Monterey support and dead simple SSD upgrades. I would say that if you need raw CPU speed, the higher end 2012 models are better, but if you just need speed which is more than sufficient for mainstream business applications, mail, surfing, etc.
It's really nice having current support, at least for a few years. And there is even a chance this 2014 might get macOS 13 too. It's great having my secondary desktop machine, the Mac mini, also on Monterey. My 2017 MacBook is already on Monterey, and my 2017 iMac is on Big Sur but will be on Monterey as soon as 12.1 is released. The reason I wanted the 2014 is because Catalina is beginning to show its age now, as there was a fairly significant change in the aesthetics at Big Sur, which was further expanded upon in Monterey. You might to need to spend another $5 to $10 for the screwdriver, but I already had one. The cost for the 500 GB SSD + adapter was about US$50. All you need to do is remove the back cover, with care to note that the Airport antenna is attached there, but you don't even have to disconnect that antenna. A beginner can do it in less than 10 minutes, with very low risk of damaging anything, since there is no need to disassemble it. It was basically unusable with the hard drive, but the NVMe SSD upgrade is extremely simple. I got the 8 GB model with 1 TB hard drive. Old thread I know, but I just wanted to say I'm very pleased with my 2014 Mac mini, for my business applications and mainstream consumer usage. You can compare specs and benchmarks of your two Mini's here, the 2012 CPU is twice as fast.
I don't see any improvement in performance on the 2014 Mini with the Iris chip. Did all the development on a 2012 2.6ghz quad i7 Mini. I created a website that uses webGL and 3js to render 3d terrain models from LIDAR imagery. Honestly, I don't even think the Iris is much of an upgrade over the HD4000. The higher end 2014 Mini's have the Intel Iris graphics chip, but that 1.4ghz model has the Intel HD5000 which isn't much of an upgrade from the HD4000 in the 2012. I am using a 2014 2.8ghz/8gb Mini as an iTunes server now, and it is much better. Now, the 4gb memory bottleneck was a big issue on mine, so I'm sure 8gb helps, but I still wouldn't touch it. It was fine for that (just running iTunes 24/7 with home sharing) but was virtually unusable for everything else. That 1.4ghz 2014 Mini is a disaster, I have one (but only 4gb RAM) and used it for a few years as an iTunes server. The 2012 will just run circles around the 2014.
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