M2 Mac Mini Buyers Guide - Don’t Make These 9 Mistakes!

Apple just announced the M2 Mac Minis and some of these are the best value computers in the world but with that some are actually a terrible value now there are so many different configurations and options to choose from being able to upgrade your CPU your graphics your storage and your RAM so I'm gonna help you guys out so you guys don't make some major mistakes when you are purchasing one and with that once you start specking it up you get close to the price and even exceed the price of some of the Mac Studio so we'll also talk about who should buy a new Mac Mini and who should just get a Mac Studio potentially at a discounted price now before I jump in I have to let you know that we are giving away a Mac Mini and a new Macbook Pro and all you have to do is be subscribed to channel enable notifications and leave a comment on these videos during the launch week the more you watch and comment the better your chances and we are going to reveal the winner on February 1st so make sure you guys don't miss out on that now looking at this configuration right here we have three different choices from Apple the base one actually dropped by a hundred dollars compared to the M1 which really shocked us but not only that if you're gonna buy for educational prices you can get one for 499 which is absolutely insane now taking a look at the base model here it comes with the M2 Chip and the killer thing is that it comes with a full a core CPU and a 10 core GPU compared to the 1200 M2 MacBook Air where you actually have a weaker Bend Graphics in there that has eight cores and then you actually have to pay another hundred dollars thirteen hundred total to get the full performance where here you get all of that now that does not mean that it is without its issues because for the base storage the 256 gig SSD I presume that just like the M2 MacBook Air and M2 MacBook Pro it has just one nand storage chip which means that the performance is going to be half that compared to even the M1 Mac Mini and that does affect real world as well so if you're doing some productivity and some web browsing you can get some very major slowdowns so I would say even if you're buying a base model your budget's not very high go ahead and upgrade to the 512 gigabyte SSD because you don't only get double the storage but you also get much faster storage and with these machines if you have eight gigs of memory well you're going to use the SSD as RAM and that's going to make your machine much nappier and that will make your SSD last at least twice as long roughly 10 years compared to four or five which is a big deal and that is why Apple for their mitts stack model the only difference is that it comes with 512 gigabytes of SSD now we also have some differences between the M2 Chip and the M2 Pro Models now as you guys can see the price tag goes up significantly now a portion of that is because it also comes with 16 gigabytes of RAM so if we go into this mid-spec one and we jump up to 16 gigs it gives us two thousand dollars so we're going to talk about who should spend the extra money to get that M2 Chip but one difference other than that chip is the fact that the higher end M2 pro model has four Thunderbolt ports instead of two now that is very convenient we have been using the M1 Mac Mini for a while and it definitely is limiting having just two of those USB type-c ports you use it for storage use it for displays and that is nice to have now you can get a dock like like the OWC now the next mistake you can make is limiting your display connectivity the M2 Chip Mac minis have the same capability as the M1 so you could do a 6K display up to 60 hertz over Thunderbolt or if you're using the HDMI uh then you can use 4K 60. now with the M2 Pro chips you have much more power not only can you connect up to three displays two being 6K and then a 4K over HDMI but if you use two one of those could be 4K 144 Hertz which is great to have or if you only want one it is future proof because it could support 8K at 60 hertz or even 4K at 240 hertz this is a new standard that is just hitting the market right now with these the Max and the last physical difference is that the M2 pro model actually weighs more than the one with the regular M2 and I presume that is because as it has a better cooling system to handle a lot more power and with that it actually has a slightly more powerful power supply built into the machine and that means even when you're doing Simple tasks it should run a little bit cooler or have the fan be able to run slower getting back to the configurator if you're wondering if you should upgrade your SSD past 512 I would say don't make this mistake now while it is nice to have it built in you are spending two hundred dollars to get an extra 500 gigs of SSD now personally we love our saber rocket ssds I use mine all the time and for 220 you get a full one terabyte that is incredibly fast over Thunderbolts it could also be backwards compatible with USBC if you can plug it into a Mac so you can use it with a lot of computers not just the Mac Mini and it costs you practically the same amount now the same thing goes if you want to go up to two terabyte that is a 600 upgrade that's locked into your Mac compared to spending three hundred and sixty dollars for two terabytes that you can always keep with you so I'll leave a link to those down below now getting into RAM the second upgrade I would do other than going to 512 would be to jump to 16 gigs of unified memory doing both at SSD and that memory with this M2 Chip gave us great performance in a lot of applications for example if you do photo editing it definitely speeds that up and it helps across the board and the M2 Chip screams with 16 gigs of memory now here you can go all the way up to 24 gigabytes the M2 Pro can actually go higher but in our testing with the M2 MacBook gear and MacBook Pros for most applications because of the fast swap you don't really need to so unless you have unlimited budget I would say 16 gigs is a sweet spot even for productivity now the next stake is the ethernet port I bought my Mac Mini before we had this 10 gigabit Ethernet option and now I have to get rid of it to get a whole new one because you can't upgrade it now it's an extra 100 bucks and that makes ethernet port 10 times faster nowadays most people use Wi-Fi and so not everybody needs it but if you're gonna connect to a server or to a switch and you got to think about two three years from now that is money well spent but with that all of these new M2 Mac minis actually come with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 so not even the M2 MacBook airs have this and that means that if you upgrade your Wi-Fi router you might not even need to have that ethernet port the new routers are really fast so if you don't think you're gonna use it don't make the mistake by spending that extra hundred bucks now I think this 999 dollar configuration is going to be excellent for a lot of people even for 4K video editing prores because it has that decode as an encoders photo editing it's gonna scream compared to your previous Mac or Windows computer but with that for 300 more you can upgrade to that M2 Pro that has four Thunderbolt ports that has the better cooler included and that has all the support for the external displays now at the base here you actually do not get the full M2 Pro chip your CPUs bin so you have six performance cores instead of eight giving you a total of ten and the graphics has actually been as well 16 to 19. now if we go and we take a look at the performance of the M2 Pro compared to the M2 you will see that depending on what you're doing the gains don't seem like they're massively improved for example people the neural engine is the same in both models for video editing it is quite a bit faster because of the extra graphics performance and in productivity the difference is very very minimal so you have to think about what you're going to do now with that said we actually ordered three Mac minis because we are going to test out the difference depending on what real world tasks you are doing so here for video editing they show that we have pretty much double the scaling because I have extra graphics and for transcoding it's not double but you do have an improvement we're going to do much more tests so make sure you're subscribed and you have those notifications enabled now one thing that they don't show you on this chart so you have to make sure that you don't make this mistake is that when you're looking here they're not comparing the base models and they're not comparing that bend version that comes in at thirteen hundred dollars those performance differences even though sometimes they're not that big that goes off of the full on sixteen hundred dollar model and also with the ram kicked up even higher so I think for a lot of people you don't need to upgrade to the M2 Pro unless you know you need that absolute best performance now if you're wondering about upgrading 232 gigs of RAM well go ahead and check out my video comparing 16 gigs to 32 with the M1 Pro and how well the 16 gig version works it works a lot better than you expected and I think it's going to be very similar for this machine so don't make the mistake of upgrading your RAM unless you absolutely know that you need to and that video will help now the next mistake a major one that you can make is to spend two grand on an Mt Pro Mac Mini when for the same price you can ask actually get a Mac Studio but with that said some of you guys actually Should Skip on the Mac Studio and go for the M2 Pro so I'll help you guys decide now as I showed you you can actually pick one up for eighteen hundred dollars that's actually cheaper than the M2 Pro Mac Mini and it actually comes with a 10 gigabit Ethernet port which brings you up to 2100 for that Mac Mini now for those of you guys that do Graphics related tasks for example rendering in blender even doing photo or video editing that use the GPU this thing actually has a 24 core GPU at base or for 200 bucks you can actually upgrade to 32 core which is what we personally use here at Max Tech and that is a lot of performance more graphics performance than the M2 Pro now on the flip side if you use cpu-based tasks for example if you do a lot of photo editing with Lightroom well this thing actually has a worse CPU you then that Mac Mini which will have about 20 percent better CPU performance now don't worry we're gonna do a comparison between a high-end M2 Pro Mac mini versus the Mac Studio to help you guys decide based on what you guys do and I'm very excited for that now other than the chip the M1 Max that is in here the Mac Studio comes with an SD card slot which we absolutely love that it has that it also has two USB type A's but with the four Thunderbolt ports for the base models you also get two USB type-c ports which are really nice to have and when we tore this thing apart it has such a beefy cooler so it's silent no matter what you throw at it so for a lot of people the Mac Studio is going to make a lot more sense but the one downside is the HDMI port that is built into it only supports 4K 60 over the HDMI and then 6K 60 over the Thunderbolt Port so the Mac Mini is more future proof along with having Wi-Fi 6E and the latest Bluetooth as well but overall I have three configurations that I recommend the very base model if you only do web browsing and you're not a tight budget I would go at least up to 512 or 16 gigs as well to have a very well-rounded machine and if you want the extra ports and the connectivity go up to that thirteen hundred dollars but I would say stay away from the higher end prices because you start clashing with that Mac Studio so make sure you guys are subscribed and you comment down below enable notifications if you want a chance to win a Mac Mini or a MacBook Pro that will be given away on February 1st uh go ahead and check out the YouTube shopping feature if you want to pick up one of these machines check out one of those videos right over there and we'll see you in the next one [Music] thank you

Channel: Max Tech

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Id: x7bIHnSGovI

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023