M2 Mac Mini Review $599 - Don't Listen to the Critics!

Apple shocked everyone with the announcement of the new Mac Mini M2 and its price it comes in 100 cheaper than the previous generation with a better processor but is it cost savings too good to be true or is this the ultimate desktop machine made for both consumers and professionals hi guys in today's video we're going to go over a detailed review of the M2 Mac Mini the base model with the 256 gigabytes and eight gigabytes of RAM and see if this is a device that's right for you and what Apple really claims it to be and if you're new here my name is Manny ritol I post Tech and Apple related content on a weekly basis so hit that subscribe button to stay in touch with all the new videos now before we get into the review I want to talk about the review unit itself it comes with the M2 CPU which is the 8 core version and a 10 core GPU and it's all integrated with Apple's neural engines this is similar to amd's ryzen apus where you have the video card and the CPU all integrated into a single chip now this Mac Mini in particular comes with 256 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigabytes of unified memory now talking about the form factor about the mini and it stays true to its name this is the unit itself as you can see it's very very small and very Sleek it's made out of both plastic and aluminum with the majority of being in aluminum casing very sturdy with absolutely no flex whatsoever the unit itself is actually quite simplistic in design there are no buttons along the front and side of the unit just a simple LED light to let you know when the unit is on or off and in the rear you have the ports you have two standard USB ports you have Thunderbolt ports which is USBC you have an ethernet port for a wired ethernet connection which is very very interesting and I'm glad that Apple included this as well you have a headphone jack so Apple allows you for both Bluetooth connection and wired connection for your headset and very interesting it does have the same vent as the last gen mini so an actual physical fan it's not passive Cooling and other than that that's really all there is to the form factor of the unit itself now another thing very interesting about this Mac Mini and previous Mac minis which I did not know is that it actually has built-in speakers so it's an added bonus for me I was expecting to buy a Bluetooth headset or a Bluetooth set of speakers to connect to this but it's nice surprise to have them all built in here the speakers themselves are not the best sounding but they're there and I can't really complain about them now moving on to the performance of this unit I want to talk about the M2 processor which is an upgrade from the previous Mac Mini that had the M1 now on paper and generic Benchmark tests the M2 is about seven percent faster than the M1 but I've stated this in the past these generic benchmarking tests don't really paint the entire picture people want to understand how this unit will function in a day-to-day work setting now the hardware is an ecosystem of a bunch of parts that work together and the processor is just one component of all of that so I've actually set up a generic benchmarking test which I'm going to talk about very soon and I'm going to compare this to my M1 MacBook Air and my desktop PC to see how well this unit actually performs now before we get into the benchmarking test I just want to touch on the SSD and this Mac Mini it's a 256 gigabyte SSD that is the nand or nand version so a lot of people have stated that Apple has cut costs by using this specific SSD model in here I did the performance test I get around 1500 megabytes read and 1500 megabytes write speeds which is actually quite good but relative to my M1 that had the 512 gigabyte SSD that got 2800 megabytes in right and around 3000 megabytes in read now right off the bat people will say well that's a 50 decrease and that's a significant discrepancy between the older and a new generation now we'll see if whether or not the speeds of the new SSD which are slower than the previous gen actually affect this performance and you'll actually be surprised so to establish the parameters of this test I wanted it to be as similar and as close to all units as possible so the same test is performed on the M2 my older M1 and on my desktop I loaded up a video file that I recently uploaded to YouTube it is around seven gigabytes in raw and I wanted it to export into a 5.5 gigabyte 4K video with a Target bitrate of 70 megabytes per second now each unit both the M2 the M1 and my desktop had both Chrome and application open to replicate you know a multitasking situation now surprisingly the M2 mini was able to export this video in 5 minutes and 45 seconds now my M1 that has 16 gigabytes of RAM and a faster SSD actually took around 7 minutes and 45 seconds to do the same thing now to really change things up and to really replicate what a person would be doing in the real life I opened up Chrome and if anybody knows anything about Chrome it is a memory hog so what I decided to do is I loaded up three videos each with three separate tabs all playing simult tendency and I re-ran the same test and surprisingly believe it or not it took the M2 Mini the same amount of time to export that exact same video as it did without having all those three videos running simultaneously even for the M1 the same thing happened 7 minutes and 45 seconds and to put everything into perspective my Standalone Desktop Windows machine that has a ryzen 7 3800 X CPU and a dedicated video card with eight gigabytes of gddr5 RAM the RTX 2060 did this all about in about five minutes and 10 seconds so just off the bat you understand how powerful this M2 Mac Mini is and how those SSD speeds that I you know mentioned previously didn't really affect the outcome it's actually about like 30 faster than the M1 unit at such a cheap price point a lot of YouTubers have made such a big deal and concern about the slower SSD speeds and I'm here to tell you that is that's all bogus don't fall for that trap the value for the base model here is incredible and I actually suggest this model for a lot of users now having said all those positives I do have to address the elephant in the room about the 256 gigabyte SSD in terms of virtual memory and Its Right Cycles so let's take a step back what is the right cycle right cycle is how many times you can read and erase the full capacity of your hard drive for example one right cycle for a 256 gigabyte SSD would be writing 256 gigabytes and then erasing 256 gigabytes that's one it takes about 2500 to 3000 write Cycles before the life of your SSD ceases so after that point the transistors within the SSD are no longer functional and your SSD just fails you're probably thinking well 2500 to 3 000 that's that's a lot I'll never use that much space till never write an erase that much the issue plays in when it comes to virtual memory virtual memory is using your SSD as memory and absence of physical RAM so when an application is utilizing more RAM than you have physically it'll result to virtual memory in your SSD and that SSD memory is never as fast now when you're using virtual memory it's constantly writing and erasing writing and erasing based on the application so you can imagine that this compound's pretty quick and the lifespan of your SSD is starting to go down because you're constantly reading and erasing reading and erasing the M1 MacBook Air with the base model 256 gigabyte and 8 gigabytes of RAM ran into the storage issue as well a lot of people were complaining that their ssds were being over utilized and the lifespan was cut drastically now this mini has only been out for about two weeks now and I'm not sure how bad that situation here is but it may potentially be another area of concern so two ways of combating this you can either upgrade your SSD to a higher capacity so 5 and 12 gigabytes that pretty much doubles Your Capacity and makes it much longer to reach that right cycle so now a full ride cycle is 512 instead of 256 gigabytes or you can expand your memory with expandable memory and expanding that memory you no longer really have to use virtual memory to begin with the issue with both of these options is that they're costly now one of the things that make the Mac Mini so great is the price point the base model at 599 dollars is just such an amazing value once you start adding each of these components you'll get over a thousand relatively quickly there is a way around this though and that is using Apple care if you do sign up for AppleCare if your SSD does fail which might be inconvenient Apple will replace it for free but I'm willing to bet that this problem isn't as significant on the M2 as it was on the M1 but this is something that I just did have to address there are some negatives of having a smaller SSD and lower RAM and this is a one of them unfortunately but you guys decide whether or not you want to deal with this or not I would recommend that you deal with it at 599 you're not getting a better machine anywhere now I do want to really briefly touch on cooling as I mentioned previously that this has a vent in the back so this does have a fan that blows out hot air unlike the M2 MacBook Air that was possibly cooled and ran into thermal throttling issues no issues here whatsoever this unit stays cool uh no matter what task I'm using and I've never had it slow down on me because of thermal throttling so very very good and very well cooled system okay so now the go golden question is the M2 Mac Mini base model worth it the answer is it absolutely is whether or not you're upgrading an older desktop that you've had for many years or if you're just getting yourself introduced to the Mac OS the M2 Mac Mini the base model is the perfect unit to start off with at just 599 USD now there are some other considerations you should be making before purchasing the M2 mini this is the box it comes with and obviously it does not come with a display you'll have to purchase that separately it also doesn't come with a mouse or keyboard you can actually just find the video of my unboxing here to find out all the components that it comes with Hint it only comes with the unit itself and the power cable now as I mentioned it doesn't come with the wireless mouse or keyboard but any Bluetooth or dongled set of Wireless mice and keyboards will work on this unit I'm actually not using an Apple keyboard or Mouse that's working just fine on this unit and in terms of display yes you can purchase 1900 HDR display from Apple but it is quite expensive you are getting what you're paying for but if you want to go the cheaper route any standard resolution monitor with an HDMI input will work on this m mini so just consider that that yes it's 599 dollars but for a complete system you will have to pay for those other peripheral components as well and that's it for the video review guys I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you got a little more insight into the new base model M2 Mac Mini if you've purchased this already let me know how you're enjoying it in the comments below and if you haven't done so please consider subscribing to the channel if you found this video and videos like this helpful but until next time peace foreign [Music]

Channel: Manny Rataul

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Id: J5k5nffL5bk

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023