M2 Mac Studio VS M2 Mac mini - DON'T BE FOOLED!

there are now two small Mac desktops in Apple's lineup competing to be your next computer but is the M2 Max studio really worth 700 more than the M2 Pro Mac Mini and if it is does the introduction of the M2 Max studio make the Mac Mini obsolete okay for this comparison I am pitting the M2 Max base model of the Mac Studio against the base model M2 pro version of the Mac Mini which I'll discuss more of why it's against these two particular models later but overall I think that these two base model computers are going to be very very popular choices for a lot of professionals like video editors photo editors developers music production and whoever needs a powerful and small Mac desktop at a good value now design wise these two Macs are very similar in concept both of them come in the same silver aluminum finish with a very similar physical footprint on your your desk the main difference being that yes the Mac Mini is smaller than the Mac Studio in height basically the studio is a little bit bigger it's like having two Mac minis stacked on top of each other but I don't think these design differences should have you picking one over the other because even though the mini is smaller they both take up almost the same exact of physical space on a desk and both fit under a display easily I can't imagine there's too many setups or scenarios in the world where you can't swap a Mac Studio for a mini or vice versa granted yes I guess technically if you want to get really technical about it you could probably more easily Mount like a Mac Mini under your desk than a Mac Studio just because it is lighter and you know a little less taller but I'm guessing like if you can mount this somewhere it's not impossible to mount the Mac Studio either no the real difference in design does come down to something very important the port selection the Mac Mini with the M2 Pro chip comes with four Thunderbolt ports two usba port an HDMI port a headphone jack and then an ethernet port now the Mac Studio gets all of those ports as well but it also gets an additional two USBC ports on the front and an SD card reader which is absent on the M2 Mac Mini making the studio the obvious winner with the amount of ports it offers furthermore the studio comes with a 10 gigabit Ethernet port as standard while on the mini that's actually a 100 upgrade yes this isn't a relevation these are very similar computers and unlike Mac laptops we don't have to go into a bunch of comparisons on the speakers or the displays or the webcams there's none of that to be found here these are two computer boxes the real difference in these boxes are the chips that are powering them and if the performance difference in these chips is enough to make up for that 700 price difference though of course I have our usual run of benchmarks to see the potential performance difference you can expect effect between these two computers so taking geekbench 6 you can see that the M2 Pro in the Mac Mini performs exactly the same as the M2 Max in the Mac Studio when it comes to single core performance single core performance usually dictates how fast most basic apps perform on a Mac so the speed of things like launching apps UI responsiveness and just general basic Computing tasks from you know simple apps that don't require a lot of processing power the speed on both desktops it's going to be the same the real difference is when you get into multi-core performance that's again because we are looking at the base models of both of these desktops and that base model chip for the M2 Pro chip in the Mac Mini is a 10 core CPU while the M2 Max and the Max studio has a 12 core CPU and geekbench shows us that this is true right there's about an 18 increase in multi-core performance on the CPU in the Mac Studio but because I'm never satisfied with running just one Benchmark let's dive into cinebench R23 which is another CPU related Benchmark to see if these results hold up after running this test for 10 minutes of CPU usage and unsurprisingly we see similar results in cinebench with the Mac Studio once again beating the Mac Mini with about a 17 increase in performance which is pretty much what we saw in geekbench no surprise here as both of these desktop computers come with plenty of cooling and both machines had enough cooling to the fact that I didn't even hear the fans spin up during this test they were both pretty silent so the risk of thermal throttling on either of these CPUs seems to be a non-issue now I know what you're thinking Greg you idiot both of these machines can get the same exact CPU performance if you just spent an additional 300 to upgrade the Mac Mini to the 12 core M2 Pro CPU you would get the same CPU performance as the M2 Max chip and yes that is true for 300 you can get the same CPU performance as the M2 Max and that would still bring the price of the mini 400 under the price of this Mac Studio but while that is true you'll start to see the value proposition plummet when you upgrade to that 12 core CPU but I'll talk about that more towards the end of this video but for now even with that full M2 Pro chip the biggest difference between the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio is the amount of GPU cores available on both machines because even with the full M2 Pro chip in this machine it only maxes out at 19 GPU cores while the base model max comes with 30 GPU cores and gfx bench a benchmark optimized for Apple's metal framework we can see that no matter what configuration of the Mac Mini are using the Mac Studio crushes it with a 44 performance bump over the fully binned empty Pro chip and a staggering 60 performance improvement over the base model M2 Pro Mac Mini for gaming performance the Mac Studio again is the clear winner running shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark at 1080p at the highest settings the M2 Max Max studio gets an average of 102 frames per second while the M2 Pro base model gets an average frames per second of 57 with the Mac Studio gaining a 56 performance increase over the base model for tasks like 3D modeling rendering and blender running the classroom Benchmark the base M2 Max had a 25 performance increase over the base level M2 Pro tip finally at this point if you're looking between these two computers you've probably heard about the infamous media engines on these M2 chips which helps with video transcoding and all that stuff for like exporting video so how much better is the Mac Studio at exporting video well for this test I took a recent project at about 13 minutes in length it's a 4K video project and I exported that to h.264 on both the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini and the Mac Mini finished that export at around 8 minutes while the Mac Studio finished the same task almost twice as fast at 4 minutes and 31 seconds so for compressing that footage the Mac Studio was way faster but let's do a prores export which requires uh you know less compressing of the footage now the Mac Mini finished that task at two minutes and 54 seconds for that same video file and the Mac Studio this time wasn't that much faster but it's still finished at two minutes and 25 seconds still beating the Mac Mini so are these results shocking no of course not right like the more expensive computer is faster stop the presses move over investigative journalism we have a new sheriff in town and his name is [Music] yeah right like this this wasn't that hard to figure out so why did we run all these tests well it's to show you that yes the base level Mac Studio is faster than the base level Mac Mini but that's mostly with GPU related tasks and the real question that you kind of have to make up for yourself is is that Advantage worth it to you for a 700 price increase for some users that answer would obviously be yes right for others the base level M2 Mac Mini provides an excellent value for users on a budget especially for users that just need more CPU performance and don't really care about the GPU you know if you care about GPU that's where you start to really see the benefits of the Mac Studio and yes if you only care about CPU performance you can still get that M2 Pro Mac Mini at 1600 which will perform identically in CPU performance to the M2 Max Max studio however there is a reason I'm really only suggesting buying the base model of the M2 Pro Mac Mini in this video you know I've kind of been alluding to this the whole video there's a problem with that configuration of the Mac Mini and that is that currently well you know it's just a poor value because what we didn't talk about is that the Mac Studio also by default comes with 32 gigabytes of unified memory as standard and the Mac Mini comes with 16 gigabytes so if we upgrade the M2 Pro chip on the Mac Mini and also the memory we get a computer that is literally the same price as the Mac Studio but that computer comes with a way worse GPU like around 44 lower in GPU performance to make matters worse the Mac Studio comes with those additional ports on the front and 10 gigabit Ethernet in the back as standard if you add 10 gigabit Ethernet onto this Mac Mini it would actually be more expensive than the Mac Studio For Worse performance and less ports it's why I think that this M2 Pro configuration and with the full 12 core CPU is kind of pointless it kind of feels obsolete right now like yeah I guess if you didn't care about the additional memory and 16 gigabytes is fine and all you want is extra CPU performance You could argue it still has its place in the lineup but just knowing that it's literally one memory upgrade away from the Mac Studio and you get a worse computer really shifts the value to the M2 Pro Mac Mini at the base level chip version like that one is still a great choice it's still a good value for the performance you're getting but that higher end version just seems kind of obsolete to me in a world where the M2 Max Max studio exists and that becomes a much better computer when you get around that price point and what I really think Apple needs to do is they really need to take a hard look at this 12 core M2 Pro Mac Mini and I think they need to consider giving that upgrade a serious price reduction alright I hope this video helped you out in deciding between these Apple desktops let me know in the comments below are you going with the M2 Pro Mac Mini or the M2 Max Max studio of course links to either of these computers will be in the description below and a like and a subscription is always appreciated thank you so much for watching and I'll see you all in the next one

Channel: GregsGadgets

Views: 154,731

Keywords: Mac Studio m2 max, Mac studio base model, Mac Studio 2023, Mac mini 2023, Mac mini m2 pro, Mac mini vs Mac Studio 2023, Mac Studio vs Mac mini 2023, m2 Mac Studio vs m2 Mac mini, Mac Studio m2 max vs Mac mini m2 pro, Mac mini m2 pro vs Mac Studio m2 max, best apple desktop, apple desktop buyers guide 2023, Mac Studio m2 max video editing, Mac Studio m2 max gaming, Mac mini m2 pro video editing, Mac Studio m2 max 2023 review, Mac Studio vs Mac mini

Id: 5Uz91yW9vHI

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023