M2 vs M2 Pro Mac Mini: Which Should You Buy?

at 5.99 the M2 Mac Mini is definitely a really hard deal to pass up I mean no one's going to blame you but depending on what you're planning to do with this shiny new Mac it might not be the best option for you now before we get into everything please be sure to subscribe and of course like the video If this helped you out at all but most importantly uh let me know in the comment section down below what type of Mac you're looking for or if you're just kind of curious between whether or not you should go and spring up for the M1 Pro I'm sorry the M2 Pro or the M2 Max let me know in those comments down below and of course you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram if you want to carry that conversation over to another platform so let's take a step back a minute and assess your needs if you're someone out there who's just checking emails casual web browsing video consumption you know you're just needing a computer to pay the bills research some Stuff Etc then this is a great machine and in all scenarios we're going to assume you have a monitor and a keyboard mouse because otherwise it starts to get a little sticky things start to add up here and there depending on your wants and needs and then it might just be an easier thing to just go out and get a MacBook Pro but if you really want a Mac desktop and you have everything you need for it you just need the computer I'm going to help you decide which one you should get if you fall into the description that I just mentioned the chances are the base model M2 Mac Mini it's going to be just fine for you but there are a few things that do worry me about that computer for anyone out there that looking to do just a little bit more I have an M1 Mac Mini and while I do expect M2 to be a bit faster in certain situations and much more efficient than M1 the 8 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigs of storage really killed me with the M1 model I'll give you a little story I was using the M1 Mac Mini and I still am but I was using it for primarily hosting the podcast we use a program called ecamm live and I think a combination of just Bluetooth issues and the overall processing power and the low amount of RAM and storage just kind of ate away at the machine and that program shouldn't really be that difficult to manage on this Mac but it really had a hard time to the point where um certain things were just not being picked up audio would cut out the Bluetooth headphones would be affected and there was just situations where I couldn't run the rode podcaster Pro that we had it just it didn't work and the moment I switched over to the M1 Max MacBook Pro that was running the whole setup everything was Flawless we had no issues and this actually carried over to a program that we use before ecamm where we used a web app enabled website to host the platform and I think a lot of the issues did still come from my machine's inability and the basically the lack of performance on that machine to carry everything and that workflow and that was really the hardest thing that I put it through and then other than that it's just you know some light editing here and there and it really had a hard time and then I was using an M2 MacBook Air and this is it right here and I love this machine but I had the base model at first eight gigabytes of RAM 256 gigs of storage the lowest processing power you can get and it had the same issues it was not that good but the moment I maxed it out a little bit I mean I went up to a terabyte of storage but everything else the CPU GPU the ram everything else was at its maximum capacity and it performs amazing and you can pretty much do anything that you want to do on this for the most part and you're going to be just fine and so that's kind of where I don't want people to fall into the same trap so here's my recommendation if you're looking to stay cheap but get a little bit more power out of your Mac and you know kind of future proof yourself a little bit so you're not in a year or two thinking you made the wrong decision and you're kind of stuck with it at least get 16 gigs of RAM and at least 512gb storage and I'm not entirely sure if this is still the case with the Mac Mini that's coming out but in previous machines Apple has gone with one Nan SSD for the 256 model and when you go anything up over that you have two and that does eat into the performance of the ssds uh people found out and did test and found that it was slower and most importantly if you run out of space on your Mac because you have only 256 gigs of storage it's going to start to eat into your virtual memory and it's going to start eating into your performance that way and things could start to slow down and you definitely want to avoid that if possible now when you price out what I was just explaining to you you're looking at 9.99 which is still a pretty good deal All Things Considered but I think for anyone out there who's going to do part-time or even full-time content creation web development graphic design music production all of this anything that requires more CPU and GPU cores the 12.99 price tag really becomes the best Mac Mini you can get for the M1 pro model and it's going to maintain that per performance level and cost Effectiveness so you'll get the 512 gigs of storage you'll get the 16 gigs of RAM and another thing that's going to be going a bit unnoticed is that on the back you're going to have four USBC Thunderbolt 4 ports instead of the two that's offered in the base M2 model so basically two additional Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside the two USB the HDMI and the gigabit Ethernet port and the headphone jack either way out of all of the machines and chips that were announced I think the M2 Pro machine is the better deal out there for most creators and people who just want more power out of their Mac it's nearly a baby Mac Studio at a fraction of the cost obviously you're not getting that full power of the ultra chip or anything like that but I think for most people who are doing this work and don't need it to be anything more than what it is and just to get your work done I think you'll be just fine with the M2 probe of course I won't know entirely for sure until I get it in hand which we will next week so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss that video where I fully test it out and try to get some benchmarks run and everything and just see where we're at in terms of performance of course I would love to hear from you down in the comments and I hope to see you guys around in the next video

Channel: MacRumors

Views: 96,912

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Id: I-0P17T8kyA

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023