The Base M2 Mac Mini - Here's What They're Not Telling You..

[Music] foreign [Music] what's up friends I got a brand new video for you today and today we're going to talk about the new M2 Mac Mini and I honestly think that this is the most exciting thing that Apple announced last week and more specifically this base model M2 Mac Mini because it's only 5.99 us and that's actually 100 bucks cheaper than the launch price of the M1 Mac Mini back in 2020. now this video isn't going to be a bunch of benchmarks or comparisons because I don't feel like that really equates to real world performance especially when you're talking about responsiveness and overall fluidity you get just from using the computer and honestly I'd argue that there's no Windows PC that matches this level of Speed and Performance to this price especially something that's going to come with Bluetooth 5.3 Wi-Fi 6E Thunderbolt 4 usb4 built-in GPU that can drive two 5K displays smoothly all while sipping power and running silent if you've been following this channel for the last couple of years you know how stoked I was on the M1 Mac Mini came out back in 2020 and while I was in my honeymoon phase gushing about how fast and responsive it was I showed how far you could actually push that system and I used it for an entire month doing all my photo and video editing and it was Game changing and honestly it still is also keep in mind I'm reviewing this system as a professional content creator and I realize that the system probably isn't going to be powerful enough for many of you that do similar things that I do but it's still crazy to see what you can do and I'm sure that 85 percent of the people that are buying this computer will realize how fast and awesome it actually is but if you can find a used M1 Mac Mini for like under 400 bucks I'd recommend you get that and not this and then don't watch the rest of this video so the base M2 Mac Mini has identical i o to the M1 Mac Mini and in fact it looks exactly the same they haven't really changed anything the design is the same you get one gigabit Ethernet you get two Thunderbolt four usb4 ports you get HDMI and two usba ports now if you upgrade to the M2 Pro chip then you get an extra two Thunderbolt 4 ports and the ability to actually drive three monitors instead of two from this base model M2 but we're not here to talk about that we're here to talk about about this base model so the new M2 Chip comes with eight CPU cores and 10 GPU cores and that's up from the eight GPU cores that was in the M1 Mac Mini so theoretically this M2 will perform much better in graphic intensive tasks like photo editing and video editing and it also has the New Media Engine with the built-in encoders and decoders for prores as well as h.265 which is also just going to give you better handling of those video files as well as faster exports and Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve the base model also comes with 8 gigs of RAM and 250 gigs of storage and this is an area where I wish Apple would at least up it to 512 gigs of storage as standard but it is what it is I would also highly recommend upping the ram to 16 gigs if you can afford it that way it's going to have to swap with the SSD a lot less and it's going to give you a smoother experience especially if they're kind of person that has tons of tabs open in Safari or Chrome or you're editing a lot of 4K video I was able to actually hit eight gigs just with five tabs open and maybe one 4K video playing and don't even get me started in any complex video editing because you're just going to get beach balls every 20 seconds now when it comes to storage you can easily get really fast external drives for a fraction of the price compared to ordering your Mac Mini with more internal storage and I think that working off external ssds is the better choice anyway in my opinion that's just how I've always worked but if you upgrade to 512 gigs of storage you're going to add an additional 200 and if you want to go to one terabyte it's actually 400 extra dollars so it adds a pretty quick if you want to build your Mac Mini with a little bit more and there's also some controversy online right now about Apple using slower ssds in these smaller capacity drives and they're correct they're not nearly as fast as the one terabyte models I ran magic disc test and I was getting under 2 000 megabytes a second reading right which is still fast but it's about half as fast as my 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro so maybe this could be a deal breaker for some people but honestly with a 599 Mac Mini base model what are you doing that you need faster than that oh if we go back to fast external drives I actually make my own I have a two terabyte usb4 drive that I added from cost me under 300 bucks and it cranks out around 2600 megabytes a second read and write it can easily keep up with anything you want to throw at it 8K video if you have to and the funny thing is it's actually faster than the internal drive in the M2 Mac Mini so one issue I had on the old M1 Mac Mini was Bluetooth connection problems I had disconnections lag just it was super annoying and I know a lot of other people also had that issue and I'm assuming it's fixed now with this and one thing that was really cool I was surprised with is that my magic mouse and my magic keyboard instantly connected on the first Boot and I have never experienced that with Bluetooth that's usually a pain in the butt but maybe it's the new Bluetooth 5.3 it's just kind of working how I expect Bluetooth should work so who's the system for I feel like it kind of hits a few camps if you're a student and just need it for word docs light photo editing web browsing watching video stuff like that it's going to rip through it no problem it's gonna to do it silently and if you're a content creator and you're editing photos editing YouTube videos tick tocks maybe even recording and logic this thing is going to burn through it even if you're working with 4K video like prores h.265 it's only when you start to get into more serious color grading working with 10-bit video and adding effects and stuff like that you're going to see us struggle a lot more that's where I'd recommend getting as much RAM as possible if you can afford it or even going to the M2 Pro chip okay so here's an update this is editor Lee here you're watching this video being edited on the M2 Mac Mini and so far it's been going well the main talking head stuff is prores LT and then a lot of the b-roll is 4K 60p as well as some 4K 120. I noticed that when I'm playing back some of the 4K 120 it's a little bit slower this stuff here is 4K 120. it's it's running okay I'm also working in a 1080p timeline and then I will export it as a 4K timeline when I get to the end I've noticed that that 4K 120p well in a 4K timeline is just chugging it's not able to handle it but for the most part I can cut this video no problem the tough thing for me when it comes to reviewing computers is I just want to show you all the things that I would typically do and that's a little bit more complex edits in 4k or even 6K red raw for my Komodo but I don't want to throw smoke up your butt and say this thing's going to crush it I've seen some other reviews say that it would but I loaded in some projects that I edited on my Mac Studio that typically run perfect and smooth and I instantly felt how much it was struggling on the system compared to what I'm used to I tried loading in four 4K video files and they're all 10-bit and it could sort of run it in Final Cut and it would start to lag out but I don't think you're typically going to be running that type of video in a system like this but I just wanted to try it anyway and I also know at this price point I can't expect it to do all the gym many things that I require for my work because my Mac Studio is literally 10 times the price of this Mac Mini but if we take a step back and look at what this machine can actually do for the price not much is going to be able to beat it and honestly this is one of the best bang for buck computers you can get right now except for a used M1 Mac Mini and that's not usually something you get from Apple do I wish this had more USB ports do I wish this had an SD card reader and do I wish this came with at least 512 gigs of storage obviously but the cool thing is you get into the Apple ecosystem at a relatively affordable price and if you're a content creator you're going to realize how awesome this is like I loaded in some photos and a little bit of video here I edited an Instagram reel in about three minutes exported it air dropped it to my phone in full quality and uploaded to Instagram it's things like that that make this ecosystem nice you get all your iMessages synced across devices notes calendars basically everything is in one ecosystem like even just my airpods being able to switch between my phone and the Mac Mini is really nice to have if you're thinking about upgrading from your M1 Mac Mini to the new M2 Mac Mini the only thing I'd say that's actually improved is maybe the media encoders the decoders encoders as well as those extra two GPU cores but outside of that they're both going to be super fast in day-to-day tasks and depending on what you're doing you probably won't even notice the difference I'm just going to leave the video at that thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you just like this video give a thumbs down twice don't forget to hit that notification Bell and I'll see you guys in the next one oh if you made it this far to the end of the video this is pretty funny I ordered the Mac Mini it was supposed to be in yesterday and I get an email from Wendy's the hamburger place saying that they got my Mac menu and they opened it up but at least they were honest and I was able to go pick it up but now I'm a complete day late on my review [Music] thank you

Channel: Lee Zavitz

Views: 96,463

Keywords: m2 Mac mini 4k video test, m2 Mac mini review, base model m2 Mac mini, best m2 Mac mini specs, best budget computer 2023 for video, best bang for buck computer, apple m2 Mac mini review, Lee Zavitz, m2 pro Mac mini, m2 Mac mini vs m1 Mac mini, m2 Mac mini DaVinci resolve, m2 Mac mini desk setup, best Mac Studio setup

Id: MNLcUVGTflI

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023