Which Desktop Mac Should You Buy?

hi this is gary with macmost.com let's take a look at which desktop mac is right for you [Music] macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than a thousand supporters go to macmost.com patreon there you could read more about the patreon campaign join us and get exclusive content and course discounts so if you're thinking about getting a new mac soon you of course need to decide which model is the right one for you now the easiest decision to make is whether you're getting a desktop or a laptop or macbook i'm going to assume in this video that you've decided to get a desktop and in the next video i'm going to talk about all of the macbook models so there are basically three mac desktops right now there's the mac mini the imac and the mac studio i'm going to break each one of those three models into three different possibilities a super low end model a reasonable model and a high end model so let's start off with the mac mini this is going to be the lowest price option it's a very small desktop machine that you can hook up to any screen keyboard mouse or trackpad that you want and you can get the base model for only 699 dollars but this low-end model has very limited use if you really don't do anything with media you don't have a photos collection you don't edit video you don't have a big music collection you're not downloading a lot of apps you're basically just using the mac to surf the web to check your email then perhaps you can put up with a 256 gigabyte drive but i would not recommend that really to anybody even people that think they can go with the smallest possible drive usually end up in trouble later on when they realize this is too small for them it doesn't take a very big photos library to run into problems with something this size now for a lot of these models i'm going to suggest instead of getting an apple screen which is very expensive getting a third party screen and you could pick up a variety of different 4k screens for about 300 i used one of these for years until i got my studio display a regular 4k display works really well with macs and also i'm going to assume that you already have a keyboard or mouse or trackpad or perhaps you're looking into getting a very low priced keyboard and mouse to use with it to save money so i'm not even going to add those to the price and you can see here your cheapest mac that you can get brand new comes in at a thousand dollars here but let's look at the reasonable mac mini all i'm going to do here is upgrade two things first the m1 processor now it's important to note that in addition to the major divisions of the m1 processor the m1 m1 pro m1 max and m1 ultra there's also some subdivisions in there there's actually a low end m1 and a regular m1 so getting the upgraded mac mini adds a little bit to the price but get you the regular m1 the one that has the full number of gpus on it and also i'm going to go up here to a one terabyte drive which should be able to handle files for most people as long as you're not doing a lot of video editing this brings the price over a thousand dollars and then you have to get a screen in addition to that i'm assuming you're bringing your own keyboard and mouse to it but one word of warning here is that this is the m1 mac mini that's been out for a while we expect at some point perhaps later this year for there to be an upgrade the same basic machine but with an m2 processor in it so if you're not in a rush you might want to wait for that now what happens if you want to get a mac mini but you want to go really high end you do expect to do some video editing and all that but you don't want to spend the money to get a mac studio model which i'll be looking at in a bit where you can get a fully upgraded mac mini with the full m1 processor 16 gigs of ram and a 2 terabyte drive but it's going to cost you significantly more and i'm going to assume here if you want everything high-end and looking great that you're also going to want to get the studio display which is a premium 1600 plus you're going to get the official apple keyboard and the apple trackpad and then you've got a fantastic setup without having to go beyond the mac mini but it's going to cost you a lot more here and if you're going to spend the money to get a high-end mac mini like this you really probably do want to wait for an m2 mac mini just so you have the latest one and not a two-year-old model now note here about memory you can see my reasonably priced mac mini has eight gigs of ram while the high-end one has 16 gigs the maximum for the m1 processor a lot of people will recommend getting 16 gigs of ram and never going with the 8 gigs of ram but i don't think a lot of those people have actually tried the 8 gigabyte version of the m1 processor i have one i have an original macbook pro with eight gigs of ram in it and it works just great maybe if you want to have like 20 tabs open in chrome and editing in final cut pro and doing a whole bunch of other things at the same time and you've maxed out your drive space maybe then you'll feel it but i've actually done quite a bit at the same time with eight gigs of ram on my m1 macbook pro and it handles it like a champ i think mac os handles memory really well and you can get away with eight gigs of ram if you can't afford the 16 gigs i highly recommend that the first things you upgrade on any machine be the storage that's where i hear the most complaints that's why i see the most people running into some serious trouble not memory so if you can only afford one thing get more storage and stick with eight gigs of ram so next let's look at the imac model the imac models can be actually more affordable than mac mini because they come of course with a screen and a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad so you can get the base model for only thirteen hundred dollars now this is going to include that very anemic 256 gig hard drive so very limited use there only if you're sure you just don't store pretty much anything are you going to want to get this model a more reasonable model is the same thing but with the slightly upgraded m1 processor and the one terabyte ssd and this one will work for a lot of people and if you want to go high-end you can upgrade to the 16 gigs of ram and maybe a two terabyte drive and now you can see the price is up there significantly over that original imac this takes us to the mac studio the mac studio is similar to the mac mini but it's a significant speed upgrade with using the m1 max and m1 ultra processors and a lot more memory so the base model is going to have an m1 max processor and it's going to come with 32 gigs of ram which is a lot of ram that's going to be able to handle a lot of stuff the only thing wrong with this low end model is going to be the drive size 512 is still twice the size of the mac mini and imac at the low end but i still think it's too little especially if you're going for a mac studio you're probably using it for things like video editing or working on big graphics projects so a 512 gig drive is just not going to cut it what you're going to want to do is go up just a little bit to the two terabyte drive and this is a really powerful machine that will work for a ton of people i'm going to assume that you're going to bring your own third party 4k screen to this and also an old keyboard or mouse or get a cheap one and keep the price down at under 3 000 here but if you really want to go high-end you can't get better than a mac studio now with the m1 ultra processor in it it comes with a base 64 gigs of ram i'm going to add a 2 terabyte drive here so it comes with plenty of drive space this is the model that i have this is the one i use this is the one i'm using right now to record and edit these videos if you want to be high-end just like with the high-end mac mini you're going to want the apple studio display which is 5k superior to almost anything else out there it's going to cost a pretty penny as will the apple keyboard and trackpad and the total price is going to be well above six thousand dollars now there's one model i've left out what about the mac pro well i don't think i'd recommend the mac pro right now to just about anybody it's a 2019 model using an intel processor apple has said that they're coming out with a new mac pro at some point and that's going to use the new apple silicon so you're going to want to wait for that if you can do it at all so what is the 2019 mac pro even doing right now well i suppose if you're using it for production work like you need to get a machine to handle video maybe you're editing a film right now you only expect to use the machine for six months or a year while you work on this project it's being bought by a company or it's part of your budget then it makes sense to maybe get one of these with the afterburner card and everything it's gonna run six thousand dollars but probably more like ten thousand dollars with a decent drive in it after burner card and all of that but for any home user you're going to want to look at the mac studio right now not the mac pro at least not until apple comes out with a new one so i thought it'd be useful to break everything down here in a chart so you can see the three groups and the three variations that i've included with each one the imacs stand out right here because they don't need a screen or any of the peripherals you can just get it and the price is the price whereas with the mini and the studio you have to think about screen you have to think about the pointing device and the keyboard you can see how even though the imac is pretty reasonably priced you can still save money by getting a mac mini instead if you want mac studio models are going to be much more expensive of course but people are in general using them for their jobs they're using them to make a living so spending the extra money to get that extra power is worth it looking at this chart the one model you can probably rule out for most people is the high end mac mini jump right from the reasonable mac mini to the low end mac studio and then you can divide this into whether or not you want the imac which is mostly for home users or whether you want a mac with a separate screen and then you can go from the mac mini to the mac studio and basically choose your level of what you want how much power how much memory and how much drive space that you need if you are on the fence as to whether get a mac mini or to get an imac i highly suggest you don't make a decision until you actually try an imac go to an apple store or a reseller and actually see the imac in person i think pretty quickly you'll either fall in love with it and decide that's the one for you or you'll see it and you'll think now i could do with a mac mini and i can use my existing screen or get some sort of 4k screen to go with it so i hope this makes your decision a little bit easier thanks for watching [Music] if you like this 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Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 16,899

Keywords: mac buying guide, mac buyer's guide, which mac should i buy, which mac to buy, which mac to buy in 2022, which mac mini to buy 2022, which m1 mac to buy, which mac studio to buy, which mac desktop to buy

Id: Xj60lBq_uU8

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022