Apple Announced M2 Mac Mini

For whatever reason Apple made the decision to lift the minimum SSD chip size from ~ 128gb, to 256gb. I guess this strategy allows them to carry less SSD chips for the range of models offered, improving economies of scale - and in turn cutting costs = increasing profits.

But as we can see from the benchmarks, a circa 50% performance hit in read/write performance is a bitter pill to swallow, especially as the SSD chips are soldered and can’t be changed.

I guess Apple are banking on the ignorance of most Apple users accepting their marketing graphs, and believing M2 must be the better & faster machine. IMHO the M1 remains the better choice for SSD performance.

I wonder if down the road Roon will begin to access GPU cores for DSP processing etc. This would make higher spec mini’s more attractive.

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I think it is more of an availability issue than cost saving per se – but hey, what do I know?

That said, my wife and I both use MacBooks Air M2 – hers 256GB, mine 512. I’d be hard pressed to find any difference at all in daily usage.

I imagine you need to do some serious photo editing or video editing to notice a difference really. And if you do that it’s more likely that you store those files in a thunderbolt enclosure.

That’s at least what I would do.

I am going to set up a new Mac Mini today for a photographer friend. He got the 1TB model for the speed of reading his very large raw image files.

It is replacing a 2014 27" iMac which has become so slow as to be almost unusable. I have gifted him my old 27" cinema display so it should be a great setup for him and Lightroom and Photoshop and he is not going to believe the difference in processing performance when using Lightroom.

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Very fine displays, above any iMac display or any small laptop display. I still use one, 24 home 30 at work. Only the Pro XDR (added nano texture) beats that.

My 2017 iMacs struggle with Photoshop and Lightroom updated. I guess the trick is not to update. 2009 iMac with CS3 works faster then the updated 2017

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Feels more like planned obsolescence to me.
It was perfect for him 2 years ago, but he had to update the OS to put a current(ish) version of Lightroom on it.

My (Intel) Mac Mini was exactly the same, so feels like maybe they only optimised for the latest chips. Let’s be honest it has been known to happen, and it is understandable, given that they get no money from these customers. If only running older software I would keep it on an older OS and be careful what you use it for.

My replacement M1 Mac mini will hopefully give me 7 orr 8 years of good service, and you can not really ask for much more than that.

I am not a big fan of the monitor’s TBH which is why I am giving it away. I have an LG 28" 4K screen and a 32.5" AOC (1440 HDR) gaming monitor and I much prefer those, with the M1 I can also use both and a USB KVM for the keyboard and mouse as well, so I have been using it much more. He will put the screen to good use.

Adobe following Apple offer support only for the last 2 versions.

Basically meaning that you have to keep up the software/hardware. I never blame them and not even think this is the squeeze money frame. Looks more like running for non stop higher specs and features. So it comes natural that the older versions are not supported anymore that would be unprofitable and now we are talking money.

7/8 years for a mini looks ok. 8/9 iMac. and for my Mac Pro it was 10/12 years. I’m curios about the studio but I’ll be receiving my upgrades at my lab later, or maybe very later this year (can’t wait to test HQP on those :monkey:)

you need to be careful with Macs and monitor resolution anyway. 27" and 1440p for example seems to be best if you want to avoid upsampling to 5k and downsampling again. has something to do with DPI that MacOS requires. it just works different from windows and linux machines.

so if you are doing video editing on a 4k monitor it might happen while everything gets upsampled to 5k and downsampled to 1440p again.

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Well I have Studio’s in work, and they are awesome computers.
I would expect to get shorter lives going forward as they will not support them as long. I can see Apple moving to a 5-6 year lifetime and Adobe will just blame Apple and support the same thing.

I think the M2 Pro looks as good as the studio, and if that was out before I bought 6 of them I would probably have gone with them.

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No I got it for HQPlayer but was planning on using it headless (which I also do via Remote Desktop).
The Mac works very nicely with the HDMI and. USB C
to Display port cable, and I will probably start using it more.

:joy:

same problem, I did the requirements, the money were approved, now I have to look for legal advice how to change the hardware requirements to match the new devices. I knew this is going to happen as the project is for 3 years.

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Would be great if you could get your money back after 2 years and 9 months and buy again at the new spec :rofl:
Let me know how you get on :+1:t2:

:rofl:

I’m curios about the computers but more anxious to work on the Pro Display XDR nano textured glass monitors :slight_smile:

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We have not bought any of those :roll_eyes:

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I use 32 inch 2650 x 1440 Benq at home and at the office

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I just retired my NUCi58beh I cleaned the fan for the second time and applied new arctic silver etc and came to the conclusion it needs a new fan, noise isnt crazy bad but my setup is next to my desk, I replaced it with a cirrus7 nimbini fanless PC, so thats one less noisy component.

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That is exactly what resolution mine is, I take it you have no issues either?
Got to say the latest seems to run really well with non Apple screens and even allows me to use HDR on the AOC screen

No issues and the dpi is such that you can read the screen clearly without scaling.

Good to know, and that is why I bought a screen at that resolution :+1:

Anyone had any success with the m2 chip?
My macmini crashes roon every 20 minutes.

Update… Uninstalled roon app, only installed server and… Perfect!