In 2005, when Apple first introduced the Mac small, it was a carefully designed, strategic product: a low-cost computer aimed primarily at luring customers from the Windows PC hegemony with the promise that they could save even further by using all of their existing accessories, thus putting the dent into the argument that investing in the Mac was by necessity expensive.
Eighteen years after its debut, the particular Mac mini is, surprisingly enough, still going strong. At the core, however, it remains a machine of contradictions: it has become a bastion of Apple’s lineup, but it’s been updated more sporadically than any other Mac. It was one of the first Macs to make the jump to Apple silicon back in 2020, yet at the same time, a more costly model lingered as one of the last remaining Intel Macs. It’s an entry-level machine, but it’s also been deployed in server farms and modded plus smushed into any number of applications.
With the most recent update in order to the M2 family associated with processors, the particular Mac small is once again doing more compared to just one thing at the same time. In its base configuration, with an 8-CPU-core/10-GPU-core M2 processor, it’s the respectably performing desktop that can now be had for just $599, a $100 price drop from the particular M1 mini, solidifying its status as the cheapest Mac around. But bump the mini up to an M2 Pro, and it’s also a high-performing device that will go up against the more expensive products inside Apple’s desktop line, like the Mac Studio.
It’s hard to argue that will the mini’s versatility isn’t the biggest part of why the product is still going strong, nigh on two decades after its debut. If the particular iMac, the Mac Studio room, and the still-waiting-in-the-wings Apple silicon Mac Pro are the bricks of Apple’s Mac lineup, the Mac pc mini is the mortar, with the various configurations filling the particular gaps in between.
Mini me
I’ve owned a handful of Mac minis over the years, though never as my primary machine. For the last decade, I have split my time between an iMac and a MacBook Air; prior to that, I was a good all-laptop-all-the-time person for several years. Yet with the particular demise of the 27-inch iMac (and, more to the point, the demise of my personal 27-inch iMac), I’ve already been waiting with regard to a mid-range desktop—a device that may bring a little extra performance without the heftier price tag of the Macintosh Studio .
And until now, that gap was unaddressed in the Apple silicon era. With the introduction of the particular Mac Facilities last spring, desktop Mac users had to choose between an iMac running the company’s least powerful chip or the much beefier machine that will not only carried a higher price tag but also required you to shell out for a separate monitor. Even if you were prepared to pay a little bit more for better performance, the particular realm in between the $1299 iMac as well as the $1999 Mac pc Studio was a barren wasteland.
The new M2 Pro Mac small fills that gap quite nicely. The default M2 Pro configuration offers a 10-core CPU—six overall performance cores plus four efficiency cores—with the 16-core GPU, but you can furthermore upgrade this to a 12-core CPU along with eight efficiency cores and four effectiveness cores regarding an additional $300. Along with 200GB/s memory bandwidth and up to 32GB of RAM, the M2 Pro’s specs handily trump those associated with the M1 iMac. And given that it starts in $1299, it is priced far enough below the Macintosh Studio to offer some cost savings. (The Studio’s base M1 Max construction, by comparison, has the same total number of cores since the standard M2 Pro, but has 2 more functionality cores, plus eight a lot more GPU cores, twice as much RAM MEMORY, and double the memory space bandwidth. )
However , upgrading the stock configuration of the M2 Pro Mac mini can close that will price space in a hurry. Move up to 32 GB of MEMORY and the 1TB SSD, and you’re just $100 shy associated with the Studio’s introductory price—and that’s not even including that more powerful CPU plus GPU option. All in all, a maxed-out M2 Pro mini will run you $4, 499, surpassing the cost of the Studio’s standard M1 Ultra configuration—heck, now you’re inside Mac Professional territory.
In short, the particular Mac mini is really two products. The base level $599 M2 mini will be basically the equivalent of the MacBook Air: a pretty affordable machine that’s capable of handling almost any daily task thrown from it. The particular M2 Pro mini, on the some other hand, is a mid-range Mac pc desktop that’s aimed with what you might have once called the prosumer market: a powerful Mac that can go the extra mile—for a price.
Design of the times
The design from the mini is basically unchanged from its M1 predecessor, which itself was unchanged from its Intel forebears. From the front, it’s the nearly unmarred slab associated with aluminum, broken only simply by the tiny pinprick of a power light. On the back, you’ll find a solid array of ports, including gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 4 slots (four upon the M2 Pro configurations), a 3. 5mm audio out, and—hurray for those who hate dongles—two USB-A ports.
If there’s a disappointment using the design of this latest revision, it’s that Apple seems to believe ports on the front of the machines are a luxury to be reserved intended for those who want to spend two thousand dollars on a Mac. The Macintosh Studio got high marks for prioritizing function over form with two USB-C (or Thunderbolt, depending upon the version) ports and a card reader on the particular front, handy when you just need in order to just quickly pop in the flash drive or, say, a hardware security key. Nobody wants to go rooting around behind their computer. The new Mac small, alas, offers no such consideration.
In the pre-Apple silicon era, the mini’s versatility was bolstered by this being 1 of the particular only upgradable Macs that will Apple sold, but that ship offers long since sailed. As with the M1 mini, you won’t be removing the black plastic foot on the particular bottom and popping within extra RAM or somehow wedging in another drive. So what a person buy is what you get and what you have forever.
Also lost with the departure associated with the Intel Mac small is any kind of color choice in the particular mini line. Once again, the Mac mini is available in any hue a person want, as long as it’s silver. So long, space gray, wherever you are out in the particular cosmos. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded some other options—even Apple’s midnight or starlight tints would at least shake things up a bit, yet I guess the mini is a “serious” computer.
Performance arts
All right, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. If you are in the market for an M2 Professional mini, what you really want to know is usually: how does it stack up against the rest of Apple’s Mac lineup?
As the benchmarks bear away, the M2 Pro ends up exactly where you’d expect it to fall: in the same neighborhood as the M2 plus M2 Max for single-core operation (because the cores are pretty much the particular same) and about 68 percent faster than the M2 on multi-core tasks, largely by virtue of having an additional four performance cores.
Graphics performance was likewise predictable: the M2 Pro blew the particular vanilla M2 out associated with the water, thanks in order to having more than twice as many GPU cores, but can’t match up to the 38 cores of the M2 Max (or, for that matter, the particular 32-core M1 Max). Inside short, while it’s a very capable machine for graphics work, if that’s your bread and butter, it may be worth the investment to look at a more powerful machine—or wait until Apple likely takes the particular wraps off an M2 Ultra.
But those are usually benchmarks, which are by their nature an unrepresentative (if easily quantifiable) measurement. What prospective buyers actually want to know is definitely real-world experience.
In the everyday usage over the much better part of the week, the M2 Pro mini delivered as expected: everything from loading web pages inside Safari to crunching spreadsheets in Numbers was fast and fluid, with no significant hiccups.
For fun, I fired up Ghost of Tsushima , which I’m currently playing on our PlayStation 5, via Sony’s PS Remote Play app, and the gameplay was excellent (with occasional graphics artifacts because it is still streaming on the network, and even via a wired Ethernet connection these things happen).
Apple company has also touted the performance of games that take full advantage of its Metal graphics framework, such as Resident Evil: Village , , and in that case, the small performs admirably. I played the first bit of the game, which Apple provided, plus gameplay was smooth and impressive looking: with the particular Prioritize Graphics settings upon, the framerate stayed steady at close to 60fps—the exact same happened even when We activated the MetalFX upscaling feature that will improves graphic quality. It’s clear that Apple silicon can become an impressive platform to get gaming— if developers embrace the tools that the particular company can be providing to help get the most out of its hardware.
However, the big caveat to that statement is that there simply aren’t that many games that are designed along with Apple’s tools in mind. One of the particular titles that will Apple demoed in its video announcing the latest M2 Macs has been No Man’s Sky , which it described because “demanding”—and although it might be, it’s also a title that debuted in 2016 and just this past year came out pertaining to the Nintendo Switch, not a console usually lauded for its graphics overall performance. Is the particular M2 Professional an extremely capable gaming device? Absolutely. Does it change the state from the gaming market on the Mac? Sadly, no—but that is about way more than just Apple’s equipment.
Of particular interest to me in the particular performance realm was movie streaming. I actually have, in the past, broadcast many episodes associated with Total Party Kill , our live play Dungeons & Dragon podcast at The Incomparable, in order to YouTube. That involves sharing a browser window as well as video clip and sound of six participants through Zoom. On my old Intel iMac, using the popular free streaming application OBS, this was an extremely intensive job that chewed up a lot of my CPU and didn’t perform particularly well to boot. Video was often bad quality with low frame rates or dropped frames entirely. Within later streams, I switched over to Ecamm Live on my M1 Mac-book Air, which had the particular benefit of being a native app; managing it on a separate computer added a degree of complexity, but the overall performance was much better.
Nevertheless , OBS has come a long way within the year or even so since I moved away from it. It is now native to Apple company silicon, takes advantage of hardware encoders, and provides fixed the bug along with display capture (thanks in order to Apple itself). The difference was immediately apparent. Streaming some associated with my PS Remote play of Ghost of Tsushima along with video of myself via Continuity Camera had been smooth since silk, plus the PROCESSOR never went over 5 percent. After the experience on the Intel Mac pc, it was night and day. I cannot overstate how amazing I found this right after all our streaming struggles on Intel Macs; this just goes to show, as with gaming, how much of the difference optimizing for Apple’s platform makes.
I also put the M2 Pro mini to the test with another processor-intensive task that I do around the regular: exporting a podcast from Logic Pro. For my test project, I chose an episode of the nerdy game show, Inconceivable! , because it’s among the most complex podcasts I produce: an hour-long show along with eight people, lots of cuts, and a few filters to even out rough audio. In a bake-off check, Logic within the M2 Professional bounced that project to some WAV file in 4: 15; our M1 MacBook Air took 6 minutes flat. Granted, that’s a task I’d generally do inside the background or even walk away from my computer, yet at the end of the day, it’s even now time saved.
Oh, and since i have know fan noise is of specific concern to segments associated with the marketplace that may be interested in the M2 Pro small, I’ll say this: I could not hear the machine’s fan. Ever. I fired up all the particular cores plus left them going for a while, and still nothing. I held my Apple Watch’s decibel reader near the back of the mini, and I noticed no appreciable change. We even installed Fanny , an app that reports fan data, to make sure there was indeed the fan inside. (There is certainly, but apparently it is very quiet. ) Apple’s not blowing smoke whenever it says low power consumption is really a cornerstone of how it develops its chips.
Gap, filled
For all those users that have been waiting for a Mac desktop computer that may offer a step up through the M1 mini or even M1 iMac without breaking the bank, the M2 Pro Macintosh mini delivers. While I actually can’t speak to the non-Pro model’s efficiency, one may extrapolate fairly well from the standards of the particular M2 Mac-book Air , considering that the chips are basically the same. Moreover, at a $599 price point, the particular entry-level mini continues to fill a niche as pretty much the only sub-thousand-dollar Mac that will Apple sells , even in case it might require additional outlay in the form of peripherals.
Perhaps the majority of interesting comparison for the particular M2 Pro Mac mini is putting it up towards the Mac Studio. Yes, even the $1999 M1 Max Mac pc Studio—and is not that a mouthful—continues to offer a few advantages, namely superior images performances, faster memory speed, and, of course, ports on the particular front. Yet on quite much anything but graphics functionality, the M2 Pro Macintosh mini not only outpaces the Mac Facility but definitely offers a lot more bang for the buck.
In short, the M2 Mac small is extremely good at exactly what most users will want to perform, as well as the M2 Pro Mac mini will satisfy the section of the market that needs to do tasks that require a little more oomph (or a couple more ports). The just real question, to the mind, will be how much associated with an audience there is usually for an inevitably more powerful desktop Mac model, whether it be a good M2 Mac pc Studio, the particular promised Apple company silicon Macintosh Pro, or both. It’s lots of items at the quicker (and more expensive) end of Apple’s product line.
But for right now, the M2 Pro Mac mini ably fills the mid-level gap in Apple’s desktop range, which may be the relief towards the many individuals awaiting this kind of a machine—myself included. Apple silicon continues to impress in this second generation, there’s no question, but it’s hard not in order to feel like the particular company’s resting on the laurels somewhat, especially where the mini’s design is concerned: it’d end up being nice to see the outside of the item keep upward with what’s inside.
[ Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at [email protected] The latest novel in his Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi space adventures, The Nova Incident, is available now . ]
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