Apple Mac Mini M2
From £649/$599 www.apple.com
Utilitarian isn’t an adjective you’d often associate with Apple. After all, Cupertino wrote the book on fashionable tech. But left within the shadow of Apple’s sleek-looking Macbooks and colourful imacs is the aesthetically unremarkable – yet no less powerful – Mac Mini.
Two years ago, the miniature computer received a much-needed update in the form of Apple’s coveted M1 silicon chip and now it’s back with, you guessed it, the M2. What nobody could have predicted though, is an even more affordable price tag. The Mac Mini M2 starts at £649/$599, that’s £50/$50 cheaper than the last-gen.
Compared with the Mac Mini M1, the new M2-loaded version is said to offer 50% faster filter and function performance in Adobe Photoshop CC, and 2.4x faster Prores transcoding when using Apple’s own Final Cut Pro video editor.
And if the M2’s scintillating performance just isn’t enough, the Mac Mini is available with the M2 Pro. Apple says this boosts a Prores transcode in Final Cut Pro by up to 4.2x, when compared with the older M1 Mini, while graphics performance in Affinity Photo 2 is enhanced 2.5x.
The base Mac Mini includes the standard M2 chip, 8-Core CPU, 10-Core GPU, 8GB of Apple’s Unified Memory (RAM) and a 256GB solid state drive (SSD). To put that into perspective, a 13-inch Macbook Pro with the same core specs retails for £1349/$1299. As you’d expect, Apple offers a range of upgrades and a near-fully-specced Mac Mini boasts the M2 Pro chip, 12-core CPU, 19-core GPU, 32GB Unified Memory, 1TB SSD (upgradable up to 8TB), four Thunderbolt ports (as opposed to two) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, if you are planning on hardwiring your Mac setup. At £2399/$2299, that’s a £700/$600 saving on a similarly specced 14-inch Macbook Pro. We reckon most photographers will be happy with the standard M2 chip, but would recommend opting for 16GB of Unified Memory and a 512GB SSD at the very least, since 8GB of RAM is relatively underpowered in 2023. It’s also worth remembering that you can’t upgrade the machine after purchase, although you can, of course, expand its storage using an external drive.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
If portability isn’t an issue and you’re happy to source a monitor and peripherals separately, the Mac Mini M2 looks like a great option. The setup continues to represent the most affordable route to owning a Mac and, although the base model is a little underpowered for editing, you can spec out a worthy machine for little over £1000/$1000.