If you need 32GB in your Mac Mini the price difference is $1999 for the Mac Studio vs $1699 for the Mac Mini M2 Pro 32GB. Indeed that's a tough sell for the Mac Mini. It shows how much Apple is charging extra for those capacity upgrades.
Plus I’d assume the M1 Studios will now get discounted in preparation for M2 refresh in March.
Apple don’t do discount for latest gen unfortunately. On a related note: if the USD stays strong and you live outside of the US, you will get a price bump when they refresh the product line.
Oof - once you bump the base model to 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage it doubles the price Apparently Mini RAM hasn't been user upgradable since the 2014 model https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#2020
On the plus side, with a desktop like this that isn't going to be moving frequently, there's really no compelling need to upgrade the internal storage. You could attach an external 1TB (or bigger!) NVMe SSD and you should be able to install macOS on that. You could just use the internal SSD as an extra storage drive. AFAIK, you're not required to use the internal SSD at all.
Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?
I'm not trying to bash Apple in bad faith, but let's be real the $599 model is inadequate. 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in 2023. There's plenty out there on the M1 Mac mini's 8GB being a bad idea even for casual users. I had an 8GB M1 mini when it first came out and returned it because it was swapping to the SSD with like 3 apps open (nothing like an IDE or Docker or Adobe X Y Z). I just find it humorous that you can s…
The $599 model is for a basic user who barely does anything more than browse the web and send emails (which is to say, a lot of people). It's not a pro machine.
I feel like such a "basic user" would be better-served with an iPad or even a MacBook Air, unless they happen to have a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and webcam from, say, their old PC. Historically Apple has marketed the mini as a "gateway drug" to Macs. Cheap, and people can just reuse the peripherals they already have. Even now I wouldn't recommend an entry-level mini to that "email and web" crowd.
Another anecdote: I have a M1 air and an m1 iMac both with 8GB and have never run into a problem. I think 8gb is still the sweet spot for casual users.
Can you define "sweet spot" in this case? Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance. In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x cur…
The $599 model is for a basic user who barely does anything more than browse the web and send emails (which is to say, a lot of people). It's not a pro machine.
I'm a "pro", but don't do 8k video editing. Still haven't maxed out the M1 mini. Except when Zoom or Discord start taking weird amounts of CPU for literally no reason :D
I know from personal experience that if you are using the mini for anything of substance, and only have 8GB of RAM, you are using your SSD as "RAM" more than you probably realize.
disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
I was really hopeful for these, but so disappointed.
I have a triple monitor setup, and there's essentially a 117% surcharge to add support for the third display.
I'm not trying to bash Apple in bad faith, but let's be real the $599 model is inadequate. 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in 2023. There's plenty out there on the M1 Mac mini's 8GB being a bad idea even for casual users. I had an 8GB M1 mini when it first came out and returned it because it was swapping to the SSD with like 3 apps open (nothing like an IDE or Docker or Adobe X Y Z). I just find it humorous that you can s…
> let's be real the $599 model is inadequate For most of the folks on HN, that's probably true. We're an edge case. For my parents? A Mac mini is gonna be more than enough. There are folks happilly using Chromebooks with a tenth of the power.
But why would you buy them a Mac mini of all things?
disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.
> More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 Mac mini On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software? I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to war…
What was the resolution a decade ago? Just having the Web in 4K is going to require significantly more memory. And something like Discord is not exactly comparable to an IRC client.
No, it's $599, with a load of extra customised options that allow people to add what they want, you cannot even buy this one in a store, you have to do a custom order, your regular user, walking into an electronic store will buy a base model. You've specced it up with every customisation possible, that 999.999999% of buyers won't do and won't need and then complain at the cost in an effort to bash Apple,
I'm not trying to bash Apple in bad faith, but let's be real the $599 model is inadequate. 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in 2023. There's plenty out there on the M1 Mac mini's 8GB being a bad idea even for casual users. I had an 8GB M1 mini when it first came out and returned it because it was swapping to the SSD with like 3 apps open (nothing like an IDE or Docker or Adobe X Y Z). I just find it humorous that you can s…
My 2016 Macbook air had 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, and that was bad for 2016. You can buy 1TB NVME SSD for $100 to upgrade any off-the-shelf SFFPC. There's not much excuse why Apple can't do the same, other than to get you to subscribe to iCloud storage.