I mean, the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the same M2 Pro starts at just $700 more than the Mac mini and it’s a whole laptop, with an HDR display, keyboard, trackpad, SDXC card slot, battery… We’re used to Apple charging a big premium for this stuff, but it’s gotten way out of hand, and the fact that none of it is upgradeable and you have to buy what Apple sells you at its crazy marked-up price only makes things worse. Charging $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB of RAM, and $200 to go from a 512GB SSD to 1TB, is more than double the going retail rate for top-tier PC hardware. The starting price is just one issue the other, as always, is Apple’s exorbitant price on storage and RAM upgrades. Unless Apple drastically increases the Mac Studio price when it gets an M2 Max upgrade, that will definitely be the better buy. The only real advantage of the M2 Pro Mac mini is Wi-Fi 6E and HDMI 2.1. Plus, it’s got two USB-C ports and an SDXC slot up front. With the lower-tier M2 Mac mini starting at a lower $599 price, the gap is bigger than ever.Ĭonsider that the entry-level Mac Studio is $1,999 and has an M1 Max with a 24-core GPU, double the memory bandwidth, and double the RAM (32GB vs 16GB). $1,099 was a good starting price for an upper-tier Mac mini, it’s a real shame it went up by almost 20 percent with the new model to $1,299. If there’s a problem with this system, it’s the price. It goes without saying it absolutely smokes the Intel-based Mac mini it replaces, but that system was so old that we don’t even use the same tools to benchmark it anymore. It’s a nice upgrade from the M1 Pro and obviously a lot better than the M2. Take the gap between the M1 and M2 and apply that to the M1 Pro and there you have it-a better Neural Engine, and usually somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent better performance depending on what the limiting factors are. The M2 Pro is about what we’d expect, performance-wise. But the faster CPU and Neural Engine in the M2 Pro make it faster than the M1 Max when applying the video stabilizing feature. The M1 Max has two video encoding engines, so the M2 Pro can’t quite keep up with its exporting speed, and the M2 Pro is similar in performance to the M1 Pro.

What is the mac mini for