M2 Mac Mini Buying Advice for Photographer [MERGED]

[Keegan75]

Hi everyone,
I am a serious hobbyist photographer. I do not do any video. I use both Lightroom and Photoshop extensively. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on M2 vs M2 pro.

I am willing to pay more for the M2 pro if i know it will drive material performance gains.

Configurations I am considering are:
- M2 with 24GB RAM, 1TB
- M2 Pro with 32GB RAM, 1TB

For those familiar with these chips, would I see any improvement in performance with Lightroom and/or Photoshop?

Thanks!

 

[Fishrrman]

I think you'd be fine with the M2pro, base model (with 16gb RAM), BUT with SSD upgraded from 512gb to 1tb... (adds $200, I believe)

 

[Mettaman]

I don't earn any income from my photos. I use Lightroom Classic, Photo Mechanic and Topaz Photo AI. I import 100's of 24MB RAW files for sorting and editing. Which of the following M2 Mini configurations do you recommend, and why? My inclination is to get the 24GB memory because I can't upgrade memory in the future. My current computers* are painfully slow and get hot working with RAW photo files. Thanks!!​

a) 1T - 16GB
b) 512GB - 24 GB

*MacBook Pro 2019, i5, 8GB/250GB
*IMac 5K 2015, i7, 8GB/3.2TB

 

[Mettaman]

Hi everyone,
I am a serious hobbyist photographer. I do not do any video. I use both Lightroom and Photoshop extensively. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on M2 vs M2 pro.

I am willing to pay more for the M2 pro if i know it will drive material performance gains.

Configurations I am considering are:
- M2 with 24GB RAM, 1TB
- M2 Pro with 32GB RAM, 1TB

For those familiar with these chips, would I see any improvement in performance with Lightroom and/or Photoshop?

Thanks!

Please let me know where you net out. I have the same questions.

 

[aperfectcircle]

If you can afford it, the Pro option is what I would go for. You get the extra CPU grunt (plus the extra memory in your config options). The base M2 will absolutely be fine, but if you start getting more advanced with editing, running batch processing, the Pro should be better. Plus you have a bit more future proofing if you decide to play around with more heavy stuff down the line.

 

[xaxik]

Hi everyone,
I am a serious hobbyist photographer. I do not do any video. I use both Lightroom and Photoshop extensively. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on M2 vs M2 pro.

I am willing to pay more for the M2 pro if i know it will drive material performance gains.

Configurations I am considering are:
- M2 with 24GB RAM, 1TB
- M2 Pro with 32GB RAM, 1TB

For those familiar with these chips, would I see any improvement in performance with Lightroom and/or Photoshop?

Thanks!

Hi Keegan, sharing my thoughts as it seems we share pretty much similar use case:

I've ordered M2 24+512 version already purely for amateur photography management. I have around 70k photos in catalog and working with it on Windows is extreme pain. Mac Lightroom performance is much better.

I think that 512GB SSD is enough to get fast internal SSD (2chips). 1TB is cost overkill by my opinion. External Thunderbolt disk will be much more cost efficient if needed.

For the RAM I see really important to get enough to avoid swapping memory to disk. So I've chosen 24GB.

PRO vs Non PRO - I'm scared of noise coming from the active cooler. I've seen on some of the early videos for fresh M2 and M2 PRO tests where tester mentioned M2PRO is much hotter and cooler is active - can be heard. For M2 it seems to be OK.
I've made some very bad experience years ago with I5 version of mac mini (extremely noisy beast) and I do not want to repeat it - so I ordered M2 version - from the computing power perspective it should be really sufficient for Lightroom.

The difference between these two chips is not so big in common tasks and work. You will utilize PRO extra power only on edge cases (rendering previews/exporting huge amount of photos continuously) by my opinion. So I didn't find it cost efficient and I bought M2 version.

br
Mchal

 

[xaxik]

I don't earn any income from my photos. I use Lightroom Classic, Photo Mechanic and Topaz Photo AI. I import 100's of 24MB RAW files for sorting and editing. Which of the following M2 Mini configurations do you recommend, and why? My inclination is to get the 24GB memory because I can't upgrade memory in the future. My current computers* are painfully slow and get hot working with RAW photo files. Thanks!!​

a) 1T - 16GB
b) 512GB - 24 GB

*MacBook Pro 2019, i5, 8GB/250GB
*IMac 5K 2015, i7, 8GB/3.2TB

b) more RAM definitely,
512GB gives you faster internal SSD drive (2chips) already, no need to pay for extra 512GB I think
you can buy extra SSD external drive later and it will be much cheaper