Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
It doesn't make much sense to me that the Mac Mini "Pro" allows for a customer to configure a BTO machine to as much as 8 TB storage (SSD) while at the same time hitting the wall at a mere 32 GB RAM.... ?? Huh???? Surely anyone who needs and who can afford to upgrade to 8 TB storage would also truly require (and be able to afford) more than a mere 32 GB RAM? This doesn't compute.

Obviously, those who are in the situation where they need both more RAM and more storage are then going to skip the MM and go right to the Mac Studio, and I suppose that is what Apple is anticipating. This applies to those who are not interested in the base level specs of either the Mac Mini or the Studio, of course.....
Maybe the mini's thermal solution can't handle the extra on-die RAM?
 
Maybe the mini's thermal solution can't handle the extra on-die RAM?
Fine -- then the potential customer/user needs to move immediately on from considering the Mac mini to taking a look at the Studio, where presumably that situation has been considered and is not a problem.....

Fortunately I think that in the end this will be a somewhat moot point and that the majority of those who buy the Mac Mini will go with the base model or the next level above and that will be that, and those who actually need more than the MM is offering, even with the potential for upgrading various specs will take a look and then simply say, "OK, time to look more carefully at what Apple's Studio has to offer!" Probably what Apple is anticipating, anyway.....
 
Sheeeeeeeshh where are all the mac mini pro haters??? 😂😂
Agreed. This had to happen and I was surprised at the nay-sayers. This was obvious and needed as an AS replacement for the M1 Intel Mini. The intel M1 machine may still be an option (I haven't checked) but now the Mini AS transition is complete.
 
I have a 2018 MBP and it seems to only support 2 displays, I have a lower spec'd HP that supports all 3 of my 1080p/1440p monitors. I always thought it was a software limitation and not a hardware limitation. Nice to see apple supporting 3 displays officially. I might have to get one of these for the home office.
 
246GB SSD in the “base Pro” model in 2023?. Who can live with that????. Please… Ripping of customers knowing that model will be useless the soon the owner uses it forcing him to get a new one soon or making everyone to buy a higher end model. Selling the same car with 1 seat to save you money?!. Yeah, sure.
You can't make blanket statements like this. I've had my Mac for 10 years and there's a total of 260GB space used out of my 1TB Fusion drive. 256GB for OS and software would be ok for a lot of people, myself included.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Luap
Last year I purchased a Late 2012 Mac Mini (16GB Ram + 1TB HDD), and I'm running an unsupported version of macOS Ventura on it.

Would I see a lot of difference with an 8GB Ram + 512 SSD M2 Mac Mini?
 
  • Like
Reactions: zapmymac
I literally wrote a whole paragraph explaining that I'd rather do 512 Studio over 2TB M2 Pro.
But if you're comparing for the masses, you do the 1-to-1 same configuration, so that the price comparison is, welllll, actually a comparison.

Then in the conclusion, you can explain how you'll save because you'd rather have 512GB vs 2TB and your paragraph of reasoning...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Riot Nrrrd
It doesn't make much sense to me that the Mac Mini "Pro" allows for a customer to configure a BTO machine to as much as 8 TB storage (SSD) while at the same time hitting the wall at a mere 32 GB RAM.... ?? Huh???? Surely anyone who needs and who can afford to upgrade to 8 TB storage would also truly require (and be able to afford) more than a mere 32 GB RAM?
I've had 32GB in my Mac for 10 years and even under heavy use ( Xcode development with a simulator running, many browser tabs ) I rarely use more than 20GB. Obviously, everyone has different use cases, but I'd suggest a 'mere' 32GB is more than enough for 90%+ of the user base.
 
Last year I purchased a Late 2012 Mac Mini (16GB Ram + 1TB HDD), and I'm running an unsupported version of macOS Ventura on it.

Would I see a lot of difference with an 8GB Ram + 512 SSD M2 Mac Mini?
I strongly suggest you get 16GB if that's what you need. Stepping down to 8GB would be a bad idea. RAM is RAM - there's nothing 'magic' about the memory on AS machines.
 
What no blue, yellow or green options? 🤣

No problem. This is what I have been waiting for to replace the old 2013 iMac27 I have in the office. I already have plenty of displays but things like MS Office and Adobe CC are telling me that this machine’s terminal operating system are no longer supported.
 
Anyone that is considering buying 8TB of storage from Apple is just asking for Apple to rip them off. If you need that much storage just invest in an external storage solution. It'll be much less expensive and expandable to boot.
External storage uses up an extra USB/Thunderbolt port (a precious commodity on the Mac mini), is much slower and potentially requires another power plug to be available if you don't opt for a bus-powered external drive.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MacCheetah3
Just wondering can you run VMware fusion pro - using windows 10 pro (64-bit) for the Mac mini m2 pro. I’m currently using Mac mini 2018 intel model I5, 8gb.
Don’t know about VMware but I tried running ARM Windows 11 on Paralells Desktop. Doable but some programs I work with just didn’t run on it. So Macs are a no-go for me, for the time being.
Good old Bootcamp times. Get Macbook for quality materials, build quality, get Windows because it just works, there’s no tradeoffs. And Windows 11 is so clean, boots in a second. Even Office is still scuffed on macOS as I learned. Recently a student came to me. We tried to figure out how to export a Word doc into PDF/A- you can’t do that. Only on Office for PC…
 
  • Like
Reactions: MacWorld78
I strongly suggest you get 16GB if that's what you need. Stepping down to 8GB would be a bad idea. RAM is RAM - there's nothing 'magic' about the memory on AS machines.

I'm not sure I need 16GB though. I upgraded my Late-2009 Mac Mini to 8GB, and it seemed to do fine for me. When I purchased the Late-2012 model last year, the bump to 16GB was like $20, so I thought why not. Paying $200 extra for something which I'm not sure will truly benefit my needs seems excessive, hence why I'm asking for opinions.

I generally just use my Mac for web-browsing, and some other built-in macOS apps, and a couple of mild intensity apps I own. I do have intentions of transferring some old VHS tapes to digital format this year, so I may spend some time working with SD content on iMovie, but I'm not sure that working with SD content on iMovie would be SUPER RAM-intensive.
 
I'm not sure I need 16GB though. I upgraded my Late-2009 Mac Mini to 8GB, and it seemed to do fine for me. When I purchased the Late-2012 model last year, the bump to 16GB was like $20, so I thought why not. Paying $200 extra for something which I'm not sure will truly benefit my needs seems excessive, hence why I'm asking for opinions.

I understand where you're coming from. I suggest that you may want to monitor your RAM usage through Activity Monitor over a few days as you go about your normal tasks. If over that period you can see that you're rarely swapping to disk with 8GB then that will be the right choice for you.

While the extra $200 upfront is a factor, if you find yourself doing more intensive tasks over time, you'll have room to breathe with 16GB and extend the usable life of your machine given you can't upgrade the RAM after purchase. 🤷‍♂️
 
  • Like
Reactions: Alan Gordon
Stoked with the Pro version of this. Will be my next Mac. The best value Mac :) Looking forward to reviews and tests online.
 
It just holds 32 GB RAM when the Intel 2018 peaks at 64GB I already have. Good lord. This is sad. I routinely have single vocal mixes alone that draw 28GB on Intel. More and more I will be forced to move to Pro Tools and leverage effing Windows on a secondary server.
Do those vocal mixes load into 28gb because the RAM is there or do they need all that RAM to be editable in real time? Software will use basically all the RAM available because available RAM is free. But there is a big difference between data being in RAM just because nothing else has asked to use that RAM, then really needing the RAM. I’m just a simple office worker, but when I had 8gb on my mini 2018, certain programs used X amount of RAM And worked fine. When I upgraded to 32gb a lot of the programs started using more RAM. But there was very little performance improvement. (Note, enough to be worth the $60 and taking apart my mini And swapping the RAM, but hardly night and day difference. And who knows how well the mini would run the current MacOS if I still had it at 8gb.)

Also, this is much faster RAM. So data goes into it faster and gets read faster. That allows more to be done with less RAM, since data can be used really quickly.
 
8Gb standard RAM is embarrassing. I can't believe how arrogant Apple is for not putting in 16 Gb standard.
Pathetic
 
The Mac mini and the Mac mini Pro look great to me. I ordered the mini pro this morning. I am impressed that they included Wi-Fi 6E and the updated Bluetooth even in the base model. I would’ve liked a space gray, or even a starlight version of the mini pro, but the specs are more important to me than the looks. I bumped up the specs a little bit on the mini pro, and it did seem a little too close to the base Mac studio price. That made me pause a little bit and think about buying the M1 Mac Studio or waiting for the M2 Mac studio.
 
I'm not sure I need 16GB though. I upgraded my Late 2009 Mac mini to 8GB, and it seemed to do fine for me. When I purchased the Late 2012 model last year, the bump to 16GB was like $20, so I thought why not. Paying $200 extra for something which I'm not sure will truly benefit my needs seems excessive, hence why I'm asking for opinions.
Remember that on Apple Silicon SoCs, regular RAM is shared with the GPUs so that "8 GB" you think of as being adequate now won't be a 'full' 8 GB on AS. Back a while ago I upgraded my Mid 2010 Mac Pro from 8 GB to 24 GB and it was like night and day.

I tended to have hundreds of tabs open in browsers and run lots of things at once, so as I ran out of 'real' RAM the system started to create swap files in /private/var/vm, which slowed things down as well as ate up free disk space on my SSD, which was another problem. (Google swap space if you do not know the term.)

I would highly advise that you get the 16 GB for peace of mind if you can afford it - not to mention performance.
 
Don’t know about VMware but I tried running ARM Windows 11 on Paralells Desktop. Doable but some programs I work with just didn’t run on it. So Macs are a no-go for me, for the time being.
Good old Bootcamp times. Get Macbook for quality materials, build quality, get Windows because it just works, there’s no tradeoffs. And Windows 11 is so clean, boots in a second. Even Office is still scuffed on macOS as I learned. Recently a student came to me. We tried to figure out how to export a Word doc into PDF/A- you can’t do that. Only on Office for PC…

Thanks for your advice.

So I should get both system Mac Mini M2 Pro & possibly NUC PC or PC Laptop.

What’s the different between regular desktop /laptop and NUC especially on the intel CPU?
 
Finally! I can almost certainly replace my trusty ol 2012 MacMini! 🤗
It has lasted me 10 years, a pretty good innings, even by Apple standards 😉

Me too!!! I ordered the 16GB / 256 in edu store for $740 after tax through the education store.
PSA to all -- Costco Citi's extra +2 yr warranty ending in a few days. Make sure to use your Citi Costco card to take advantage of the 1% back and +2 yr warranty through Citi.

Sooo glad I didn't have to wait for 1) Costco to carry it 2) Hope for Costco to have the 16GB config (they didn't for the M1). Edu store gave me the prices I needed that Costco prolly won't be able to beat

Hope this computer runs me another 10 years!
 
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.