what is the latest intel or even rumors re a new Mac Mini?

[meson]

I'm not quite sure I'd shell out for the 2TB of internal storage, as that is quite a premium. However, the 1TB option may well be what you need to provide the space you need and some extra room.

When it comes to ram, I'm inclined to say that you won't need to upgrade the ram for your uses, but you could add the bump to 24GB of ram and the 1TB of storage and still come in cheaper than adding the 2TB storage upgrade alone.

In your situation, I would be considering how much of the stuff on external drives you access regularly, determining how much space you need and migrating the core materials to external ssds. I'm sure you'll still be left with some stuff on spinning drives, but if you only need to access it occasionally, it won't be so bad.

 

[bzgnyc2]

so my conclusion - I think -

in the meantime I will try to streamline my current system as much as possible to see if I can pick up a little speed ...

and then hopefully, Apple will announce an M5 Mini in October. Here's hoping!
the plan will be to get a maxxed out Mini - with the biggest possible internal startup drive. worth the expense!

Question: is it helpful to pay for the extra ram? Is it worth the $$$ ?

Thanks again!

w

It's unclear to me you've fully optimized your current system such that you'll notice an improvement with an M5. A quick scan of your disk space breakdown suggests to me you're not running anything that should tax a M1 not to mention an M4. And with more older, more efficient software, a Mac Mini 2018 would have been fine.

Extra RAM is generally critical or mostly a waste. 16GB of plenty for most things but things that need 32 or 64GB are usually painful with 16GB. Whether you need it depends on the applications you run and the data/files you run through them. If you are just doing typical web browsing, MS Office, music player, etc, 16GB should be fine. Show us the results of Memory under Activity Monitor when things feel slow and we can advise further.

If your external HDD 5TB drive is formatted APFS (the default), it's likely the culprit of your beach ball. I would move all the data on it to SSD. Or if that's not practical, back it up, move all the stuff you need online to a Thunderbolt/USB4 SSD, reformat the HDD to HFS+, restore the stuff you want to keep in archive there, and keep it disconnected while you're not using it.