And then now, from the news, 256 M2 SSD is slower than 256 M1 :/ damn
I was going to get 16/256 but now what? no extra $$$ for the 512
I was going to get 16/256 but now what? no extra $$$ for the 512
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8gb vs 16gb
- Thread starter ahostmadsen
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My first day of working from home on my M2 mini 256/16 after upgrading from an M1 256/8.
With all my apps and tabs open performance is much better on the new M2. 0 swap usage and everything is nice and snappy. With the 8GB M1 I always used to get red memory pressure and performance took a noticeable hit.
With all my apps and tabs open performance is much better on the new M2. 0 swap usage and everything is nice and snappy. With the 8GB M1 I always used to get red memory pressure and performance took a noticeable hit.
This is on par with my switch from M1/8 to M1/16 mini. I just need dual 5k support and I have a feeling Apple with not update the Mini for 2+ years so I am trying to determine best setup to last 3 years at peak performance.
I own a 2010 one with 4GB RAM and 320GB spinning HD which only plays lossless music connected to a DAC and still does great, thinking of getting it an SSD to revive it but, so far so good.
There is a 2014 i5 to whom I got an SSD and only 4GB RAM doing great.
Then my main one which is, sigh, a 2014 i7 with 16GB and 1TB SSD, this is the one being upgraded, I mostly do LightRoom and little PhotoShop with one file at a time and no dozen layers so very little power requirements and I am thorn at the upgrade, thinking of M2 with 512GB and 8GB but I am afraid I'll have to raise the bar to 1TB and this takes the cost all the way up to 1.189 (tax included) which starts to be quite a high price.
To today with my i7 16GB the most annoying things I face when working with Adobe LightRoom are, strange but true, cropping and straightening and exporting with the latter sometimes taking eternities compared to file size... but I have to admit I keep tons of Safari tabs open, my idea is the new Mini to only do photo retouching and leave the old i7 for the s&%t so I won't overload the internal storage and keep RAM busy with web browsing, a new monitor with double input to switch from a computer to another would do the trick.
Would you suggest biting the bullet and go for 512 and 16?
Come on, I am now using a 4GB 2015 Air and can also do some LightRoom editing if needed, it takes some patience but it is still useful, I gotta say Apple OS is very efficient, unfortunately software houses don't save on RAM usage any longer just because it is cheap now, cheap for them all besides us Apple users...
I'm always an advocate of swapping in SSDs into older Macs. Those were some well built machines and so easy to maintain. It feels so rewarding to spend 10 minutes to pop in a US$30 SSD drive in and watch it breathe with new life. I keep a 15" 2010 as a loaner/backup option machine.
The M1 Pros were amazing at performing even under limited resources. I had very good experiences with a 13" M1 8/500 despite running a very heavy workload (Capture One Pro & lots of developer tools), but this is before we had concerns with SSD speeds. Because of that I don't feel comfortable saying that M2s still perform great even when under resourced.
Do you live close enough to an Apple Store so that you can try an 8/512 first? If you need to save money and don't want to overbuy, try the lower model and throw everything you can at it to see how it does. If it does great, keep it. If it doesn't, buy the next one up.
I am going to upgrade the 2010 with a 500GB SSD and since it only streams lossless music to a DAC 500GB is plenty of space, unfortunately I broke the remote control cable on the 2014 i5 Mini while installing the SSD otherwise it would have been a nice upgrade.
Unfortunately no Apple store here but even in town, where I usually go once every couple weeks, they have them on display but not Adobe apps to check it out, my guess is that I will have to go 500GB and 16GB on the mini and use an external SSD for eventual storage, I will later on also update the old Air with an M2 one
Unfortunately no Apple store here but even in town, where I usually go once every couple weeks, they have them on display but not Adobe apps to check it out, my guess is that I will have to go 500GB and 16GB on the mini and use an external SSD for eventual storage, I will later on also update the old Air with an M2 one
Did you install a SATA SSD? Cuz it is much easier to install an NVMe SSD in the 2014.
Less risk of damage.
External storage is going to be fine. You'll have a Thunderbolt 4 port. There are people here running their OS off of external SSD drives and a Thunderbolt cable.
I use Capture One Pro and for a few weeks, I had to do all of my edits off of a USB 3.1 SSD that's only 1/10th of TB4 speed. I didn't notice any problems.
im happy with 8GB of RAM on my MacBook Air 2020 M1 and never had heat or spinning balls
this is while I was
streaming a euro football game,
with music going to a pair of HomePods,
and handbraking a 2-plus hour movie, TAR 1080dpi fast
while using a battery just Thursday.
I forgot to plug the MBA in the power supply.
Nope, I had a 2.5" handy and used that one, unfortunately I broke the tiny connector which serves the status led and IR receiver so I won't be able to use the remote to play/pause music otherwise I'd be fine with the i5 Mini as a music server
Since I will have a spare Mini and also have to, sooner or later, upgrade the screen with a 27" the best would be to use the new Mini to work on my photo archive and as such be sufficient with the internal storage and leave the actual i7 one to dirty stuff so that it won't run short of space but I anyway have both an external 2.5" 1TB and a NMVE 500GB handy to eventually store non critical stuff.
About to take a decision but still I won't buy anything before end of March
Yeah I had a 2.5” SSD handy as well but a cheap NVMe drive with adapter is much easier and much faster to install, with less risk of damage, and also runs much faster too, so I chose that route. This also leaves the hard drive in place for extra storage.
I say this as advice for others in the future with a hard drive based 2014 Mac mini contemplating the upgrade. Unless budget is the primary concern, or the hard drive is defective, I’d usually recommend the NVMe SSD + adapter option. The only caveat is that it’s best to update macOS first before doing the upgrade.
So what do you advise to do with the 2010 one, 2.5" swapping or NVME + adapter? I am against adapters, got not that great of an experience with the MBAir NVME + adapter and since the Mini won't need to run lightning fast I don't mind speed but rather reliability on the long term.
Thanks
Thanks
Agreed with the RAM points completely.
Re: Useful life: I think the machine’s useful life will be the same (what would a machine that works now stop working? We have zero evidence of early SSD failure for example). If you meant it won’t resale for as much, I think that’s a fact of technology and technological change, not Apple: in 2010 the improvements year over year on the Mac side were tiny, so there wasn’t the downside of having older models. Now each year brings some pretty significant innovations that simply didn’t exist on the Intel side. It’s rare on the Intel side we’d see 20% jump in performance in a year: I can think of only the 8th gen (adding 50% CPU cores) and the 12th gen (improvement in raw core speeds) as recent examples; other than that, slim pickin’s.
Have you actually tried both and confirmed this? The 8GB M1 Ux isn’t bad; it just isn’t. Unless you are using an app that demands 16GB. But still, even in 2023, that’s rare. Apple’s professional apps all work just fine on an 8GB machine.
The 2010 Mac mini can't run an NVMe drive.
As for the MB Air, I wouldn't necessarily recommend an adapter. I would recommend an Apple OEM SSD if available and not too expensive. For my wife's 2017 13" MacBook Air and my kid's 2015 13" MacBook Pro, I upgraded those with Apple/Samsung OEM SSUBX drives. Many of the problems with the NVMe drives in the Mac laptops are related to power management. This is a not an issue with the Mac mini. Another issue is macOS updates and NVMe drive compatibility, but all you have to do there is upgrade the OS to Monterey before the NVMe install.
Indeed. My 2014 Mac mini is 8 GB with NVMe SSD and it runs just fine in Monterey. I can lightly to moderately multitask business applications with Safari, Messages, and Mail at the same time with no problems.
In contrast, the 2014 Mac mini with hard drive is basically unusable even with 8 GB RAM in Big Sur.
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So agree. Put in a Crucial 1 TB SSD into my 2011 iMac (27"/3.4 GHZ i7 quad) years ago and it still remains my daily workhorse for stuff like MS Office and scientific graphics and stats programs, and packs plenty of punch.
But alas, ordered an ASD this week with the Amazon sale and looking forward to a mini M2 upgrade, just because I am tired of having to the "oven bake" the iMac's video card every year and now it restarts by itself after waking from sleep 2-3 times every morning before it warms up. Not to mention outdated OS starting to cause some grief.
As expected, regular mainstream usage is fine on 8 GB, but doing that + video editing with multiple 4K layers is obviously problematic.
That is pretty impressive just to do all of the stuff he did to the base model before it finally said, I can't do anymore. For my usage, the base model is more than enough by a wide margin.
Now that you mention this, I wonder if the decision to use slower bandwidths at lower storage sizes could in part be to reduce wear and tear on the SSD. I ran an 8GB M1 like a 32GB i7 and it did amazingly well, but the swap volume was unnerving.
Think is a factor of economics. Price of Mac's is surging in many regions and Apple needs to remain competitive globally as any excessive uplift in pricing neither serves Apple or the customer...
Wear on the SSD is vastly overblown IMO as Apple doesn't release official TBW figures, nor have the original base model Mac's been observed to have a significant failure rate such as the Butterfly Keyboard. I simply don't worry about how much the system uses swap, I just use it as intended.
Q-6
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Oh yeah, economics would be the simplest explanation and the one I'd go with first.
I just realized I had been reading the numbers wrong. I haven't been following that closely. I thought the M2 mini was measured at 1500mbps. I just now realized that it's 1500MBps.
I was thinking, "Ouch. 1500mbps is really harsh. Maybe I need to stop telling people they don't need to obsess over memory swap as much as they do."
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Sorry to piggy back off of OP’s thread.
I think I’m gonna end up getting the M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage.
That should be good enough for the office suite, Pixelmator, Photoshop, programming, and some basic video editing (while I have a lot of that opened at the same time), I think.
Especially since I intend to get a more powerful Mac Mini whenever the M3 is released, and this M2 Mac Mini will be relegated to a different work station that requires less intense work…
… Though now as I type this… I don’t really know WHEN the M3 would be released, so maybe I should go for 24 GB of RAM for this M2 and stick with it for as long as possible (maybe get a base M2 Mac Mini for my less intense work station)…
I think I’m gonna end up getting the M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage.
That should be good enough for the office suite, Pixelmator, Photoshop, programming, and some basic video editing (while I have a lot of that opened at the same time), I think.
Especially since I intend to get a more powerful Mac Mini whenever the M3 is released, and this M2 Mac Mini will be relegated to a different work station that requires less intense work…
… Though now as I type this… I don’t really know WHEN the M3 would be released, so maybe I should go for 24 GB of RAM for this M2 and stick with it for as long as possible (maybe get a base M2 Mac Mini for my less intense work station)…