I cannot fathom why anyone would buy a Mac for pro use. They are so under powered it's truly comical. I wouldn't touch any pro PC with less than a 1080Ti these days, and realistically I'd want to be in 2080 territory with 10gb+ of VRAM and 64gb of system RAM.
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Given that NVidia have been making mobile 1080s for well over a year with near desktop performance, Apple have no excuse.
GPU power matters. It matters a LOT. Nobody should be working with anything under 10tFlop of GPU in a pro capacity anymore.
The cost of a desktop NVIDIA GeForce 1080Ti FE GPU from NVIDIA's own website is
$699. Most of the ones I found on New Egg are pushing $799 and up, which is the cost of the base model Mac mini. Even going with an ATX board to get 4 DIMM slots to keep the cost down, the 4x16GB DDR4 (64GB) is going to run roughly $600 for good quality G.Skill DDR4 3200 sale or no sale.
So you are already at $1,300.00 USD for a GPU and 64GB of DRAM in your Pro machine and you do not have a CPU, a motherboard, a case, a PSU, storage, an operating system, any sort of cooling for the above components, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, et al.
Adding those to make a complete computer is going to add roughly $1,100.00 to the $1,300.00, which gets us to $2,400.00 USD pretty fast.
NVIDIA's "mobile" GPUs use anywhere from 34w-64w (GTX 1050/1050Ti) all the way up to 90w-150w (GTX 1080), which are not going to fit inside of a Mac mini chassis give the power and thermal constraints. The end cost to the user for a mobile GTX1080 would be close to $500-$600 as a BTO item, even if it was possible to put one in there, which is would not, at least not within the existing mini chassis and retain a built-in PSU, the slim form factor and a 65w CPU.
"Nobody should be working with anything under a 10 TFlops GPU in a pro capacity anymore" Really? Because that equates to a Titan X from 2016, which cost $1200.00 alone.
It seems your sole criteria for whether a computer is "Pro" is the amount of GPU power that it contains, which is narrow-minded, to say the least. While visual creative comprise a large amount of the Professional market, they are not the only Pros who need to get work done. There are many Pros, even creative Pros, who do not need 10 TFlops of GPU horsepower.
People with complex Excel calculations for financial modeling and forecasts, currency and trading need more CPU cores and DRAM, with just enough GPU power to drive multiple monitors.
Audio pros need more CPU cores and DRAM depending on how many tracks they are working with, and may even need DSPs for their virtual instruments, but only need enough GPU to drive the monitors showing the tracks they are working with, which is hardly worth 10 TFlops and $1200 worth of GPU.
As for video production, the UHD 630 and its QuickSync engine provide plenty of hardware acceleration for certain tasks, and because video encoding is a new function for the T2 in the Mac mini, we may see even more performance as Applications are updated to take advantage of the T2 chip.
That being said, for some, an eGPU may be a necessary addition to their workflow at some point. The Mac mini will work for some as is, but not for others, just like any other computer ever built. It will be interesting to see how the mini does months down the road when more are sold and users find new and interesting ways for molding it to their particular workflow.
