Just got an info about mac mini:
Same design, same part, change SOC /threads
Same design, same part, change SOC /threads
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M2 Mac mini is an incremental upgrade.
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No great surprises there, reckon pricing will be the thing that affects demand. Just like that they have done with MacBook Pro 13. Will they keep an M1 around to maintain the entry level price?
And bear in mind that the M1 Pro CPU that this will be compared with is likely the double binned variant - 6+2 cpu cores and 14 GPU cores. Not the ‘full fat’ 8+2 and 16 GPU cores which costs £300 more.
The standard M2 will have 4+4 and 10 GPU Cores but with slightly faster single core nosing ahead of the M1 Pro multi core.
I think the pricing and performance will be closer than people think.
The main downsides will be less memory bandwidth 100 vs 200mb/s and only 2 external monitors supported on the mini. I honestly don’t think it’ll be a big deal for most users there just like 24gb ram maximum is probably justifiably enough for the mini target demographic.
So, the M2 Mac mini will have the same number of ports as the M1 model? And I wonder if they’ll finally kill off the Intel Mac mini when the M2 is released.
If there is no M2 Pro Mac mini, it’d be nice to see it in the Mac Studio, but I doubt we’d see that either.
If there is no M2 Pro Mac mini, it’d be nice to see it in the Mac Studio, but I doubt we’d see that either.
Sad to hear but expected. The Mac Mini has apparently been relegated to truly basic users that want nothing more than email and web access. Something as simple as dual external monitor support will probably never come to the Mini as then it would stomp on the Studio.
Edit: Sweet Jesus, as acknowledged in post #10 I made a mistake about the number of monitors supported by a M1 Mini. Apologies to all that got butthurt.
Edit: Sweet Jesus, as acknowledged in post #10 I made a mistake about the number of monitors supported by a M1 Mini. Apologies to all that got butthurt.
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The M1 Mac mini already natively supports dual monitors.
The M1 Mac mini supports dual external monitors. I'm running with three right now, 2x4k directly connected and 1x2k via DisplayLink. I can hook up additional old iMacs as monitors too. The M1 Mac mini is actually a workhorse. It can run my trading setup along with some of my office stuff quite nicely. It makes for a nice home NAS as well because the power draw is so low. I'm using it with a 2014 iMac 27 for a four monitor setup. One more display would be really nice but it can be worked around.
Edit: Again, my error, had the m1 Mini conflated with M1 Macbook Air.
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The M1 Mac mini supports two external monitors without workarounds. You can run one via HDMI and the other via USB-C. The base M1 systems all support two monitors. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, though, already have one so they only support one external.
I just re-read this same thing on Apple's site, don't know where my head was this morning. Thanks for the correction.
Hardly surprising since the new Mac Studio kept the old Mac Mini "design language" & the M2 probably can't support any more ports than the M1 Also, a new form factor would break all the Mac Mini rackmount kits (seems like a lot of Minis get used for co-location - it's as close as Apple get to "high density computing"!) and kill the idea of 3rd party "stackable" hubs and drives that work with both the Mini and Studio.
Also ties in with Apple keeping the 13" MBP unchanged.
More ports would need a "M? Pro" or better SoC.
The M1 Mini currently supports pretty much all the I/O that the M1 SoC can drive - and there's never been any suggestion that the regular M2 has extra USB4 or display controllers.
Not sure if a M2 Pro Mini makes sense - by the time you've added the extra ports, bigger power supply, more cooling (assuming you want it quieter than Intel) it would make more sense to use the Mac Studio case.
I don't think we'd see a M2/M3 Pro Studio until the whole Studio line gets refreshed we know not when. As for why there wasn't one from the get-go, a M1 Pro (especially with the cheaper binned M1 Pro) might not have had a clear enough advantage over the M2. Plus, whereas getting the M? Pro in a laptop has battery life/heat/noise advantages, on a desktop going to a M? Max is "only money" - and not quite so much of that if you were needing minimum 32GB RAM anyway.
Yeah. Email. Web. 4k video editing. Music production. Apparently 3D rendering in Blender gets a bit jerky if you go above 4k... because everybody is complaining that the M1 Mini just isn't powerful enough! /s
Plus, it supports dual displays. More than that and you'd need the Pro/Max SoC to get enough GPU grunt to drive them smoothly. Unless you just want lots of text, in which case there's DisplayLink. The "problem" there is with the MBA and 13" MBP where people want dual displays as well as the internal one.
Heck my M1 mini replaced my 2019 i9 iMac 27”! It was actually so much faster with my work and was quite disappointed I spent $5,000 on that iMac.
I have an M1 Mac Mini 16gb/512gb connected to 2 monitors and an external 2tb SSD. I use Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, 3 Topaz programs, and, of course, Safari, etc. Works well for me.
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This is what I expect.
Yet it will still offer more CPU and GPU power than the M1 mini and a 24GB RAM option so for folks hitting limits with the M1 mini, the M2 mini will offer more headroom.
Exact same config, down to the 2 TB External SSD. Though I have three monitors. The mini is actually a workhorse of a system.
Vadim Yuryev has misconstrued this post's "threads" comment. He suggests it is saying both M2 and M2 Pro are coming.
I assume it just means "end of forum thread", as that's the style that was used in other posts too.
Seemed like they could have done so much more with the Mini as the M1 already had so much empty space in it, even the old Intel spec power supply though the M1 didn't remotely use it to its peak efficiency point. Like how about a Mini in the Apple TV size with a bunch of TB4 ports off the back.
Whelming if it's still the same unchanged form factor. It's not that Mini anymore compared to some alternatives.
Whelming if it's still the same unchanged form factor. It's not that Mini anymore compared to some alternatives.
The Mac Mini might make a great set-top-box, but it is way overpowered for that - the heavy lifting in a set-top box is done by hardware codecs on the chip. I used a Raspberry Pi as a set-top-box for years. The only time something like Mac Mini is needed is if it's also a media server that does real time transcoding so it can stream to phones etc.
It's probably true that they could shrink the Mac Mini somewhat now that Apple Silicon has arrived - after all, it was designed to hold an optical drive and mechanical hard drive - but is there a point? It needs to be big enough to accommodate all the I/O ports on the back - and it's good to have the power supply inside (unlike all the NUCs etc. which have a power brick as big as the computer). There's also a range of 3rd party hard drive enclosures and rackmount kits designed for the current Mini.
Apple won’t use anything less than an M1 in a mini (or a Mac) not even sure it’s a great idea to use A16 to be honest unless they thought somehow a mac nano with one USB C port was a good idea. Why would apple want to compete with a raspberry pi?
If apple wanted to make some sort of home server they could easily throw an A series cpu in and compete with synology and qnap. How popular would a DAS raid with thunderbolt connection be? Driven by an iOS variant?
The current Mac mini enclosure is a product of its Intel origins, and now there’s 2 reasons to keep it in the same form factor for the M2:
1. No more r&d required, the toolings and parts ecosystem is well evolved.
2. Co location guys want it to stay that shape for their data centre.
The side effects for us are:
Silent case because it’s now over engineered.
Radio issues with WiFi and Bluetooth when usb 3 is involved
Still limited to 2 thunderbolt ports if the Intel model is discontinued
If apple wanted to make some sort of home server they could easily throw an A series cpu in and compete with synology and qnap. How popular would a DAS raid with thunderbolt connection be? Driven by an iOS variant?
The current Mac mini enclosure is a product of its Intel origins, and now there’s 2 reasons to keep it in the same form factor for the M2:
1. No more r&d required, the toolings and parts ecosystem is well evolved.
2. Co location guys want it to stay that shape for their data centre.
The side effects for us are:
Silent case because it’s now over engineered.
Radio issues with WiFi and Bluetooth when usb 3 is involved
Still limited to 2 thunderbolt ports if the Intel model is discontinued