Mac Mini M4 or wait? RAM question

[VTGuy79]

I currently have a Mac Mini, M1, 8GB, 256GB drive.

I use it for:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Lightroom
• Canon Digitial Photo Processing (DPP)
• Pages and Numbers
• iMovie
• Final Cut Pro

The videos that I edit are 4k, recorded on an iPhone (usually HVEC, rarely ProRes) or Canon 5D MKIV. Exported total video duration is 10-30minute 4k videos. I typically edit my videos and then export and walk away. Also, I am not editing photos and videos at the same time. I also use ffmpeg to convert videos when needed.

I have an BenQ 27” SQ2700 (QHD) screen that I would like upgraded; I don’t need a 27”- I did play with an iMac and iMovie layout seemed fine to me. I have a couple of external drives for editing.

I was planning on 32GB of RAM but now it's 24GB and 48GB on the Mini Pro. 1TB of storage for room to grow (cache for FCP, etc is stored on an external drive)

Budget is $2500, I could add some more for the Apple Display but am not sure I want to go that direction or not. Am in 50's but with pretty good sight.

I guess the big question is, Mac Mini M4 24GB, Mac Mini Pro M4 48GB or wait and see for the next release this year?

 

[Ben J.]

I bought the mini M4 16GB, used it for a couple of weeks, returned it and got a mini M4 pro 24/512 instead. To me the difference in general performance was huge. After all, the processor has the exact same clock speed, just a couple extra cores, and the ram was only 50% extra. But you get a faster memory bus speed, Thunderbolt 5 ports, which makes it a class above the non-pro M4.

I've had minis with 32GB ram. Now with 24GB, I never miss 32 at all. Lightroom and Avid Pro Tools is blazing away, and I have honestly never seen memory swapping in the Activity Monitor.

I'm perfectly fine with 512GB internal drive, it sits around 50% free space. I use external drives for large data like photos, movies, music and audio - I also have moved a lot of very unimportant folders to externals (like stupid apps installing big example files and help-videos) to externals and replacing them with aliases or symlinks, thus freeing up a couple of hundred GBs.

All this makes my now 16 months old M4 Pro a dream to use, and Sequoia is rock solid. Depending on where you are in the world, you might get one of these second-hand for $1500 or less, leaving you plenty left on your budget for display(s) and extras.

At least in my part of the world it's pretty easy to buy and sell used stuff online, so I wouldn't worry about waiting. Get a good machine now, and see, when new models come, whether it's worth it to do the upgrade, losing a couple of hundred $ in the process.

 

[wonderings]

What are you hoping to gain from a new computer? M1 computers are still great machines. Sounds like rendering time is an issue as you set it and go about doing something else or do it at night. I can't see Photoshop or Lightroom being an issue, or Pages and Numbers. iMovie is going to run well. The only wild card I would wonder about is Final Cut Pro but I still think the M chips are so much better then anything Intel had out that you are ahead of all those chips that were used by pros. So why are you spending $2500? I would recommend thinking this through critically and not getting lost in Apple's marketing. What is it you want to gain from upgrading, then talk to people doing the same thing and see if that is actually going to make a difference.

 

[VTGuy79]

Rendering isn't really an issue, I just go and do something else instead of waiting. Or, I continue to use the computer for other tasks.

If I'm going to spend money on an upgrade, I would like to not do it again for many years, if possible. I don't want to spend $1k+ and then need to upgrade in a couple of years. I have this $ set aside for some time and would like to buy and be safe for awhile.

I am always in the yellow if not red for memory pressure and hovering at 90% disk space and that is with all cache on a SSD, data.