Need Mac mini Buying Advice.....

[kk05629]

Greetings...I am considering buying a new Mac mini with a new Mac Studio Display. I need advice on what Mac mini M4 to buy.

• I keep my photos and music on my current iMac.
• I run VMWare Fusion to run Windows 10 and Quicken Classic for Windows
• I run MS Office for Mac
• I think I'll use 1TB of storage and I have a 2nd external 1TB SSD. So storage is not a a real issue.
  

My real question is how much memory I really need. My current 2017 iMac (18,3) has 24 GB. Do I really need more than 16GB to run view/edit photos, listen to Music, use MS Word & Excel, and run VMWare Fusion? Or should err on the side of 24 or 32 GB or RAM?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

 

[MBAir2010]

my Mac min 2021 M1 on Monterey has 8GB ram as I never lagged or had a sinning ball
24 will be aplenty!

 

[Bigwaff]

My real question is how much memory I really need. My current 2017 iMac (18,3) has 24 GB. Do I really need more than 16GB to run view/edit photos, listen to Music, use MS Word & Excel, and run VMWare Fusion? Or should err on the side of 24 or 32 GB or RAM?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

At the risk of sounding glib, as much memory as you can afford. You should also be aware that Windows 10 will not run in a VMWare Fusion VM on Apple Silicon. In addition, you can only run ARM-based guests, e.g. Windows 11 ARM.

 

[leifp]

RAM is the lesser concern and while you’re likely to be fine with 16GB, it will probably to become the bottleneck in your use case scenario at some point in its life. And unlike your Intel iMac (assuming you have the 27” model), you cannot add RAM later.

The larger concern may well be your Windows use, although since you’re not gaming with it all the software should have Arm chip versions available. You may have to purchase new versions, however. I don’t use Quicken but I think that this forum might be of interest to you: https://community.quicken.com/discu...windows-11-built-with-arm64ec-for-arm-devices

 

[Fishrrman]

32gb of RAM.
1tb SSD.

As Butch said to Sundance, "that oughta do it"...