M2 Pro MacMini

GlennO

GlennO

Axe-Master
The M2 Pro MacMini started shipping this month and I picked one up and I'm very impressed. Starting price of US$1300 is pretty amazing for the performance you get. I got the 12 core and its performance is comparable to my i9 PC, but it runs cool and quiet, which is nice in a music production environment. Basically, this surpasses the base Mac Studio and is less expensive. If you're looking for a Mac for music production, this hits a sweet spot of price and performance.
 
I don’t see how you could go wrong with this for the money. It should make a real nice DAW. I have an M1 pro Mac Pro and a lot of my DAW stuff still needs Rosetta but runs fine. Rosetta performance seems really good.
 
in 2020 I retired my late 2009 iMac as main computer and switched to using it as a second display for a late 2018 mac mini. It's serving me well for the most part but do wish I had waited for these newer mini's. Lately been dealing with some thermal throttling /kernel panics that seem to be resolved now. I also recently integrated a Razer Core X EGPU with a MSI Radeon RX6600 XT and noticing things are snappier now.
 
M2 Mac Pro here … that chip screams through the audio and plugs.

Logic fails occasionally in both native and Rosetta. (Haven’t really tested video munching on it yet.)
 
GlennO said:
The M2 Pro MacMini started shipping this month and I picked one up and I'm very impressed. Starting price of US$1300 is pretty amazing for the performance you get. I got the 12 core and its performance is comparable to my i9 PC, but it runs cool and quiet, which is nice in a music production environment. Basically, this surpasses the base Mac Studio and is less expensive. If you're looking for a Mac for music production, this hits a sweet spot of price and performance.
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Thanks for thrme tip - I'll likely move from Macbook pro to mini next go-around as I tend to leave my laptop at music room desk all the time now and don't like that the battery degrades even though always plugged in.
 
GlennO said:
The M2 Pro MacMini started shipping this month and I picked one up and I'm very impressed. Starting price of US$1300 is pretty amazing for the performance you get. I got the 12 core and its performance is comparable to my i9 PC, but it runs cool and quiet, which is nice in a music production environment. Basically, this surpasses the base Mac Studio and is less expensive. If you're looking for a Mac for music production, this hits a sweet spot of price and performance.
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I've been thinking about it. My 2017 model iMac Pro still works well, but I'd like to have something that has some more ooomph in a smaller footprint.
 
I may very well be looking for a new machine. After a number of issues on my 2018 mac mini (bought two yrs ago) this past week and half I fear it may be bricked. Taking it to Apple Store Wednesday for a diagnostic as it seems likely hardware problem. Preparing for the worst and guess I’ll start researching these newer models and options. Best case scenario is repairable.
 
Chewie5150 said:
I may very well be looking for a new machine. After a number of issues on my 2018 mac mini (bought two yrs ago) this past week and half I fear it may be bricked. Taking it to Apple Store Wednesday for a diagnostic as it seems likely hardware problem. Preparing for the worst and guess I’ll start researching these newer models and options. Best case scenario is repairable.
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My 2018 mini hard drive failed. I have a 2012 mini that still runs fine and I have relegated it to a Plex server.
 
Been watching a lot of tech vids on the mac models that I've narrowed it down to: mainly the mac mini m2pro vs studio. I agree with @GlennO 's assessment. The M2pro packs serious performance for value. The studio version closest spec'd about the same would be the base studio model M1 Max. The studio's seem to be more geared for video applications so much of the upgrades/$$ is for that. I don't do any video work..and likely won't ever. I just want to run 2 -4k monitors at most. even my old mini technically can support that.

The main benefit on paper it seems is the better memory bandwidth offered by the M1 Max Studio 400GB/s vs 200GB/s in the Mac mini M2 series. I admit I don't know the relative difference and the way apple architecture works here with unified memory. For context, I was on my mac mini 2018 and had 32 GB ddr3 (or whatever it was) memory. I'm guessing the unified memory even at 200GB/s say at 32 GB would easily outperform my older setup ...pound for pound. Been reading up a bit on how the unified memory works and it seems hard to compare to ram in older intel based...but from what I understand its just a lot more efficient way of handling processing - less time/distance travelled along motherboard/circuits etc byusing the shared (unified) memory in newer chips.

If I have to get a new machine, I'll know in a day or two, i'm like 85% gearing for the mini M2Pro. Just still wondering if any advantage of going with the Studio. I don't care so much for extra usbc ports and certainly sd card slot. big whoop. If i'm investing in new machine i also want to future proof as much as possible so the mini m2pro having newest chip despite 'lower bandwidth memory' is the better choice. Id get 32GB memory so i'm sure I'd still be light years ahead what i had with the intel based mini....
 
Chewie5150 said:
but from what I understand its just a lot more efficient way of handling processing - less time/distance travelled along motherboard/circuits etc byusing the shared (unified) memory in newer chips.
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Yes, unified memory is the way of the future for the simple reason that it gives you better performance. People complain about the lack of RAM upgradability, but this isn't 1995 where it was necessary to upgrade your RAM every couple of years to keep pace with the memory demands of new apps. 32GB was perfectly good for music production 10 years ago and it's still perfectly good today.
 
iaresee said:
RAID is tricky stuff to get right. I generally avoid it if I can.
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I thought about RAID, then decided I'd go with Time Machine for local backups, and then use BackBlaze to back up to the cloud. I also have my Fractal-stuff, like backups, 3rd party presets and IRs, in a hierarchy that is also copied to the cloud by Dropbox. So there's lots of redundancy, along with long-term archives. Probably the weakest link is the Time Machine drive, which has died a few times over the last 10-ish years. Most of my external drives are SSD now, but that one I keep as a regular drive because it gets written to so much; I think it'd be a bad use of an SSD drive.
 
MSS said:
My 2018 mini hard drive failed. I have a 2012 mini that still runs fine and I have relegated it to a Plex server.
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Plex/Scrypted server 2012 i7 Mac mini died last night. Picked up an M2 from Costco for $500 today 🥴
 
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Maybe it's gotten better, but I've had more Time Machine backups fail than every other backup system I've used combined. I honestly think it's just a waste of disc space.

For hardware vs. software RAID....your options on Mac are somewhat limited. It might just be ZFS via Fuse and SoftRAID (XT) from OWC. I'm not aware of another one.

But....unless I'm mistaken, software RAID predates hardware RAID...a lot of non-pro raid cards are actually software running on a microcontroller, and software raid has been the standard in the unix world pretty much forever (remember, OS X started as OpenBSD userland and a Mach kernel....and I think it's still Posix compliant). And Windows Storage Spaces actually got good at least for raid 1 and 10. I'm also of the opinion that parity raid is kind of silly at this point unless you're talking about scale that makes multiple redundant storage servers makes sense. Drives are too cheap (other than Mac internal modules).

All that is to say that unless you're using VMWare or need blind swap because you're installing in a datacenter...software raid is generally the way to go.

On a Mac, I'd probably go with some thunderbolt DAS, probably from OWC. The Thunderbay 4 Mini would work for me, with one big raid 10 of SSDs. But, I also only need a few TB of live storage. At this point, I'd also probably have a Synology box (that clones itself to a cloud) with spinning rust, also in raid 10, for backups using their backup agent. It at least hasn't catastrophically failed and needed to have the data dropped yet (had that happen to several time machine things, including one of the magic boxes apple used to sell).

That's a heck of a lot more expensive than just 2 TB of internal storage (even from Apple), but ... I would trust it more.

FWIW, I'm actually using a FreeBSD machine with a zfs span over mirrors (not exactly raid 10) of SSDs (speeds over 10GbE are similar to local SATA SSDs, mostly thanks to the way ZFS does caching and that server not doing anything but storage and having 128 GB of RAM), which backs up to a synology, which backs up to backblaze. In reality, I'd probably just pay for a dock with 10 GbE and keep using what I'm already using.
 
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