Is your Mac mini a regular or a pro?
I’m looking to buy my first Mac mini, and my budget is somewhat tight.
Right now I’m on the fence about purchasing the M4 pro, or the M4 with 24 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of memory.
I’m looking to replace my M One MBP, and to be honest I’ve heard that the base model Mac mini is actually capable of doing that.
My question is, should I break the bank and go all in, or keep it somewhat modest?
I’m honestly not a power user, and would only primarily use it for surfing the web and word processing. It may come a time where I start to get into AI in large language, models, or start to dabble in a little programming in the future, but that’s a another story.
Comments
Investment
Look it as an investment. Make a list of what you are going to use it shor time, long time and look at what you need and which will help get you there. Check Amazon for deals specially when it comes this Summer. Long live the Apple, it is little bad but still worth it.
Keep in mind
Consider not only what you will use the Mac for with regards to both short-term and long-term goals, but also that Apple tends to lean towards a "what you see is what you get" approach. Meaning that you will not be able to simply take your Mac into a computer shop, and later upgrade it.
Just food for thought…
I would go base
Consider that the M4 is comparable in performance to the M3 Pro, so I see no investment in getting the M4 Pro. If you're on a tight budget get the M4 base as the M5 Pro will be its equivalent in performance figures. The real future-proof investment is the M4 Max, which is both future-proof and won't give the urge to upgrade to the M5 when it is debuted.
Again, the Base is a very capable machine as I can see from the reviews.
HTH
Aim High
But also, be realistic.
Never simply optimise for cost. Buy cheap, buy twice and all that.
The top-tier base configuration is entirely appropriate for a non-power-user. Really—you'll be fine.
But, if you ever intended to do anything fancy, like lots of virtualisation or use those very large LLMs, then it would obviously make sense for you to think about that now because you would only have to buy again when the time came. Unless you know you're going to, I suggest you be kind to your wallet in the present moment and just sell the machine later, because you don't sound like you have an immediate need and there is always another time.
FWIW: I went Pro. I wanted as much CPU and RAM muscle as I could get. It's a server that does virtualisation but it's going to be doing routing soon as well, so I'm not sorry I have the power. Also, it was worth it to upgrade the storage as well.
Have fun!
Fear of commitment
Here’s a little more info for you guys.
I currently have an MBP M1 pro with 16 gigs of RAM and a 512GBSSD, and from what I read is basically the equivalent of the base model Mac mini.
I’m looking to sell the Macbook and use that money to purchase the Mac mini, however, I really feel like it’s a loss due to lack of portability.
I guess the real question is, would it be worth the upgrade?
What's the benefit?
What could you do with it that you can't do with your current system? For example, are you experiencing performance problems with your existing hardware that would be solved with a new purchase? Why would you sacrifice portability? Would it be for performance reasons, or is there something else?
When I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro in 2021, there were three main reasons. (1) The old late 2013-model MacBook Pro was very slow even for ordinary desktop tasks. (2) The old machine couldn't be updated to the most recent operating system release. (3) I thought the second-generation M1 processors (the M1 Pro is what I decided to buy) would be ideal to meet my performance needs. I turned out to be correct on that last point.
I think those were good, persuasive reasons for an upgrade. Undoubtedly you have reasons too. Think about whether they're good enough, or whether it would be better to wait. Future devices are almost certain to be better than what you can buy today.
I had to make it all makes sense.
I would like to thank Jason for talking me off the ledge, he reminded me of the importance of portability.
Now, after doing some research, I’ve decided to go with just a simple ram upgrade.
I’ll keep my M1 MVP, and simply purchase the base model Mac mini with the 24 gig ram upgrade.
It seems to me that the ideal path for storage upgrades would be a thunderbolt for enclosure instead of the internal memory.
Although the MacBook Pro is heavy, it’s still portable and very capable.
For now, this seems like the ideal compromise, thanks everyone.