Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Testing Apple’s New M2 MacBook Pro and Mac Mini”.
Apple has got new Mac products and new Mac chips, and the new Mac chips are, of course, in the new Mac products. New for January 2023 is the M2 Pro and the M2 Max chips and they go in the new Mac Mini and the new 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros. Now we’ve seen these devices before the Mac Mini was most recently updated in 2020, when it was one of the very first systems to get an Apple silicon chip, in that case the M1. Now you can get it with the M2 or the M2 Pro, and the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros. They previously had the M1 Pro and the M1 Max chips as options.
Now they have the M2 Pro and the M2 Max chips as options and an Apple’s chip naming system. Yes, M2 is more advanced than M1, but it’s really that suffix the pro the max the ultra, which is two Max chips, basically stapled together. That really tells you what the performance level of the Chip is going to be so in M1, Pro in most cases, it’s going to be more powerful than an M2. Just a plain M2 of these two new sets of products, the one that I’m actually most excited about is the new Mac Mini I’ve always been a Mac mini fan.
It’S actually one of Apple’s, longest surviving product lines, they’ve been making something called the Mac Mini. That looks kind of like this since 2005, that’s even before they started using the name MacBook and before they switched to Intel chips. So the Mac Mini has always been with us, not usually the star of the show, but it’s got a loyal, dedicated audience in recent times. It’S really become sort of the podcaster’s friend computer or a small audio or small video facility, uh kind of computer.
If you have your own display and keyboard and input devices that you like you just take, one of these guys insert it into your workflow, and it just sits out of the way and frankly does a very good job. It’S especially notable because the lowest and and Mac Mini, which now has the M2 Chip, starts at 599 dollars, and that is by far the least expensive way you can get a Mac OS computer. The next closest system in terms of price is the M1 version of the MacBook Air, which is positively ancient at this point, and that’s 9.99, so really there’s nothing even close when it comes to. If you want Mac OS, you want the system.
You want all the advantages that come with that, but you don’t spend a lot of money. Mac Mini is going to be your best friend now the caveat is this lowest end version, and I have that one right over here uh only comes with eight gigs of RAM to start 256 gig storage. You can upgrade all that stuff, but it does start to get expensive, so 5.99 uh to start with the M2 Chip. If you want to trade up and start with the M2 Pro chip, then it’s 12.99 uh, but you start off with 16 gigs of RAM and more storage and again you can bump it up to you know several terabytes of storage and up to 32 gigs of Ram here up to 24 here uh, which is very important if you’re doing things like, let’s say: 4K video editing.
Now, if you look at these two side by side uh, you might say how am I even gon na tell them apart? The big tell is on the back of the less expensive one: the M2 there were two Thunderbolt USBC ports and on the back of the more expensive one, there are four ports uh and that’s really the only big visual tell between them other than that. Not only do they look nearly identical, they look identical to the ones from 2020, where they first got the M1 chips, the MacBook Pro very similar exact same design as the previous generation, which is only from 2021. So it’s not that far in the past. It follows Apple’s new design language, I guess of uh.
You know very flat top kind of more squared off edges. I think it’s a nice minimalist, modern look. They now have that in the M2 version of the MacBook Air, so it’s kind of the default apple. Look going forward and, of course, they continue the new version of the magsafe connection on the side, which, of course, I’m always a big fan of, and since we talked about price, a lot with the Mac Mini. Keep in mind that the new Macbook Pros 14 inch with an M2 Pro starts at 19.99 16 inch with an M2 Pro starts at 24.99 and you’re past three thousand dollars before you can get into the M2 Max territory, so very expensive products. Indeed, especially considering one of these guys here is six hundred dollars, but sometimes you do need to invest more.
For example, we threw up a nice chunky, uh Premier, project, on the Mac Mini and on the M2 version it was doing. You know, 4K footage some edits. Some color Corrections, some title Graphics, uh, definitely felt slow and you had to preview it at a much lower resolution. When I traded up to the M2 pro version, I felt much smoother almost flawless.
I could totally get away with using that, for you know full everyday. All the time editing, another really interesting thing is that apple is pushing in some of their promotional materials and how they talk about the Mac minis in particular uh pushing gaming, which is not the first thing you think of when you think of Max is the Mac. Now, a gaming machine. No, of course it’s not, but it’s not because the hardware is not capable uh. It’S largely because there are very few games available uh for the Mac platform. Some of them you can get from Apple arcade, some of them you can get directly from the Mac App Store most of the time, you’re, probably going to get them for, like the macaw Us section on Steam.
Now I looked at the Mac OS section on Steam and the most popular or best-selling Mac games. Right now are all things from several years ago, on the regular M2 version, I had to uh get my resolution down to about 25 60 by 1440 and graphic settings on medium to be able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on the 599 Mac Mini. When I moved up to the M2 pro version, obviously I could crank up the resolution and the graphic detail settings much more and of course, you can use either an Xbox controller connected via Bluetooth or you can use a PlayStation dual sense controller connected via Bluetooth. That actually works really well on Max now, before this, my kind of Mac gaming hack was always to use something, like you know, Nvidia GeForce, now, where you’re just Cloud streaming, but you can, you know, play on your nice neck screen uh, even though the games are Not stored or played locally you’re just doing Cloud streaming, which you can do in pretty much any device.
One other interesting footnote about the Mac Mini is now that there are these two new versions. Apple has stopped selling the one old Intel based model of the Mac Mini they used to keep around just in case, you were very invested in Intel and you needed that they pretty much got rid of all of them. Now everything is Apple. Silicon.
The Only Exception is the giant Mac Pro desktop which might get updated later this year, and I would bet that that’s going to go. You know M2 Pro M2 Max M2 Ultra and not have an Intel version any longer, and that will be the end of the Intel era at Apple completely. Now the new Macbook Pros 14 inch and 16 inch again uh the actual body and the design very familiar.
They’Ve got fantastic screens, starting with the last generation. They have fantastic webcams, which has always been a Macbook weakness up until very recently now you’ve got full HD webcams that look really great a lot of software helping it also, but you know good enough for Zoom meetings good enough to actually frankly shoot. You know Creator quality videos and upload them on YouTube. Built-In mic also remains really good, not really new in this generation. For that, but still a pretty recent development like any powerful laptop, it’s going to get kind of warm uh.
If you use it, let’s say on your lap for a long time, battery life very long Apple claims 22 hours for the 16 inch Max, which is only like an hour more than the previous generation. But the point is, you should be able to use these all day and there’s one little under the hood feature. Uh, you might not realize. Is there, but definitely worth looking into these now support Wi-Fi 6E and you need a Wi-Fi 60 router to take advantage of those faster speeds, but having tried it out, I think it’s really worth it.
So. The big question Whenever there are new Max is who are they for for the 599 Mac Mini? I can definitely see the audience here. Someone who wants to get into Mac OS doesn’t want to spend a lot of money wants to do basic video editing, and this is going to work for them, especially if you’re doing you know a podcast at home or you just want a little home machine. You’Ve already got your own monitor setup that you like the more advanced one.
That’S if you’re not ready to step up to the Mac Studio, which is much much much more expensive, but you want to do higher end. Video production do some 3D Graphics. I wouldn’t really go to any of them as a gaming machine as a primary platform, but it’s nice to have a little more flexibility there than you used to for the MacBook Pros. I mean the 16 inch is just a huge, powerful, expensive Workhorse.
I use one of them. Is my main office machine a lot of the time I love it. The 14 inch uh more powerful, but now that you can get the M2 Chip, it is just the base M2 Chip in the MacBook Air. I find that’s my you know, grab and go MacBook where for a while, it was the 14 inch.
So I’d say overall, if you have M1 Mac Equipment, uh and you’re saying. Should I trade up to M2? Probably not I’d wait another generation, but if you’re still in the Intel game, uh now is a great time to get into Apple silicon, because we found that performance wise battery wise, even software compatibility Wise. It’S a winner all around and if you want to see our reviews of the new Mac Mini and MacBook Pro and all of our testing data and performance charts, you can find the links to those in the description below .