The complete Mac Mini M2 shopping guide (2023)

For those who want the best bang for their buck

The new Mac Mini is a very good computing device. It’s relatively cheap, efficient, and powerful. Because they’re at the top of the value proposition in these days, the amount of “which should I pick” moments on Reddit and Twitter (RIP to both, get Lemmy and Mastodon) have left me with some notes that I want to share as a shopping guide.

The Mac Mini models you should aim to buy are four. You can hop into the section you’re interested based on your budget, and then get into the accessories part.

• Mac Mini 8GB / 256GB ($599) ($499 for Education)
• Mac Mini 16GB / 256GB ($799) ($679 for Education)
• Mac Mini 24GB / 512GB ($1,199) ($1,059 for Education)
• Mac Mini 32GB / 512GB ($1,699) ($1,559 for Education)

At time of writing, Apple is offering a mail-in $100 gift card. If you qualify for education pricing, this is a great opportunity to buy one!

Before digging in, let me warn you on three important things:

Don’t pick a Mac Mini if you need portability. You will work better with a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. If you’re extremely mobile, an iPad will cost less, and probably offer a better experience that shoving a Mac Mini into your backpack and look for a wall plug.

Don’t pick a Mac Mini if you need everything but the kitchen sink. Instead, look for a discounted, used or refurbished iMac M1. Don’t pay full price for them until it comes with the newer Apple M2 processor. Also, consider you get an Apple Keyboard ($100) and Magic Mouse ($100), a 4.5K screen (valued $500) with speakers included in the price, no need to look elsewhere.

Finally, don’t pick a Mac for 3D Rendering or Virtualization. A PC will be cheaper and more performant, let alone mature for these workloads. You can read my notes on that at the very end of this article.

With all that said, let’s dive into a Mac Mini, desktop users!

Base Mac Mini 8GB / 256GB ($599)

The base Mac Mini is unbeatable. Nothing comes closer to it in terms of performance, efficiency and space, at the asking price. It’s a great entry-level machine all around. The problem is that you are not limited, but hindered.

It’s clear the base model is a light machine made for the average user, like those who are new to macOS, or neophytes to the world of computing. It’s perfect for home or office tasks: writing large documents, organizing photos, creating presentations, designing posters or flyers, and many other tasks better made with a mouse, keyboard, and large screen. It will work without problems even if it’s shared between multiple family members.

Better, if you can split the cost with a roommate or your family, it becomes a good decision as long you don’t fight for using it every afternoon.

That doesn’t mean you’re limited just to light software. You can still use software like GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto, and some games (hopefully) optimized for Apple Silicon, as long you don’t go overboard with large projects. The 8GB of RAM can be very limiting when keeping performance up across all tasks. This also mean to be wary of intensive multitasking, or work with large projects on Logic Pro, Final Cut, Adobe Lightroom, or some Intel-based apps, as performance won’t be on your side all the time.

About the storage, it will be fast for anything mundane to the point the average user won’t notice. Just don’t expect blazing speeds or sustained writes for huge operations. The 256GB storage versions use a single NAND Flash chip with a maximum of 1,500 MB/s for read and write.

Consider the average lifetime for a 256GB chip in the market is about 200TBW at least, which roughly translates into 1GB written each day in 5 years. Don’t fear that it will die soon, but don’t treat it as lasting literally forever. You can read 9to5Mac article about why you shouldn’t panic over SSD wear.

This is not a machine to work on heavy professional workloads where RAM and storage are needed the most, at least not every day, but will surely help you if you’re in a pinch like any other computer would as long you have a little patience.

Good for:

• Home & office tasks
• Light video games
• Occasional or rare intense workloads or multitasking

Mac Mini 16GB / 256GB ($799)

Believe it or not, the Mac Mini with 16GB will work incredibly well with some entry-level professional workloads. For example, those who are starting with graphic design, video editing, music production, or software development.

That’s the main purpose of the upgraded RAM: to support workloads where lot of things needs to be held in memory. It’s not that the base Mac Mini can’t do it too, but the larger RAM size makes swapping the SSD for memory less often, which in turn makes the system feel snappier without shortening the drive lifetime. The less the beachball you see, the better.

I’m going to take the liberty to trash Max Tech’s awful, borderline-stupid, RAM comparison video and leave you with a better one. The conclusion is simple: if you had to pick only one upgrade, more RAM is always better than more storage.

Okay, I’ll give some credit where credit is due. They made a Mac Mini comparison not too long ago with a lot of benchmarks.

The big elephant in the room is the number of ports. Depending on what you plan to do with your Mac Mini, you will be forced to buy a hub to expand the number of ports. This is substantially cheaper than upgrading to a Mac Mini with an M2 Pro processor or to a Mac Studio for the number of ports alone.

In the same tone as the previous paragraph, external storage is still cheaper than upgrading the internal storage. Prepare to work on your projects inside a drive attached to your Mac Mini. Depending on your use case, you may get a large HDD, or a smaller but faster SSD. Any of those will be better than upgrading the internal storage by $200.

There are some Mac Mini hubs that expand ports and also work as storage enclosure for your NVMe or SSD with decent speeds.

In any case, check “The rest of the computer” section for more details about storage and hubs.

Good for:

• Developing apps on Xcode, JetBrains, VS Code and similar
• Final Cut with some 4K footage
• Logic Pro with a small set of sound banks and a few FX plugins
• Photoshop or Affinity Design on medium sized files

Mac Mini 24GB / 512GB ($1,199)

The use case for this model is the same as the prior Mac Mini 16GB / 256GB. You can get away with 1TB for additional $200 if you really need to, but I won’t recommend when you can spend that on cheaper external storage. Better if you can drop down to 256GB to make it to $999.

There are two reasons for going for a model with 24GB of RAM, either way. The first is straightforward: the best bang for your buck, not for value but because this the maximum RAM you can get without jumping to 32GB at $1,700. There is software that’s not CPU intensive, but require a lot of memory, like Logic Pro with a great bunch of plugins and sound banks left and right.

The second is simpler: a little more longevity.

If you’re one of those people who use their machine until it wears out, then it’s a no-brainer since upgrading a Mac Mini in the future means buying a completely new one. By the time you do it, the new model should be miles ahead in performance. If you don’t plan use it until it dies, this is a moot point.

Currently, in 2023, a machine with 16GB of RAM is enough for most tasks and leaves space for some demanding workloads and multitasking heavy-duty software. Having 24GB of RAM may be helpful in keeping the machine relevant some additional years, even if the CPU is still a 4×4 core configuration — four “performance” cores, four “efficiency” cores.

All in all, this model is a good mid-point before the M2 Pro as long you’re not starved in processing power — you will know when you do. It’s a great way to get a lot of RAM, and a bigger SSD if you can, without stepping into the M2 Pro that will cost 40% more than this. By the same terms of the prior cheaper model, consider a hub and external storage.

Good for:

• The same uses as the Mac Mini 16GB / 256GB.

Mac Mini (M2 Pro) 32GB / 512GB ($1,699)

I like to consider this model as “The Mac Studio without raiding the wallet”. In other words, from this point onwards you’re approaching to the Mac Studio territory, and surely not wanting to upgrade for the same price in 5 years, at least, unless there is a substantial leap in performance.

That previous sentence makes this Mac Mini 32GB / 512GB with an M2 Pro sound like a good value proposition against the Mac Studio, but it’s not. This is the cheaper model you can get with 32GB of RAM, and we can’t save $200 by downgrading the storage to 256GB.

Anyway, there are only three scenarios where this model should be picked over the previous, cheaper Mac Mini models:

• You need four Thunderbolt 4 ports.
• You need triple-monitor support.
• You need more memory an processing power.

The M2 Pro (6×4 CPU, 16-core GPU, 200GB/s) doesn’t sound as an enormous leap in performance at first glance, but it is. Consider a 60% more powerful GPU, two additional performance cores, and 32GB of RAM, and you will be work on intensive workloads, especially parallelized processing, with heavy multitasking like it was nothing.

Talking about leaps, consider this Mac Mini as “the edge” of what you should get. You may argue that you’re better choosing the base Mac Studio ($1,999) with more ports and an M2 Max (8×4 CPU, 30-Core GPU, 400GB/s), given the $300 difference. I’ll argue back: for that amount of money, you should be aiming for Mac Studio with 64GB of RAM ($2,399) since it’s only 20% more than the base model nad you’re stuck with it forever.

Of course, don’t aim for a M2 Pro with 16GB of RAM, but instead, get a cheaper Mac Mini. It’s a booby trap: you will feel the lack of RAM when you start to multitask on heavy software left and right. I’ve seen it between Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, WhatsApp and Chrome at 3:00 AM.

To me, the $400 jump between 16GB and 32GB is worth it as long you are not looking to upgrade this machine in 5 years, at least, given its price.

Good for:

• Reading 4K footage from two or more different external SSD drives.
• Working with a ton of highly detailed photos and illustrations.
• Designing, prototyping and modeling in 3D.
• Using 3 monitors to code, preview and debug software.

Where is the rest of the computer?

Given it’s a Mac Mini, you will have to bring your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and probably a hub.

This is one of the reasons why people tend to prefer the iMac. As it comes with everything, you don’t need to look for the perfect accessories around the Internet, let alone waiting each to arrive. Before the iMac M2 comes, we’re bound to find these ourselves, but luckily for you I prepared some decent options to buy your Mac Mini accesories easier.

Advice

All of the following product recommendations don’t have any referral or code. If you’re feeling generous, you can tip me at my PayPal.

These were captured at the moment of writing, so double check for price changes and if newer products have superseded them.

Good monitors, wrong monitors

Those users who do graphical intensive work will probably have in mind a big, color-accurate monitor. If you have your professional-grade option certified to work with macOS, already mounted up, or in the shopping cart, I won’t be able to stop you, so skip ahead.

For the rest looking for a monitor, I made it really, really, really simple to pick one:

• Any 1080p monitor over 20-inch will be fine. Check RTINGS best 1080p monitors.
• Any 1080p Ultra-Wide (21:9) 26-inch monitor will be excellent.
• Any 1440p 27-inch monitor will be excellent. Check RTING’s best 1440p 27-inch monitors.
• Any 2560p/4K 27-inch monitor will be mostly fine, except for serious graphic work.

A 1080p monitor will work fine for a Mac Mini, but you may want to get something bigger or use two of them. Most 1080p monitors will go around $100, but the ASUS VG246H ($150) is heavily recommended. For 1080p ultra-wide monitors, the LG 26WQ500 ($130), and the larger LG 29WQ600 ($200), are very tempting and my personal choices for value and decent color reproduction.

The GIGABTYTE M34WQ looks very gamer-ish, but still a good option as a 34-inch UW monitor.

If you want something 1440p ultra-wide at 34-inches, the Gigabyte M34WQ ($400) it’s almost perfect, almost. A cheaper and decent option is the ViewSonic VA3456-MHDJ ($330) .

Those 27-inch iMac orphaned users may check MacAddress video about moving to the Mac Mini. Of course, if you plan to do graphic work, don’t take into account the paid 4K monitor recommendation from ASUS, and consider the 1440p 27-inch version, or one of RTING’s recommendations as long the model you want starts at 27-inch.

That is the easy part. Since, from here on out, choosing a monitor gets complicated, I will redirect you to my article about choosing a good monitor for your Mac that should cover all bases.

Good cables, bad ports

You should try to use the HDMI cable to connect the monitor whenever possible, that way your Thunderbolt 4 ports will remain free for other devices (or hub).

It’s rare to see monitors without HDMI, but if that’s the case, you can always get a reputable DisplayPort-to-HDMI or USB-C-to-HDMI cable. Just be wary that the base M2 Processor doesn’t support anything over 4K@60Hz via HDMI, while the M2 Pro will do up to 8K@60Hz.

Some monitors will demand a Thunderbolt 4 connection for advanced features, like high refresh rates, daisy chain (MST) or additional USB ports. Check their manuals before buying if you have any doubt, most of the are always available at the manufacturer site.

There are more details in the Apple Support page about monitor configurations, if you want to know how many monitors can attach, and which resolutions top your selection.

Cheap peripherals, costly peripherals

If you have already invested thousands of dollars on a mouse and keyboard, just shove an USB dongle if you need to and call it a day. Otherwise, get the Logitech K380 keyboard with the M350 Pebble Mouse.

This keyboard & mouse combo goes around $60, sometimes cheaper if you search deep on the Internet and bring your coupons. It’s a great value given the quality.

Apple also sells you this stuff. I would recommend the Apple TouchID Keyboard ($150) if you prefer TouchID for everything, like Passkeys. The Magic Mouse ($100) is a matter of personal preference: some don’t like it, and some have brain damage. The MX Keys S Combo ($200) is the furthest I would go on the premium tier, because at that price I’ll happily mash potatoes for a RAM upgrade on a hot Sunday.

Any other alternative should (hopefully) be Bluetooth, so that way you can keep the back USB-A ports free for anything else.

Fast storage, big storage

There are a lot of guides around the Internet for external storage, but we can resume your available options in two categories:

• A classic HDD (spinning disk) for the storage size advantage alone.
• A 2.5-inch SSD for great read and write speeds.

A hub with an integrated SATA/M.2 slot will be more convenient since you will expand your ports and storage at the same time. More information on that in the next section.

Cheap 2TB drives for $60 like the WD Elements 2TB, Seagate Portable 2TB and Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB don’t go faster than 60MB/s for read and ~30MB/s to write, the limit for USB 2.0, but are a valid options if you need size rather than speed.

My recommendation for the best bang for your buck in terms of storage size is the WD_BLACK 5TB P10 at $120 (120MB/s), but you can also look into the WD Elements 5TB at $100 if it’s not available.

The next step is an SSD. For me there are only three options: Samsung T7 Portable 1TB for $80 (1,000MB/s), Samsung T7 Portable 2TB for $120 (1,000MB/s), and the Kingston XS200 4TB for $240 (2000MB/s).

Check my article about formatting your external drive for macOS while you’re it. You may be surprised that APFS and exFAT are not always the correct choice.

Remember, thread lightly on $200 and over. If you have that kind of money, you may want to upgrade the RAM of your Mac Mini and think about external storage later on the road.

Fast and furious storage

When speed is critical for your storage, it will depend. Currently there is nothing with transfer speeds over 3,000MB/s that doesn’t cost another Mac Mini, or requires 2TB of internal storage.

The only way to reach acceptable high data transfers without paying the Apple Tax is with NVMe enclosures. I’m going to let here Tech Notice excellent video about this matter:

For example, the ACASIS ($130) and ORICO ($150) enclosures can reach 2700MB/s. Apart from that, you will need a NVMe drive as fast as the enclosure, like the Crucial P3 Plus 4TB ($230) or Corsair MP600 CORE XT 4TB ($220).

Wasting around $350 for 4TB with a decent speed is a no-brainer, compared to what you can get by upgrading the Mac Mini internal storage.

Digging deeper into internal speeds, there are some gotcha’s.

If you REALLY need speeds at 7,000MB/s, you will need a M2 Pro with 2TB at least, as the base M2 caps 2TB at 5,000MB/s. That speed is only attainable using 4 × 512GB chips running at 1,500MB/s, as seen in this iBoff repair video, which comes from the guys at Max Tech.

I honestly think that if you need that kind of speeds for crucial work. like working with huge datasets than need to be processed in RAM or putting MATLAB through the moon, you’re looking into a Mac Studio or Mac Pro instead of a Mac Mini, but I’m going to leave that for future reference.

Simple hubs, swiss-knife hubs

Not having a party of USB devices in your house or office? Lucky you! My only recommendation is to get a couple of cheap USB-A to USB-C adapters and viceversa so you never have to sacrifice a device because the connector doesn’t fit onto the other.

If you’re looking for hubs, you will find many going around: from simple USB dongles at $15, to overkill solutions at $300 or more. This list in MacWorld is extensive and may help you in finding exactly what you need without breaking the bank.

Personally, I like something that feels part of the Mac Mini form factor. I have three choices in this category:

• The Hagibis MC25 hubs ($50~$100)
• The Elecife Hub ($70)
• The Satechi Stand Hub ($100)

All of these hubs have enclosures for attaching a SATA or M.2 drive, and may have an additional HDMI or DisplayPort for a dual monitor setup in exchange of using the second Thunderbolt 4 port.

If you’re aiming for a hub with a SATA or M.2 drive slot, read their respective manuals before buying. Most of these will connect a 2.5-inch SATA drive through USB 3.0 (5Gbps, 625MB/s), which will be fine even for the fastest SSD. You may get lucky if the M.2 port uses USB 3.1 (10Gbps, 1250MB/s) for the NVMe drive, but it’s not a guarantee.

Any modern NVMe drive will top the USB 3.1 bandwidth, so focus on storage size rather than speed. The sweet spot is around $80, like the Crucial P3 2TB, at time of writing, while most “cheap” 4TB NVMe drives will start at $170.

I’m sure there are other Thunderbolt 3/4 hubs in the market with more features and ports but, in any case, you shouldn’t waste more than $100 on a hub, regardless of what they promise.

I’ll triple down on price and remember you that we’re in Mac Mini country: $200 means a permanent RAM or storage upgrade, so prioritize making your Mac Mini snappier than getting a fancy hub with an SSD/NVMe with a dozen of ports of different sizes.

Sounds for me, sounds for everyone

If you’re producing music, or you are an audiophile, the chances are you already have in mind (or in your ears) a very good set of speakers, DAC or headphones, so there is no point on recommending anything to you.

For the rest of the plebs, it will be a matter of comfort rather than sound quality.

Honestly, you will be mostly fine with any Bluetooth speakers, wireless headset or earbuds. If you really want to avoid the Bluetooth latency, then you’re pretty much forced to any wired headset. The newest Airpods Pro 2 are no exception, even if they came close.

You may take a look into RTINGS headphones reviews and speakers reviews so you can pick what you think will be better for you: cheap bluetooth speakers, noise-cancelling headsets with microphone, or even long-lasting earbuds for commuting.

Music producers have to pick an audio interface, and here is why it’s crucial to keep one rear USB-A port free for it. Options will vary greatly depending on the type of music and instruments. If you’re starting, the M-Audio M-Track Solo ($50) with the AKAI LPD8 ($60) or AKAI MPK Mini MK3 ($100) are cheap combinations to get you going with fighting the DAW and shoving plugins left and right — 16 GB of RAM will come in handy when you do that.

What about a PC?

If you’re wondering what can be done on a PC, then it’s because you’re budget constrained. Your own custom PC will yield more RAM and storage than a similarly priced Mac Mini or a pre-built PC.

It’s pretty magical seeing how Apple pushed Apple Silicon adoption across the industry, but it’s not their first rodeo, and two years into it there is still a lot of ground left to cover. The “Is Apple Silicon Ready?” site is a great resource to check if the apps you use are native, compatible, or unsupported, before making a decision.

Picking the correct parts, building, installing Windows and setting up its respective drivers, takes time and patience. Take into account you may need to troubleshoot by yourself if anything goes wrong, by silly mistakes or just plain bad luck with a hardware part. LTT has the best video tutorial around the Internet if you’re interested in this endeavor.

If you’re still hesitating, these are the two main reasons why you should get a PC over a Mac Mini.

• You need the most RAM and/or storage possible.
• You need an NVIDIA card for 3D rendering.

Let’s start with the first bullet point: a Mac Mini can’t compete with a PC in RAM and storage per dollar.

To give a small example, let’s use the base Mac Mini 8GB / 256GB that costs $600 as a point of comparison for similarly priced PC. I ended up with a PCPartPicker list with a small case and the following specs:

• AMD Ryzen 5700G with integrated graphics and 8 cores (16 threads)
• 64 GB of RAM, around 40GB/s of bandwidth
• 1TB of storage, 7,000MB/s read and 5,000MB/s write speeds
• 12 USB ports, including USB 3.2 and USB-C
• Dual display support
• 2.5G Ethernet

You cannot argue the great value of a PC compared to the base Mac Mini: eight times the RAM, four times the (upgradeable) storage, five times the storage speed, six times the USB ports, dual display out of the box, and faster Ethernet. That’s more than enough for heavy workloads.

There are few nick picks about this PC: the CPU and GPU performance is debatable, it can consume three times more energy, the iGPU takes 2GB away from the memory, and the memory bandwidth is 40%. Also, consider this computer doesn’t have a single Neural Engine, nor Thunderbolt 4 ports, which may be a deal breaker for some users.

A word on Virtualization and 3D rendering

Let’s get to the second bullet point: virtualization sucks and 3D Rendering is cheaper on a PC.

It’s not that virtualization is unusable, but is still catching up. Creating Virtual Machines or using Docker to develop software is still a PITA because the whole toolchain on Apple Silicon must be ARM64. Compared to a PC, Apple Silicon virtualization can be from fine to janky, especially if the developers don’t have ARM64 builds for your software you plan to use.

Where Apple Silicon is not janky is 3D modeling. Indeed, almost any M2 processor will be fine handling Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, Fusion 360, SketchUp, or any software to create 3D objects. It’s the rendering what kills it.

Going by performance per dollar, any NVIDIA card for rendering will wipe the floor with a Mac, even without accounting the price for the rest of the PC.

Just to twist the knife a little more, let me expand the budget and get a PC of $1,000, close to Mac Mini 16GB / 512GB. We end up with a more powerful processor, a bigger case, and a RTX 3060 12GB for triple monitor support, faster 3D Rendering and awesome gaming support.

That kind of flexibility is what some PC enthusiasts will never sacrifice for a Mac Mini. Apple Silicon is not good for some workloads, and a PC will yield better results and less headaches.

Update 2023–06–26: Changed the external SSD recommendations given recent development of Sandisk Extreme models. — Thanks KudzuCastaway!

Update 2023–06–26: Reworded many parts of the article to better reflect my opinions clearly. Thanks dclive1!

Update 2023–06–27: Reworded many parts of storage speed and SSD wear to clarify these machines won’t die soon.

Update 2023–06–28: Added better context on the M2 Pro performance. Thanks dclive1!

Update 2023–06–28: Moved the technical monitor part to its own article.

Update 2023–06–30: Fixed the “Fast and furious storage” section.

Update 2023–07–04: Added context for internal SSD speed. Clarified virtualization and 3D rendering section.

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