Anyone can purchase from the Apple Edu Store. One simply googles "Apple Edu Store", then purchases goods from the store and picks it up or has the goods shipped normally. There is no verification currently. Apple's stated qualifications are to be a teacher, a student in college, or a member of several other education-facing groups.
Apple's SSD "maximum" speeds on the new M2 Mini is as follows:
1500MB/s for 256GB mini; 3000MB/s for 512GB/1TB mini.
3000MB/s for 512GB mini Pro; 6000 MB/s for 1TB++ mini Pro.
And for the vast, vast majority, since random access speed is vastly more important than maximum transfer speeds, none of this matters at all; random access speeds are similar on all models, and are faster than the M1 models before these. If you have a day job where you copy data from the internal drive to an external Thunderbolt 4 high-speed SSD, and you do that 8x5 as part of a job, all day every day, look at the 1TB Pro models. Otherwise, ignore all of this; it simply doesn't matter.
Compared to the previous gen M1 mini, the M2 mini is perhaps 10-15% faster in single core operations and about the same in multicore operations. The graphics operations, for some things, can be up to 40% faster, a significant jump, which is useful in games and in some video and ML applications that use the GPU cores.
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So, as for me, I just ordered a Mac Mini M2 pro with the RAM upgraded to 32GB.
So if you run programs like I do, and you have Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere or Final Cut Pro all running simultaneously with chrome or firefox and perhaps a music streaming service open too, then you might want to go for the 32GB option. If however, you work in a only 2 or maybe 3 programs simultaneously you should be fine, the most bang for your buck is gonna be the M2 with the 16GB RAM option, and just close the extra programs you're not working if you should ever run out of RAM. The Video programs can be kind of RAM heavy so if you or your church has the budget I'd go with the M2 pro with the 32GB of RAM, but you could probably do what you want to with the M2 with 16GB so long as you only work in Premiere and and After Effects and don't have Photoshop and InDesign also running, because I think each of those programs requires about 4GB of RAM when you have a project open in them.
Okay so I just checked my activity monitory and with Photoshop minimized and running in the background with no open projects it's using 1.35GB of RAM. I opened one 13MB (yes megabyte) JPEG file and the RAM use for Photoshop jumped to 4.24GB. I've closed that 13MB file and Photoshop is still using 4.14GB of RAM. I also have a session open in Bridge, and just looking through the photos in the session it's using up 3.45GB of RAM. Now I like to open a Raw image in Camera Raw before opening it in Photoshop. So if I open up one of my RAW files in Camera RAW (which is still a subprogram of Bridge) Bridge's RAM jumps to 6GB, if I pull a few sliders and do a single subject selection Adobe Bridge then takes up 8.94GB of RAM So you see where I can quickly run out of RAM.
My guess is you'll want the 32GB option, but you could make do with 16GB if you have to.
I hope this long winded comment can help you (and other creatives) in your decision making process. 😊
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or is that a 2029 year slated release?
i have no doubt 8gb will be fine for many people and i thought it would for me too on the m1 but it's not and given the longevity of all my mac products i'm more than happy to pay ~$180 to go for 24. i was using my 2015 imac with 32gb ram (that i could thankfully upgrade myself) until the m1 mac mini so i got used to having an abundance.
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It's been this way for a while.
Other than running windows on my Mac. I have more things open at one time than most people. Hundreds of tabs, 2 external monitors on my MacBook Pro M1 with DisplayLink, two separate Caldigit TS3+ docks because I ran out of ports. Yeah, not a power user at all. And it's fine for me, which means it will be fine for 99% of people.
Running photoshop all day? Nope. Anything short of that it'll be fine.
I also have a surface pro, but rarely use it unless I'm testing something.
What are your thoughts on a displaylink? I currently have two identical 4K lg monitors, one connected with thunderbolt to display port and another one connected via hdmi. Display ports looks great but the hdmi monitor wouldn't scale properly or support hidpi on certain scalings. I found a workaround by using an app called betterdisplay and streaming it to my hdmi monitor. It works ok but definitely "feels" different from my display port monitor.
What are your thoughts on a displaylink? I currently have two identical 4K lg monitors, one connected with thunderbolt to display port and another one connected via hdmi. Display ports looks great but the hdmi monitor wouldn't scale properly or support hidpi on certain scalings. I found a workaround by using an app called betterdisplay and streaming it to my hdmi monitor. It works ok but definitely "feels" different from my display port monitor.
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