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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For my work, I often need to have: three projects open in VS Code, four different development servers running, be on a Zoom call, be monitoring Slack, and have multiple Chrome windows with about 18 tabs each.
You can use the iMac as an external display GRANTED you have the thunderbolt cable and adapter and running High Sierra or earlier on the iMac.
On a related note, I'm disappointed that Apple didn't take this opportunity to keep the M1 mini and drop the price to something shockingly low (for Apple). It would have been a great way to convince the marginal user (or organization) who is tempted by Macs to give them a try. There's precedent, too: the base model iPad is frequently on sale for under $300 (and is always $299 for education) despite being more powerful than any Android tablet. The most recent base model is no longer that cheap, as they overbuilt the 10th gen and are charging $450, but they kept the 9th gen around to make sure that there's still an easy entry point to their ecosystem. A $350 (or even $450, regular price) M1 Mac mini would have been an excellent way to round out their computer lineup.
Apple doesn't have a huge cloud service impact in K12 or higher academia, probably that's the reason not to sacrifice hardware margins for base products.
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Trust me, I'm just as bummed as you are…
Also just realized that across the line they only have gigabit ethernet.
Edit: Does this work?
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matt...B08QDV5H
Edit again: Apparently not, but people are trying: https://forums.macrumor
TL;DR: prioritize RAM if you're picking RAM or SSD, but if you have extra money also upgrade SSD to 512GB.
Also just realized that across the line they only have gigabit ethernet.
Edit: Does this work?
https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matt...B08QDV5H
Edit again: Apparently not, but people are trying: https://forums.macrumor
https://youtu.be/h487I_5xOZU
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MSRP is high. I recommend shopping for a refurb on eBay or Amazon.
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