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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Someone please explain why voting on this deal is closed…
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.
At least, higher bill-of-materials than a Mac mini *needs* to be. Apple is (presumably) hitting its margins on its $129 Apple TV, which would have the hardware to be an impressive PC if only it had a little more RAM, SSD, I/O, and (maybe) cooling. It already has a SoC that's only 9% smaller than an M1 and made on the same process node, so they can't be saving *that* much money on silicon alone.
Is putting it in a tiny plastic case with minimal connectivity really that much of a cost saver? If it is, would it make sense to do that for an ultra-minimalist Mac (maybe targeting education) to win more volume while preserving margins? Like you say, I'm sure they have bright people working on it. I just want them to come up with a different answer :-)
If I get the M2, I'd either still have to use HDMI on one, and get a displayport adapter for the other, or did they make it so one can daisy chain. Are there different kinds of displayport adapters? The computer end of the displayport cables are the same as a thunderbolt 1 plug. My other question is, if I get an adapter (TB-3 to TB-1/2) will I be able to use my STAE129 in target mode as well as use it for displayport? I'm thinking the M2 Pto would be more future proof, and perhaps its better to get a Mac Studio on ebay - its got 32GB, M1 Max, 512GB already and the price should be dropping due to this M2. On the other hand, a base M2 + 16GB RAM is a lot less expensive - I could get TWO M2 minis for the price of a heftier setup.
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