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.
expired
Top Comments
POLL
How many browser tabs do you keep open?
"Like" for 10 or less
"Funny" for 11 to 20
"Helpful" for 21 and above
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. 😊
Join The Conversation
Share your experience with the Slickdeals community
Share information with the community. Please follow our Community Guidelines and be kind!
875 Comments
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
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. 😊
My wife usually has 50 going at one time, but she won't be using this computer, and that's what I consider to be a lot…to overkill.
I, personally, would get an M2 Pro mini at a minimum, which comes with 16GB, if it were to be my main rig. But I can tell you from how I see most people using their computers, if you just want a computer to do computer things, the base model is fine. Wait until you run out of storage and then just get a cheap USB-C expansion.
In fact, I would say if someone has $500 to spend on a computer to do things with, this mini deal will serve them better than basically any prebuilt PC you can get at the moment.
These are not upgradable so if u don't want to listen to people with actual experience with 8gb devices then by all means, go buy it. If it ends up working for u, then that's great! Do share what u use it for so those with similar usage would benefit from your experience. Just don't whine about it when it doesn't.
Oh and of course, I opted for the 16gb version. Trading in my useless 2017 Macbook Pro 13 that was collecting dust at home which was valued at 180 so the cost of the 8gb ram upgrade. How sad... lol
ALSO, if browser tabs are your concern then just use autotab discard or similar addons/extensions. It helps a lot with the memory usage. They basically "sleep" your tabs that you haven't touched in a while and you can whitelist those you don't want to be frozen.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
These are not upgradable so if u don't want to listen to people with actual experience with 8gb devices then by all means, go buy it. If it ends up working for u, then that's great! Do share what u use it for so those with similar usage would benefit from your experience. Just don't whine about it when it doesn't.
Oh and of course, I opted for the 16gb version. Trading in my useless 2017 Macbook Pro 13 that was collecting dust at home which was valued at 180 so the cost of the 8gb ram upgrade. How sad... lol
ALSO, if browser tabs are your concern then just use autotab discard or similar addons/extensions. It helps a lot with the memory usage. They basically "sleep" your tabs that you haven't touched in a while and you can whitelist those you don't want to be frozen.
If one is purely only doing office work like word excel and browsing many many tabs in Chrome.
But no video editing , rendering etc so do we still need 16gb?
180$ inst a lot but .
If M5 mini comes in few years at 500 600$ base rather save the $200.
I don't think this future proofing makes any sense.
When the next gen comes everyone will have the itch and ask if we should upgrade..that is always the case. And in some cases the upgrade may have enhancements.
Hmmmm
As you can see in the last screenshot, even if most of my Edge tabs are frozen/put to sleep, it still uses 4gb of ram and that's just ONE browser/app. That's HALF of the 8gb base.
If all you do is browse the web then u don't even need an Apple device. Far cheaper devices out there such as chromebooks that work well w/ even 4gb of ram.
If one is purely only doing office work like word excel and browsing many many tabs in Chrome.
But no video editing , rendering etc so do we still need 16gb?
180$ inst a lot but .
If M5 mini comes in few years at 500 600$ base rather save the $200.
I don't think this future proofing makes any sense.
When the next gen comes everyone will have the itch and ask if we should upgrade..that is always the case. And in some cases the upgrade may have enhancements.
Hmmmm
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
But my current laptop is a dell i7 10th generation with 32gb be ram added later.
And a intel MBP 2019 i7 16gb ram.
But all these folks saying unified memory is not same as normal memory confuse me.
Join The Conversation
Share your experience with the Slickdeals community
Share information with the community. Please follow our Community Guidelines and be kind!