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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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.
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
Everybody is different and has different work flows and needs. Does everybody wear the same size shoes?
For some people, 8 GB will be fine. For others, they'll need more. I mean, it all depends.
And some people have sloppier computer habits than others.
The person who has 72 tabs open constantly and all sorts of other things open and they don't really pay attention to their desktop is going to need more RAM compared to a person who is aware of what's taking place on their desktop and doesn't have a gazillion things open at the same time.
https://youtu.be/C1-yPCVefbo
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Everybody is different and has different work flows and needs. Does everybody wear the same size shoes?
For some people, 8 GB will be fine. For others, they'll need more. I mean, it all depends.
And some people have sloppier computer habits than others.
The person who has 72 tabs open constantly and all sorts of other things open and they don't really pay attention to their desktop is going to need more RAM compared to a person who is aware of what's taking place on their desktop and doesn't have a gazillion things open at the same time.
The m1/8gb/256gb was a fungible computer, fast enough ssd to page you along with just 8gb. Not sure that's the case with the m2. Given the limited amount of performance improvements to the m2 vs the m1, I'd get an m1 mac if you're going to buy the base config.
Apple made the m1 macs too darn good. That made a lot of mac pros rethink even needing a Studio or wanting the m2 versions.
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I think the 16GB/256GB SSD is the sweet spot at $740 taxed to CA
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