You'll need to buy the monitor cable (either Thunderbolt or HDMI), keyboard and mouse separately, so if you don't have these already, be prepared for some extra spend.įor the test, I used the 27-inch Mac Studio display, which offers a stunning 5K retina display, and the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse. It's worth remembering that the Mac mini comes with just a power lead in the box. For most people though, 16GB and 1TB is a sensible spec, which is what my test model had. In terms of customisation, you can also choose to upgrade from the standard 16GB of RAM to 32GB and from the 512GB up to 8TB.

The M2 Pro option, tested here also comes in two variations: the standard 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU, or the more advanced 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU version that adds £300 / $300 to the price. The new Mac mini now comes with either the M2 or the M2 Pro chip. Inside, the biggest change here is, of course, the chip. The only thing missing here for me is the SD card slot, but I can live with one adapter for that. For those that have lots to connect up to their machines, this is a much better selection than on a MacBook Pro, and saves you having to play around with multi adapters. You get two full-size USB A ports, an HDMI port, four Thunderbolt 4 ports (the base model gets two of these), a headphone jack and an Ethernet port. There are no ports on the front, like the Mac studio but there's plenty on the rear. In fact, travelling with the Mac mini is as easy as with a laptop in my opinion, but more on that later. It's small enough to sit underneath your monitor and easy to throw in a bag if you're working on the move. This would of course affect the thermal dynamics of the unit and make it run hotter, which is never a good thing. From what I've seen of the internals, there is now plenty of room inside, so it could go smaller. This footprint hasn't changed since the Mac mini contained a CD drive, which is quite a long time (since 2010). Partly because the case is so flat (just 3.58cm or 1.41 inches) it does seem quite wide and long.

6 cores mac mini faster 8 core mac pro