Re: MacMini vs MacStudio for photography: worth the pain?
Oscarsmadness wrote: gdanmitchell wrote:
However, you can — and too many do — waste money on memory and speed that buys no significant real world performance increase.
I do believe in marginally overspec’ing your computer if you aren’t exactly sure how long you’ll keep it or how it will hold up, but that usually means determining what current machine will do the work you will actually do… and then perhaps getting a bit more memory and maybe a somewhat more capable processor. (I’d go for 48GB memory and at least a TB SSD for photography, and probably the M4 Pro unless you really won’t push things much.) But just buying the thing with the highest specs is usually unnecessary and not the best approach.
That little M4 mini Pro is a really powerful little image processing machine.
That's the truth right there.
If you're going for upgrades, you need to articulate your reasoning to yourself. Is your work going to benefit from the upgrade in a meaningful way? For some folks here, the answer is yes. For my use, the answer is no, even with my pro workflow. No one who's shopping for the mini with M4Pro should rule out the base model. It has a lot to offer.
One should not R/O the base model - and it's a tremendous value - however it's not ideal for everyone. One fantastic aspect about Apple is their return policy, so if a user purchases a base model and finds it lacking, the computer can always be returned.
There are plenty of YT and other videos characterizing the performance characteristics of the various options and it is up to the user to decide relative value. Will a base model with 16GB/256GB SSD/TB4 ports run LR/PS, Davinci, etc. with an external SSD? Absolutely! Bottom line is buy what you can afford and what you need.
&t=833s
One other consideration is that replacement internal SSD's exist for the M4 but not the M4 Pro yet.
Mar 04, 2025 at 05:59 PM
Previous versions of armd's message #16766011 « MacMini vs MacStudio for photography: worth the pain? »
