it's not often that you can look at an Apple product and say wow that's a good
deal 13 000.
true their products are well made and long lasting but the higher prices found
across the lineup can make them inaccessible
and yet this new Mac Mini is six hundred
dollars 500 if you're a student that's 100 less than it used to be this seems
like a shockingly good deal but what's the catch well to find out we gave it to
a typical Mac User to see if at this price point there are any noticeable
trade-offs we did find one thing out though but it probably won't matter to
you it does to me
what's surprising about this new Mac Mini is that it's not just a price drop
it's a full update too Wi-Fi Bluetooth
Thunderbolt And even the headphone jack are all better and that's not all as you
also get the M2 processor with the full 10 core GPU
that's a notable though not groundbreaking performance Improvement
especially for the price you can take things further and upgrade the Mac Mini
to the M2 Pro chip though that does cost considerably more and is geared towards
professionals the base mini is better suited for average people one of whom I
will now meet
all right hi hey come on in thank you
yeah thanks so would you consider yourself an average person average in
what sense the average computer user maybe yeah oh
yeah I play video games do Zoom calls for class and I do my homework like yeah
this is Alexis wiggett last year she moved to Vancouver to study acting her
use case for a computer is pretty normal using it for school and light
entertainment and given that she currently uses an iPhone iPad and
MacBook Pro we thought she'd be the perfect fit to test the new Mac so what
computer do you currently use um I'm using this one right here
for those specific things like how does it perform it's not slow it's not
incredibly fast yeah if I play it for like 20 minutes my computer sounds like
it's dying really yeah I can't ever
really have it on the highest setting yeah but overall like it's still usable
I still do it I was thinking a little bit of disappointment in the computer
well okay here's the thing um
yes yeah okay yeah yeah that's a good
word for it it's disappointment okay so we brought along a new Mac Mini for you
to test it's about five years younger than your computer yes okay so here's
the one thing I'm not gonna tell you how much the computer costs don't look any
of it up any of the specs or any of that just use the computer okay that's fun by
having her not know the price of the setup we can hopefully get an unbiased
opinion about how everything performs and whether or not she feels it's an
improvement over her own MacBook it's a 2018 MacBook Pro which was two thousand
dollars at release she got it as a gift from her family who are Avid Mac users
themselves so this should be a good fit
since the Mac Mini famously doesn't come with any peripherals you and Alexis are
gonna need some to keep things affordable we elected to
use a 100 1080p Acer monitor as well as
a Logitech keyboard and mouse Each of which cost forty dollars and use
Bluetooth so that you can keep those precious USB ports free if you need a
webcam and have an iPhone the Belkin magsafe monitor mount is a
cost-effective solution and while the Mac Mini does have a built-in speaker I
do recommend buying a separate set if you want to listen to anything beyond system notifications
all together this comes out to 780 dollars and while it's not the most
clean setup on the desk remember that terrible iMac I bought from the
refurbished store last year that was 890
and I wouldn't recommend that to anyone which is way better okay we're ready for
you yeah so we set up I gotta get a profile
set up for you we'll log in here we got
the new Resident Evil game installs wait really yeah what she did say you want to
play so give give it a go no I never thought I'd actually like
okay you never thought you'd actually play the thing is I'm like a coward so
oh I know me too me too so what do you think of the graphics
it feels like I'm not wearing my contacts now oh okay let's just try and
fix these Graphics let me see what I can do it doesn't look like we have enough
storage though I mean I think it's memory and I think
we're fine how can we upgrade it
uh this is a bit of a controversy yeah
um yeah with this Mac Mini there is a little bit
of an elephant in the room memory and
storage it has 8 and 256 gigabytes
respectively and that's getting to be a little low especially considering that
with apple silicon the RAM is Unified
meaning it's shared between the GPU and CPU
also with the M2 Apple has changed the
storage speeds in base configurations which are now up to 50 slower than the
base M1 so you're losing something but is it too
much well going by our experience with the machine I'd say no compared to a
fully upgraded M2 MacBook Air with 24 gigabytes of RAM there's no noticeable
difference in everyday tasks which include web browsing emails word
processing and listening to music pushing the Mac Mini harder it handles
light photo editing in Lightroom and speeds through 4K prores footage in
Final Cut and yes it can handle gaming like War Thunder they're also sponsoring
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refuses to slow down when I'm intentionally try trying to push the
computer playing 8K footage on that timeline but it's when doing all these
things at the same time that you push the limits of memory and the Machine
stutters so if you're a big multi-tasker or work
with large files the upgrade to 16 gigabytes of memory is an easy albeit
costly and annoying recommendation Apple
has always been stingy when it comes to memory and storage especially when
compared to PCS but consider this at our
local Best Buy the cheapest desktop PC available has the same memory and
storage as the Mac Mini for the same price sure the PC is more likely to go
on sale but a refurbished M1 Mac Mini is now 470 dollars so spec wise it shows
just how competitive the Mac Mini has become I'm confident this will work for
most people let's see how it worked for Alexis
okay so you've had the computer for a couple of days what do you think I mean
yeah it's a nice computer I'll give it that yeah yeah yeah no I I didn't have
any problems with it what were some of the first things you installed in the Mac Mini it was Minecraft ah
it was Minecraft there's no shame in playing Minecraft I just want to make
this clear there's a macOS version of it right I
I'm too old for Minecraft you can play Java version you can't play better Rock
how did Minecraft then run on the Mac
Mini compared to the yeah it was fine it
ran probably a bit faster yeah a bit more smoother so it seems
like you're a bit of a gamer which Macs
aren't really good for are they I don't know
um I wanted to download things like Ark
survival evolved that's just simply
couldn't get it to work wasn't able to find one that was able to work with uh I
think it's Ventura was the is the new one yet yeah yeah nothing I could get to
correspond with that oh so this Mac Mini
added a bunch of complexity to the way you want to use your computer yeah
exactly I don't know sometimes I feel like I'm putting off trying to even
bother downloading a game if I'm playing a game I want to relax I don't want to
like have a headache trying to set this up you know I was not expecting you to
be such a gamer and it seems like that's the one big weakness of macOS but why
not just get a gaming console the thing is I I didn't really grow up with a
console like why would I just not stick with the controls that I'm used to okay
so back to this Mac how much do you
think it sells for oh how much do I think Apple sells it
yeah like if you go if you were to go on the website what would be the price listed underneath a picture of the Mac
Mini approximately three grand maybe three grand yeah wow it's you think it's
that powerful no oh okay but it's Apple okay okay fair enough oh
but it's okay how much would you pay for it
um 1500 maybe okay okay so the actual
retail price is 600 us or 800 Canadian
really
wow okay well that's that's surprising I
will be completely honest really is this like this is like a new computer though
brand new just came out last month so does that sort of changed the calculus
for you much more doable I'm still gonna buy it
though
it looks bad I don't I just don't think it offers a lot of the things that
I mean I personally want I can't speak
for other people but it's really worth looking into uh what you want exactly in
the future as well as currently when you're about to invest in a computer
because I think if I were to go back in time I would have really done my
research and pushed for a PC rather than a Mac and stuff said but yeah it's
simply not the right or wrong choice for everyone I
guess I'm not going to win you over a don't try
Alexis's experience made me realize something
the switch to Apple silicon has not only made what's great about the Mac even
better it's also exacerbated the negatives
true you can get impressive performance in Apple's cheapest machines but now
that they run an ARM you can't rely on boot camp for apps and games not
available on the Mac and developers now need to put more effort into Port their
PC games to Apples chips and apis the
results can be amazing but with fewer than three percent of steam users on Mac
OS I'm not holding my breath so where
does that leave this thing well outside of games neither Alexis nor I really
felt held back by the hardware and even though she said she wouldn't buy one
it's a great experience as far as Max go
from there though we clearly differ she
feels inconvenienced by staying on macOS whereas moving to Windows would
inconvenience me what the
ultimately I think the real question is if macOS works for you as far as the
average person goes this should be able to fly through anything you throw at it
it just can't do everything at once and
if it can do everything you need it to do it's a great option uh just think
about the RAM upgrade if you want the machine to last that's really how they
get you with that RAM upgrade thanks for lowering the price of this
Mac Address if you love that the Mac Mini is now only six hundred dollars
give this video a like and if you want to know how expensive you can make a Mac
Mini well you might as well subscribe I'm curious in the comments if any of
you are running any Apple silicon Max with eight gigabytes of RAM have you
pushed it to the limits and if so how