Last March, I did the math and research, and after being insanely satisfied with my then shiny new MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro, I decided to put a Mac Mini on my desk with the same processor. Initially I was pretty happy with this arrangement, but I started to get frustrated with video editing and the inability to really get into gaming. Let me explain what I got wrong.
Those M2 processors are crazy fast and energy efficient. The developer experience on the laptop has been excellent, despite having only 16 gigs of RAM and a half-terabyte of storage. Video editing was also relatively smooth, because the drive inside could read at about 3,000 MB/s, which is good enough for 4K. Sort of. Actually, it was more complicated than that. The Mini and the laptop have the same specs, it's just that one happens to have a screen and a keyboard wrapped around it. It is not practical to edit anything long-form when you have so little internal storage. But with Thunderbolt 4, you can reach a theoretical speed on external drives that matches what's inside. In practice, this ended up topping out around 2,700 MB/s, which is still OK. Where it gets slower is when you're editing across multiple angles and adding color adjustments or effects. While the experience wasn't bad, I wouldn't quite describe it as good. As soon as you started layering things, scrubbing around a timeline got janky. Exporting and rendering was still fast, but the disk bandwidth appeared to be a serious bottleneck. That's what I get for trivial testing before getting the Mini.
There's also the issue of gaming, of which I've done a lot this year. It's a great escape for me, in a year where I've really struggled with anxiety. It felt like there was starting to be some momentum toward Mac gaming, but it fizzled out. That, and so much of my experience revolves around Xbox Game Pass, which is not a thing on Macs, obviously. When I got the dual-screen laptop for the lighting rig, I was able to do some lighter gaming, and I started to think more that I should have stuck to Windows. The cost then would have been close to equal. The small box just felt a lot more elegant.
As it turns out, costs came down even more in the last year and a half. The algorithm pointed me at a deal that I just couldn't pass up. Lenovo sells a computer that's normally $3,200, with the current second-best video card available and the fastest current i9 Intel CPU. It's topped off with 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage, and mostly standard parts. It has room for two more SSD's as well. It was on sale, and after card rebates, only $1,900. The video card alone retails for $1,100. Heck, my laptop that's closing in on two years was $2,600. I just couldn't pass it up. I'll do a review after I've had it for awhile.
Two things immediately stand out. The same SSD that I had plugged into the Mini via Thunderbolt went from 2,700 MB/s to 7,000. Yeah, the same hardware is 2.5x faster when you connect it to the inside of the computer. It's more than 2x the speed of the internal drives on both of my M2 Pro machines. That's nuts. It's worth noting that the SSD I originally had for my previous desktop (which I swapped out for a faster one when I passed it to Simon), only did 1,800 MB/s. So the sheer speed on modern PC hardware is crazy.
The other thing is that, as you would expect, the 3D performance is ridiculous. Set whatever game you have, you set it at the maximum quality settings and the native 4K resolution of the monitor, and it still exceeds 60 frames per second. And I can run all of the things from Xbox Game Pass, Steam and GOG. Just the other day I finished The Last Of Us, and I can't even believe some of those environments aren't real. It's just spectacular.
Should I have stayed with Windows last year? Probably. The cost of Macs get ridiculous when you require more storage inside, and that's on top of costs that are already high. The Mini was $1,600, which in retrospect was high given the lack of storage and RAM, but I figured the sheer processing power was worth it. It would be, if the storage wasn't an issue. The only problem is that building my own last year would have meant steeper prices, especially for the GPU. I've never bought a pre-built PC, ever, but this one is an exceptional value.