Mac mini or Macbook

Forget electricity costs . . . they are minimal.

The mini will perform at least as well (or better) and will save a ton of money even after you buy a non-Apple 27" monitor (c. £120) and a mouse and keyboard (c. £20). Remember the MB has a very tiny screen.

If you must have portability you need the MacBook although the mini can be easily moved and plugged into any HD TV via a cheap HDMI cable.

You need to work out how you could move the mini around.

Only you can decide what is best.

Consider the mini as a desktop. You don’t want to plug, unplug, carry a monitor … and keyboard and mouse….

Price-wise, bor the same amount you probably get more of a powerhouse than you would with a macbook. You have though to consider same generation.

I run a mac mini 2018 with top specs of the time, and it still outperform my M2 macbook with minimal configuration, for some tasks.

With the mini, you can also tun multiple large monitors if you wish. (You can with the MBP but you are limited to at one smaller monitor (its own). So again, depends of what you aim to do.

Obviously, a MPB can be carried without any setup time everywhere. You want to be able to work in a Starbucks, you can (Good luck if you want to do this with a mini ! First you’ll need to find a power outlet).

Bananas and Apples: MacBook Air is a great fashion statement, the mini great for serious computing. It’s also better value, plus there’s no fiddling with batteries, dongles etc. Go mini.

When you say that you are going to use the computer for video editing – how heavy is that work going to be?

Video editing is something that can require a lot of RAM and a lot of storage space. You can get external storage, but you cannot expand RAM in any Apple Silicon Mac, so you should try to order as much as you need at purchase time.

using a mac mini with an external monitor and keyboard/mouse in a bed sounds like a bit of an inconvenience.