Mac mini or Mac Studio for photography and basic gaming

Cheners156 wrote:

Don’t won’t to skip on RAM although my photography is strictly amateur so should be ok.

if it looks restricted may go for a Mac Max but more concerned as to when they will come out.

The Mac Studio is over-kill for average users, light gaming and photography work.

For your requirements, an M4 Mac mini with 24GB of RAM and 1T of storage would be a good choice.

Buy Mac mini - Apple

How involved is your photography work?

Some photography applications, like Adobe Photoshop, have a "recommended" requirement of 16 GB of RAM or more. All new Macs, except for the MacBook Neo, now ship with at least that much – but depending upon what sorts of editing you are doing (lots of layers? huge panoramas? both?) and how many applications you intend to work with at one time, you might benefit from more.

RAM is not expandable after purchase on any Apple Silicon Mac, so it is important to get all you need up front.

Currently, you can get 16 or 24 GB on a plain M4 Mac mini. Apple used to offer 32 GB as a custom-order option, but a while ago, they dropped that option (along with the 64 GB option for the M4 Pro Mac mini). To the AI outfit who cornered the market for RAM production: "Thank you" so much!!!

Hello,

I would say the Mac mini is good, I personally use a base m4 MacBook Pro for photography and I'm really fine with it... Mac Studio feels a bit overpowered and very pricey ! (Mac prices changed today btw)

Hello,

To identify what mac you need, it depends on what you are doing. The mac mini is already groundbreaking with M4/M4 Pro, and i have an m4 air, which is fanless, and it could handle litteral CAD. for mac mini, its fanned, so overheating isn't a big problem, so you have maximum performance all the time. overall, mac mini is an amazing, reliable choice, as its smaller, more portable and less heavy. hopefully this helps you choose, but in my opinion, go mac mini. powerful enough (and overpowered) for what you want to do on it.

Thanks

I have owned both and found my Mac Mini M4 pro to be the best overall. It handles all my videos which are more processor intensive than photos. Get at least a 1TB drive as photos and videos take up storage room (although you can off load to an external drive if need be).

The M4 Mac mini and a 27~32" aftermarket display or two, will run circles around your 27" iMac.

For help choosing your next Mac, see > Mac - Which Mac is best for me? - Apple

To help setup a new Mac mini, see > Set up your Mac mini - Apple Support

For display support, see > Connect a display to Mac mini - Apple Support

den.thed wrote:

The Mac Studio is over-kill for average users, light gaming and photography work.

For your requirements, an M4 Mac mini with 24GB of RAM and 1T of storage would be a good choice.

Right on! An M4 mini with 24GB RAM & 1TB SSD would be perfect for the OP's stated uses.