Apple M2 Pro Mac mini upgrade prices make no sense next to the Mac Studio

Apple has finally updated the Mac mini, with the new top-of-the-line M2 Pro replacing the utterly ancient Intel model.

It fills an important gap in Apple’s Mac desktop line. The M1 Mac mini was cheap, and the M2 upgrade made it even cheaper, and the Mac Studio is powerful but expensive, starting at $1,999. Then there it is good The $1,499 iMac, which is really just an M1 built into a 24-inch color display.

So if you wanted a desktop Mac, you were forced to go low-end or high-end. With the M2 Pro Mac mini, there’s finally something in between. It starts at $1,299 for a stripped-down version of the M2 Pro with a 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU. Upgrade to the full M2 Pro with a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU, and add some RAM or storage, and you’ll find yourself spending as much as the $1,999 base Mac Studio.

So who should buy the upgraded M2 Pro Mac mini and who should just get the basic Mac Studio? After using both for the past week, the answer is not very clear.

The $1,599 Mac mini with a full-featured M2 Pro chip often delivers CPU benchmark ratings about 15 to 20 percent higher than the M1 Max, thanks to two more high-performance CPU cores and higher clock speeds. But the $1,299 Mac mini has the M2 Pro with the same 10 cores as the M1 Max Mac Studio.

Unless you’re running the kind of tasks that pound the CPU for minutes while you stare at the progress bar, you’re unlikely to notice a difference. Both machines have such fast storage and memory that everyday tasks—email, web browsing, productivity work, photo editing, even low-end consumer-level video editing—are similarly fast and responsive.

The M1 Max in the base Mac Studio model comes with 32GB of RAM, while the M2 Pro starts at 16GB. Honestly, 16GB is fine for most things, but if you need to run a lot of apps at once or a really heavy content creation workload, the extra RAM will make a difference. And if you plan to keep it for five years, it’s a good idea to have some extra RAM.

It gets complicated when comparing the GPU in the M2 Pro to the M1 Max. The M1 Max in the base Mac Studio model has 24 cores, with 32 cores available for an additional $200. The M2 Pro has 16 cores, with 19 cores for an extra $300. The Mac Studio usually beats the Mac mini here because it has 50 percent more cores and twice the memory bandwidth.

In other words, for day-to-day browsing and the like, you probably won’t notice much of a difference between the two machines. For sustained CPU-intensive operations, the M2 Pro is a Mac mini be able to it slightly outperforms Mac Studio, but even then only if you spend $300 on the CPU upgrade. There aren’t many tasks that bottleneck the Neural Engine, but it’s significantly faster in the M2 Pro, at least on paper.

At the end of the day, I’d take the base M1 Max with 24 CPU cores and 32GB of RAM over the full power M2 Pro, but it’s close.

It’s not just about the processor

But there’s more to these machines than just a difference in processor power. The Mac Studio is bigger, of course—it’s about 2.5 Mac minis stacked on top of each other. But both machines have the same footprint. They just are small by modern desktop standards and almost silent.

I prefer Mac Studio for design. I don’t mind the extra height…it’s actually a great monitor stand for Studio Display. But it’s the two USB-C ports and the SDXC card slot on the front that make me love the Mac Studio. I used them regularly and immediately missed having them on my Mac mini.

The Mac mini has Wi-FI 6E, which may matter if you have a Wi-Fi 6E router or plan to buy one soon, although Wi-Fi 6 on the Mac Studio is by no means slow. The Mini also has HDMI 2.1, which is a game-changer if you want to connect your Mac to an 8K monitor or a 4K monitor with a frequency higher than 60Hz.

While the HDMI 2.0 port is a bit of a nuisance on such an expensive computer, it’s the front ports that make me lean towards the Mac Studio. You might end up noticing the Wi-Fi 6E performance boost, or on the rare occasion you’ll need the HDMI 2.1 port, but you’ll be using those front-facing USB-C and SDXC slots almost every day.

The problem is Apple’s pricing

If you don’t need to spend more than $1,500, the base model Mac mini with a storage upgrade to 1TB isn’t bad. It’s a little overpriced, but it’s still enough below the price of Mac Studio to make it worth it.

But the more you upgrade your Mac mini to match Mac Studio, the worse the match. While the Mac Studio’s upgraded 32-core GPU costs $200, you’ll have to shell out $300 for the full-fledged M2 Pro. Add $400 and step up to 32GB of RAM to match the Studio, and you’re at $1,999. Consider the fact that you’ll have to spend $100 to upgrade the Mac mini’s Gigabit Ethernet port to a 10Gb Ethernet port, which is standard on the Mac Studio, and the Mac mini is technically more expensive. Oh, and don’t forget those front-facing USB-C ports and an SDXC card slot.

So, what would you better for $1,999: the M2 Pro with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, Wi-Fi 6E and HDMI 2 or the M1 Max with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD and front Thunderbolt ports and an SDXC card slot? Indeed, the Mac mini with the M2 Pro should start at $1,099 like the Intel model it displaced, and of course Apple’s longstanding ridiculous pricing for improved RAM and storage is to blame here too.

And then there’s the next generation of Mac Studio. We haven’t heard much about the upcoming Mac Studio based on the M2 Max M2 Ultra, but the M1 version is almost a year old, and with the M2 Max now available in the MacBook Pro, we’re only waiting for the M2 Ultra. Assuming the Mac Studio gets updated this spring with the HDMI 2.1 and Wi-FI 6E Mac mini updates, and Apple doesn’t raise the price, there will be no reason at all to recommend the upgraded M2 Pro Mac mini.

However, if you’re looking for a desktop Mac that’s a bit more powerful than the regular M2 at the moment, grit your teeth and grab a Mac mini for $1,299, or with a 1TB storage upgrade if you can fork over $200. But if you’re thinking about upgrading anything else—processor or RAM—I think most users would be happier and get more bang for their buck with the $1,999 Mac Studio.