Mac Studio vs M1 mini vs i7 mini - Video & Photo Editing!

**The Performance Comparison: Integrated GPU vs Apple Silicon**

As we've been saying throughout this video, integrated GPUs are just not going to cut it for many today's workloads. Specifically, when it comes to video editing tasks, the kind of tests Puget Bench uses for their benchmarks, such as 4K H.264 and 4K H.265 video, as well as 4K R3D files from the Red camera, are just too demanding for integrated GPUs. In fact, in our previous test using Final Cut Pro, we had to essentially eliminate the i7 Mac Mini from the comparison because it couldn't even finish the benchmark within a reasonable time.

This highlights an important takeaway: when it comes to video editing and other GPU-intensive tasks, Apple's latest M1-based Macs are significantly ahead of their Intel counterparts. The difference in scores between the MacBook Studio and M1 Mac Mini is particularly striking, with the M1 Mac Mini scoring under 400 while the MacBook Studio scored over 800. This represents a whopping 200% increase in performance, demonstrating just how strong the GPU in Apple's latest designs is.

**Lightroom Classic: A Popular Photo Editing Application**

In addition to video editing, photo editing applications like Lightroom Classic are another area where Apple's integrated GPUs shine. In this case, we used the same photo files that Puget Bench includes with their benchmarks and ran timed exports of three different groups on our M1 Mac Mini, i7 Mac Mini, and MacBook Studio. While none of these tests took more than a minute to complete, they demonstrate the relative performance difference between these systems.

For 12 22-megapixel photos exported to JPEGs in full quality, all three machines delivered similar results, but when we increased the image resolution to 42 megapixels, the MacBook Studio emerged as the clear winner. This isn't surprising, given its superior GPU performance compared to the i7 Mac Mini and M1 Mac Mini.

However, it's worth noting that these tests don't necessarily tell us much about the capabilities of Apple's integrated GPUs in photo editing tasks. Unlike video editing applications like Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, which are inherently more CPU-intensive and thus benefit from faster processors, photo editing software is often optimized to work around limitations imposed by hardware. As a result, even the M1 Mac Mini delivered comparable performance to the MacBook Studio in these tests.

**The Intel i7 Mac Mini: A Niche Option for Specific Workloads**

Given that neither of these tests highlighted any significant advantages of the MacBook Studio over the M1 Mac Mini, it's clear that the i7 Mac Mini is best suited for a very specific niche of users. If you primarily edit photos and don't need the raw processing power required for video editing or other GPU-intensive tasks, then the i7 Mac Mini may be an attractive option.

However, if you're looking at these machines with the expectation of doing serious video editing work or requiring top-end performance in photo editing applications, it's hard to recommend the i7 Mac Mini. The fact that its fans are practically on full blast during even light usage and that it struggles to run smoothly under load make it an unappealing option.

**Conclusion: Apple Silicon vs Intel for Video Editing**

For those looking for a powerful Mac desktop with top-end performance in video editing applications, the MacBook Studio is still the clear winner. However, if you're on a budget and want a reliable, yet less expensive system that can handle photo editing tasks without breaking the bank, then the M1 Mac Mini remains an excellent option.

But when it comes to raw processing power and dedicated GPU performance, Apple's integrated GPUs are the way forward for those who require top-end performance in their video editing work. As always, we appreciate your feedback and insights – which Mac do you think you'd be most likely to buy? Let us know in the comments below!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys miles here with mountain five mac and if you're a fan of get ideas consider subscribing to the channel for future content like this these three macs being presented to you are all available to purchase from apple's website right now for what feels like the first time ever apple is offering multiple small form factor desktops that serve all kinds of different purposes but today i wanted to specifically focus on video and photo editing performance and see what the difference is between the m1 max max studio the m1 mac mini and the core i7 intel based mac mini let's first start with the specs of the intel mac mini this machine is powered by a 2.3 gigahertz 6 core i7 processor with 16 gigabytes of upgradable memory and 256 gigabytes of storage and obviously there's no dedicated gpu in the sky so it's simply rocking the integrated intel uhd 630 graphics card from intel these models can be equipped with 10 gigabit ethernet but this one's only got the standard gigabit option as far as ports there's plenty to choose from here you've got four thunderbolt 3 ports powered by two thunderbolt controllers and they sit alongside gigabit ethernet hdmi usb-a and a headphone jack as spec from apple this machine will cost you 1500 new which is honestly an insane amount of money to spend on a mac like this and you'll see why later in the video the m1 mac mini is technically the quote unquote base model mac mini out of the lineup but as we all know the m1 chip is far from a base model in terms of real world performance compared to the i7 mac mini the m1 mac mini is powered by the apple m1 chip which consists of an 8 core cpu and 8 core gpu alongside a 16 core neural processor this model here has 16 gigabytes of non-upgradable memory and 256 gigabytes of storage as far as ports on this machine you're looking at two thunderbolt 3 ports powered by two thunderbolt controllers and then those ports sit alongside gigabit ethernet an hdmi port usb a and a headphone jack so not too different from the i7 mini in terms of io you're mostly missing those extra thunderbolt ports this model s spec from apple will run you 8.99 which is significantly less than what you pay for the i7 mini then last but not least we've got max studio this model here is powered by the m1 max chip which consists of a 10 core cpu 24 core gpu and 16 core neural processor this one comes with 32 gigabytes of non-upgradable ram and 512 gigabytes of storage and obviously compared to the other two mini's this one's a little taller it literally just looks like 1.3 mac minis combined so not a super flattering design but certainly nothing to complain about as far as ports you firstly got two usb c ports on the front alongside a uh s2 sd card reader and then on the back you've got four thunderbolt 4 ports with its own individual thunderbolt controller for each port then you've got a 10 gigabit ethernet port is standard two usb a ports an hdmi 2.0 port and a headphone jack so as far as ports goes this is a near perfect mac for my usage a lot of people are looking at devices like mac studio and the m1 mini as potential video editing machines and particularly for final cut pro so i ran a handful of different export benchmarks to get a real world understanding of how these three machines will compare the first test consisted of a 4k 24p h.265 video from my canon r5 i threw that into a timeline chopped it up and added some effects and transitions and then i exported it to an h.264 video file the results from this test will clearly show you that mac studio and the m1 mini are simply light years ahead for handling relatively basic hevc video files there's only a three minute difference between mac studio and the m1 mini but the i7 mini took nearly six times as long to complete as the m1 mini and it cost six hundred dollars more from apple which is crazy but also not necessarily surprising because apple's not one to change prices just because they introduce something new and cheaper mac studio came in at two minutes 31 seconds the m1 mini came in at 5 minutes 37 seconds and the i7 mini came in at 29 minutes and 11 seconds and like i said the difference between the m1 mini and mac studio obviously isn't that huge but the difference between i7 mini and the other two apple silicon max is very huge and a lot of people wanted to crap on apple's uh gpu when m1 was first announced but apple's eight core gpu clearly destroys the intel uhd graphics even though when that card was new it wasn't anything to brag about necessarily next up i decided to test some 4k60 h.264 video from my canon camera pretty much doing the exact same thing which is throwing it in the timeline chopping it up and throwing on some effects and transitions i then exported this to an h.264 video file once again and the results are pretty similar overall just with a little added time due to that higher frame rate the i7 mini took nearly 50 minutes to export while this mac studio finished the export in just under 6 minutes the real world time being saved here by editing on apple silicon is just on another level it's also interesting to see that given the 1100 difference between max studio and the m1 mini the differences in performance for this kind of stuff is very close given that price gap max studio only took 5 minutes and 20 seconds to export this video while the m1 mini took 11 minutes and 48 seconds and the i7 mini coming in at 46 minutes and 42 seconds so i said the mini clearly getting obliterated here i wanted to test out how footage from a cinema camera would perform between these devices so i got some 6k raw footage shot on a red camera and once again the i7 mini is really really showing its weakness here mac studio took just under 15 minutes to render with the m1 mini completing it in nearly 36 minutes but the i7 mini took nearly two and a half hours to complete the export for this sub 10 minute video you could watch a feature length film before the i7 mini completes that export but on apple silicon you'd only be waiting 15 to 30 minutes for something like this so for anyone shooting on a red camera you're probably good to ditch your integrated intel graphic machines now if that's something you were ever doing you'd kind of be crazy to be doing that though the exact numbers here are 14 minutes and 23 seconds for max studio 35 minutes 52 seconds for m1 mini and 2 hours 28 minutes and 21 seconds for the i7 mac mini that thing is just such a slouch and it clearly was never geared to handle red footage i wanted to show some love to my premiere pro users out there who want to know what editing performance is like between these three machines and that's why i did a test on all three machines using puget bench which is a popular benchmarking solution for davinci and adobe apps made by puget systems this test consists of a bunch of benchmarks that stress the cpu gpu and both simultaneously for things like encoding multi-camera playback things like that mac studio completed the benchmark in around 22 minutes while the m1 mac mini completed it in around 36 minutes so noticeably longer but nothing crazy and the issue here with the i7 mini is that it went on for about 53 minutes that's when i decided to cut it off because it had been stuck at zero percent for nearly 30 minutes on a heavy gpu extreme test it just everything froze up the mac mini completely choked up so i decided to cut it off there but this essentially proves that this mac couldn't even essentially handle that benchmark with its integrated gpu which goes to show you like i've been saying for the entire video that integrated gpu is just not going to cut it for a lot of today's work as far as the exact kind of video that puget bench uses for its benchmarks it's using 4k h.264 and 4k h.265 video as well as 4k r3d files which is from the red camera just like with the previous test i did in final cut pro we can essentially just eliminate the i7 mac mini from this aspect of the comparison because it couldn't even finish the benchmark within a reasonable time i think the more important takeaway here is the difference in scores between the max studio and m1 mac mini the mac mini with m1 got a score under 400 which is honestly a little surprising while mac studio got a score over 800 so that's a pretty huge jump that's well over double and it's safe to say that the gpu in mac studio is quite strong even though it didn't take substantially longer to complete the benchmark as far as the m1 versus mac studio lightroom classic is a popular photo editing application and i want to do some timed exports between these three machines i couldn't actually run puget's lightroom benchmark because i'm on a mac and it only has window support thus far but i use the exact same photo files that they include in that benchmark and just did some timed exports of the three photo groups i firstly started out with a group of 12 22 megapixel photos and exported them to jpegs and 100 full quality i then did the same thing again with 12 42 megapixel photos and then with 12 45 megapixel photos between all these machines clearly the mac studio is the fastest but given the fact that none of these tests even go over a minute it's safe to say that any of these machines are pretty competent photo editing boxes and that's because applications like lightroom aren't as gpu intensive as other applications like final cut pro and premiere pro so if you mostly edit photos and are looking for a mac mini type device with an intel processor which you know it's a very niche group nowadays the i7 mini is definitely one to consider just based on these results alone it's once again really nice to get a refresher of how capable apple silicon is inside of mac hardware and not just purely because of the numbers i've shown you but because there's a handful of aspects of the experience that i had while running these tests that totally separated the i7 mini from the m1 mini and mac studio every test i did had the i7 mac mini's fans practically on full blast the machine got notably warm and struggled to really do anything else effectively on the operating system while most of these video benchmarks ran and just the experience of using the i7 mini with my ultrafine 4k monitor felt a little choppy and sluggish in comparison to the mini and max studio and i'm definitely not getting the full 60 hertz when scaling the resolution up a bit on the intel mini many things like that are what make me firm in my decision to never go back to intel max and so it's honestly quite baffling to see apple sell this mac mini at full price when it simply can't keep up for the most intensive tasks yes mac studio is the fastest mini mac from apple but when taking a look at most of these benchmarks you can see that the m1 mini was never too far behind mac studio which costs over a thousand dollars more and yes there are many benefits in general that you get for the two thousand dollar price of mac studio but when it comes to video and photo editing specifically it's quite clear that the m1 mini is still the best value mac desktop you can buy right now and it definitely shouldn't be overlooked from a performance standpoint personally i'm probably going to keep using the mac studio just because it's new and shiny and i like new and shiny things but as i said the m1 mini is still such great value for the money and the i7 mac mini is it's there to buy if you want it but i personally suggest you don't it just can't keep up on the video side of things and if that's a priority for you going with apple silicon is a no-brainer but if you want to run a server farm or get involved in tasks that won't stress the gpu out at all then i'd definitely say that the intel mac mini may be worth considering but that's going to be about it for this one let us know which mac you would buy in the comment section below would you take mac studio the m1 mini or the intel mac mini let us know and if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe for future content like this thanks for watching and i'll talk to you guys in the next one youwhat's up guys miles here with mountain five mac and if you're a fan of get ideas consider subscribing to the channel for future content like this these three macs being presented to you are all available to purchase from apple's website right now for what feels like the first time ever apple is offering multiple small form factor desktops that serve all kinds of different purposes but today i wanted to specifically focus on video and photo editing performance and see what the difference is between the m1 max max studio the m1 mac mini and the core i7 intel based mac mini let's first start with the specs of the intel mac mini this machine is powered by a 2.3 gigahertz 6 core i7 processor with 16 gigabytes of upgradable memory and 256 gigabytes of storage and obviously there's no dedicated gpu in the sky so it's simply rocking the integrated intel uhd 630 graphics card from intel these models can be equipped with 10 gigabit ethernet but this one's only got the standard gigabit option as far as ports there's plenty to choose from here you've got four thunderbolt 3 ports powered by two thunderbolt controllers and they sit alongside gigabit ethernet hdmi usb-a and a headphone jack as spec from apple this machine will cost you 1500 new which is honestly an insane amount of money to spend on a mac like this and you'll see why later in the video the m1 mac mini is technically the quote unquote base model mac mini out of the lineup but as we all know the m1 chip is far from a base model in terms of real world performance compared to the i7 mac mini the m1 mac mini is powered by the apple m1 chip which consists of an 8 core cpu and 8 core gpu alongside a 16 core neural processor this model here has 16 gigabytes of non-upgradable memory and 256 gigabytes of storage as far as ports on this machine you're looking at two thunderbolt 3 ports powered by two thunderbolt controllers and then those ports sit alongside gigabit ethernet an hdmi port usb a and a headphone jack so not too different from the i7 mini in terms of io you're mostly missing those extra thunderbolt ports this model s spec from apple will run you 8.99 which is significantly less than what you pay for the i7 mini then last but not least we've got max studio this model here is powered by the m1 max chip which consists of a 10 core cpu 24 core gpu and 16 core neural processor this one comes with 32 gigabytes of non-upgradable ram and 512 gigabytes of storage and obviously compared to the other two mini's this one's a little taller it literally just looks like 1.3 mac minis combined so not a super flattering design but certainly nothing to complain about as far as ports you firstly got two usb c ports on the front alongside a uh s2 sd card reader and then on the back you've got four thunderbolt 4 ports with its own individual thunderbolt controller for each port then you've got a 10 gigabit ethernet port is standard two usb a ports an hdmi 2.0 port and a headphone jack so as far as ports goes this is a near perfect mac for my usage a lot of people are looking at devices like mac studio and the m1 mini as potential video editing machines and particularly for final cut pro so i ran a handful of different export benchmarks to get a real world understanding of how these three machines will compare the first test consisted of a 4k 24p h.265 video from my canon r5 i threw that into a timeline chopped it up and added some effects and transitions and then i exported it to an h.264 video file the results from this test will clearly show you that mac studio and the m1 mini are simply light years ahead for handling relatively basic hevc video files there's only a three minute difference between mac studio and the m1 mini but the i7 mini took nearly six times as long to complete as the m1 mini and it cost six hundred dollars more from apple which is crazy but also not necessarily surprising because apple's not one to change prices just because they introduce something new and cheaper mac studio came in at two minutes 31 seconds the m1 mini came in at 5 minutes 37 seconds and the i7 mini came in at 29 minutes and 11 seconds and like i said the difference between the m1 mini and mac studio obviously isn't that huge but the difference between i7 mini and the other two apple silicon max is very huge and a lot of people wanted to crap on apple's uh gpu when m1 was first announced but apple's eight core gpu clearly destroys the intel uhd graphics even though when that card was new it wasn't anything to brag about necessarily next up i decided to test some 4k60 h.264 video from my canon camera pretty much doing the exact same thing which is throwing it in the timeline chopping it up and throwing on some effects and transitions i then exported this to an h.264 video file once again and the results are pretty similar overall just with a little added time due to that higher frame rate the i7 mini took nearly 50 minutes to export while this mac studio finished the export in just under 6 minutes the real world time being saved here by editing on apple silicon is just on another level it's also interesting to see that given the 1100 difference between max studio and the m1 mini the differences in performance for this kind of stuff is very close given that price gap max studio only took 5 minutes and 20 seconds to export this video while the m1 mini took 11 minutes and 48 seconds and the i7 mini coming in at 46 minutes and 42 seconds so i said the mini clearly getting obliterated here i wanted to test out how footage from a cinema camera would perform between these devices so i got some 6k raw footage shot on a red camera and once again the i7 mini is really really showing its weakness here mac studio took just under 15 minutes to render with the m1 mini completing it in nearly 36 minutes but the i7 mini took nearly two and a half hours to complete the export for this sub 10 minute video you could watch a feature length film before the i7 mini completes that export but on apple silicon you'd only be waiting 15 to 30 minutes for something like this so for anyone shooting on a red camera you're probably good to ditch your integrated intel graphic machines now if that's something you were ever doing you'd kind of be crazy to be doing that though the exact numbers here are 14 minutes and 23 seconds for max studio 35 minutes 52 seconds for m1 mini and 2 hours 28 minutes and 21 seconds for the i7 mac mini that thing is just such a slouch and it clearly was never geared to handle red footage i wanted to show some love to my premiere pro users out there who want to know what editing performance is like between these three machines and that's why i did a test on all three machines using puget bench which is a popular benchmarking solution for davinci and adobe apps made by puget systems this test consists of a bunch of benchmarks that stress the cpu gpu and both simultaneously for things like encoding multi-camera playback things like that mac studio completed the benchmark in around 22 minutes while the m1 mac mini completed it in around 36 minutes so noticeably longer but nothing crazy and the issue here with the i7 mini is that it went on for about 53 minutes that's when i decided to cut it off because it had been stuck at zero percent for nearly 30 minutes on a heavy gpu extreme test it just everything froze up the mac mini completely choked up so i decided to cut it off there but this essentially proves that this mac couldn't even essentially handle that benchmark with its integrated gpu which goes to show you like i've been saying for the entire video that integrated gpu is just not going to cut it for a lot of today's work as far as the exact kind of video that puget bench uses for its benchmarks it's using 4k h.264 and 4k h.265 video as well as 4k r3d files which is from the red camera just like with the previous test i did in final cut pro we can essentially just eliminate the i7 mac mini from this aspect of the comparison because it couldn't even finish the benchmark within a reasonable time i think the more important takeaway here is the difference in scores between the max studio and m1 mac mini the mac mini with m1 got a score under 400 which is honestly a little surprising while mac studio got a score over 800 so that's a pretty huge jump that's well over double and it's safe to say that the gpu in mac studio is quite strong even though it didn't take substantially longer to complete the benchmark as far as the m1 versus mac studio lightroom classic is a popular photo editing application and i want to do some timed exports between these three machines i couldn't actually run puget's lightroom benchmark because i'm on a mac and it only has window support thus far but i use the exact same photo files that they include in that benchmark and just did some timed exports of the three photo groups i firstly started out with a group of 12 22 megapixel photos and exported them to jpegs and 100 full quality i then did the same thing again with 12 42 megapixel photos and then with 12 45 megapixel photos between all these machines clearly the mac studio is the fastest but given the fact that none of these tests even go over a minute it's safe to say that any of these machines are pretty competent photo editing boxes and that's because applications like lightroom aren't as gpu intensive as other applications like final cut pro and premiere pro so if you mostly edit photos and are looking for a mac mini type device with an intel processor which you know it's a very niche group nowadays the i7 mini is definitely one to consider just based on these results alone it's once again really nice to get a refresher of how capable apple silicon is inside of mac hardware and not just purely because of the numbers i've shown you but because there's a handful of aspects of the experience that i had while running these tests that totally separated the i7 mini from the m1 mini and mac studio every test i did had the i7 mac mini's fans practically on full blast the machine got notably warm and struggled to really do anything else effectively on the operating system while most of these video benchmarks ran and just the experience of using the i7 mini with my ultrafine 4k monitor felt a little choppy and sluggish in comparison to the mini and max studio and i'm definitely not getting the full 60 hertz when scaling the resolution up a bit on the intel mini many things like that are what make me firm in my decision to never go back to intel max and so it's honestly quite baffling to see apple sell this mac mini at full price when it simply can't keep up for the most intensive tasks yes mac studio is the fastest mini mac from apple but when taking a look at most of these benchmarks you can see that the m1 mini was never too far behind mac studio which costs over a thousand dollars more and yes there are many benefits in general that you get for the two thousand dollar price of mac studio but when it comes to video and photo editing specifically it's quite clear that the m1 mini is still the best value mac desktop you can buy right now and it definitely shouldn't be overlooked from a performance standpoint personally i'm probably going to keep using the mac studio just because it's new and shiny and i like new and shiny things but as i said the m1 mini is still such great value for the money and the i7 mac mini is it's there to buy if you want it but i personally suggest you don't it just can't keep up on the video side of things and if that's a priority for you going with apple silicon is a no-brainer but if you want to run a server farm or get involved in tasks that won't stress the gpu out at all then i'd definitely say that the intel mac mini may be worth considering but that's going to be about it for this one let us know which mac you would buy in the comment section below would you take mac studio the m1 mini or the intel mac mini let us know and if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe for future content like this thanks for watching and i'll talk to you guys in the next one you\n"