The Power of Apple Silicon: A Comprehensive Review of the M2 Mac Mini and MacBook Pro

In this article, we'll delve into the world of Apple silicon and explore the performance of the M2 Mac Mini and M2 MacBook Pro. We've put these machines through a series of tests to determine their capabilities and identify any notable differences between them.

Firstly, let's talk about the CPU performance of the M2 Mac Mini and M2 MacBook Pro. When it comes to exporting 4K video footage in Final Cut Pro, the M2 Mac Mini performed impressively, taking around 44 minutes and 2 seconds to complete the task, which is significantly faster than the M2 MacBook Air's time of 1 minute and 20 seconds. Similarly, when comparing the empty MacBook Pro to the M2 Mac Mini, we saw that the mini was 1.35 times faster in exporting an h.65 4K 5-minute clip into ProRes.

However, the difference between the M2 Mac Mini and the empty MacBook Pro became more apparent when testing with a 6K 6-minute clip. The Mac Mini took around 1 minute and 33 seconds to complete the task, while the MacBook Air took an impressive 2 minutes and 10 seconds, showcasing the mini's speed advantage. Moreover, we also ran tests on Logic Pro to see how many tracks could be played simultaneously on each machine. The M2 Mac Mini emerged as the clear winner, playing a whopping 69 tracks without any issues.

Gaming Performance

Moving on to gaming performance, Apple silicon-based systems have long been considered inferior to Intel and AMD-based systems. However, our tests revealed that this assumption might not be entirely true. We started with World of Warcraft, one of the few Apple silicon native games available, and set the graphics to ultra settings with a resolution of 2560 x 1600. The M2 Mac Mini delivered an average frame rate of around 46.5 frames per second, which is quite impressive for a machine considered a 'budget' option.

In contrast, the empty MacBook Air struggled with frame rates, averaging around 38.5 frames per second and eventually throttling down to as low as 20 frames per second after just five minutes of gameplay. The M2 MacBook Pro performed slightly better, but still fell short, achieving an average of around 41.5 frames per second.

However, when we tested the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider using Metal, which is a more optimized engine for Apple silicon, the results were different. The Mac Mini delivered 18 frames per second at 2560 x 1440 resolution, while the MacBook Air managed only 13 frames per second and the MacBook Pro delivered 17 frames per second, again slightly behind the M2 Mac Mini.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our tests have shown that the M2 Mac Mini outperforms both the empty MacBook Pro and the M2 MacBook Air in several areas, including CPU performance, media engines, and gaming capabilities. Its portability, compact design, and affordable price make it an attractive option for those who need a powerful machine without breaking the bank.

Moreover, the ability to configure the Mac Mini with the M2 Pro chip for a lower price than the 13-inch Baseline M2 MacBook Pro offers significant performance upgrades. The addition of two extra Thunderbolt ports is also a welcome feature that sets this model apart from its competitors.

For those looking to save money and still get an excellent machine, consider purchasing the M2 Mac Mini through Apple's educational program for a discounted price. With the right accessories, it can be fully configured to meet your needs and provide years of reliable service.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis Mac Mini cost 600 same as a mid-range phone so what if I told you that is 600 Mac Mini not only outperforms Windows PCS and Windows laptops at its price point pretty significantly by the way but it also outperforms Apple's M2 MacBook Air which costs twelve hundred dollars double and Apple's 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro which cost thirteen hundred dollars well we're going to run not 5 not 10 but 15 actually 16 different tests to see how powerful Apple's cheapest Mac really is starting off with a disc speed test so we ran this test using Aja disk speed and a 16 gigabyte 4K file so just looking at these results compared to the M2 base MacBook Air and the M2 base MacBook Pro the Mac Mini had the highest read and when it comes to again the MacBook Air the Mac lady had 100 megabytes per second faster right and close to 100 megabytes per second faster read still these speeds are a far cry from what we get on the 16-inch 1 entered by models of the MacBook Pros which are Apple's highest performing ssds we then tested the actual transfer speed using an external SSD with two folders full of video files and 18 gigabytes in total so we transferred all of that onto the internal storage and this is where things started getting weird you see the Mac Mini only took 28 seconds the empty MacBook Air took 1 minute and seven seconds same as the M2 MacBook Pro so how could the Mac Mini be so fast when in the SSD speed test that we've seen before it was just as slow as the M2 air and the m230 inch MacBook Pro while this is likely caused by the ssds cache so every SSD has a super fast portion inside of it where things get copied initially and then they get transferred slowly to the main SSD portion just to give you guys an example Samsung's 980 nvme Drive 500 gigabytes model that one has a cache of 100 gigabytes so the remaining 400 gigabytes are much slower meaning that once that 100 gigabyte gets full everything would be much slower so for a 256 gigabyte drive we likely have 50 gigabytes at most so probably 30 or so when it comes to the M2 Mac Mini and we can see this when we run Aja disk speed but this time with a 64 gigabyte file you'll see that eventually the speeds will end up dropping significantly on these low end machines as long as you're working with small files everything will be pretty fast it's just that when you're working with large files that's when you'll really notice a massive hit in transfer Spades then we tested the CPU performance with cinebench as you probably know all these machines have an empty chip with eight cores out of which four are performance scores and four are efficiency chords the main difference between the M2 Mac Mini M2 air and m230 inch pro is that the air doesn't have a fan the 13 Spangled Pro and the Mac Mini do both the Mac Mini is of course bigger the fan is larger and also more powerful so the question is will this actually impact performance well in our 10 minutes and and Tron the Mac Mini definitely scored the highest but the difference wasn't as much as I expected in fact the difference between the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air was only 7.68 so what about the temperatures well we measured these after a five minutes in a bench run and the empty Mac menu was at 79 degrees so really really good the empty MacBook Air was at 105 and the M2 MacBook Pro was at 102. so yeah the difference in temperatures between the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro was very significant the Mac Mini definitely has the best cooling system out of the three so how will this thermal system impact real world usage well we started off with Lightroom we imported 228 images of various sizes and formats from raws to tips up to 80 megapixels in size so some of these work just massive the M2 Mac Mini took 40 seconds to import the M2 MacBook Air took 37 and the M2 MacBook Pro took 31. so the back plane was actually the slowest one here very strong change then we've applied a bunch of effects and filters to one image and pasted all of those onto the remaining 227 images the Mac Mini took 1 minute and 15 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took one minute and the M2 MacBook Pro took one minute and one second so the Mac Mini was once again slower which shouldn't really happen as this app Lightroom is already optimized for the M2 Chip which is inside all of these machines so what's actually happening well we then ran a full export test so we exported all these edited 228 images to full resolution because this is really when the systems will be pushed to the max so hopefully we'll now see a big Improvement when it comes to the Mac Mini's performance and that is exactly what happens the M2 Mac Mini took 15 minutes and 45 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took 30 minutes and 36 seconds so literally twice as long and the empty MacBook Pro took 17 minutes and 25 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.1 times faster than a 13-inch empty MacBook Pro and 1.94 times faster than the M2 MacBook Air as it has of course better Cooling and it can sustain its performance for much longer we then ran the same test again but this time we compressed the images to a small file size the Mt Mac Mini took 6 minutes and 15 seconds the empty MacBook Air takes 17 minutes and 52 seconds so the Mac Mini was 2.85 times faster here as the air overheated and started throttling and the M2 MacBook Pro took 5 minutes and 40 seconds really interesting that the Mt MacBook Pro was faster than the M2 Mac Mini here so let's run a couple of more tests so let's do some 3D rendering Now using the CPU first in blender we use the classroom scene and the cycle CPU render the M2 pack mini took 9 minutes into 53 seconds the empty MacBook Air took 14 minutes and 28 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.46 times faster and the M2 MacBook Pro took 12 minutes and 41 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.28 times faster so really nice Improvement here but now let's test out the gpus and we actually have some different is here the Mt Mac Mini and the M2 MacBook Pro they both have the unbinned 10 core version of the M2 GPU the empty MacBook Air has the bin version which only comes with 8 cores so the M2 Mac Mini took 3 minutes and 56 seconds the M2 air took 5 minutes and 55 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.5 times faster and the M2 MacBook Pro took 4 minutes and 11 seconds so very small difference from the Mac Mini but yeah the Mac Mini was still faster here and we also tested Final Cut Pro using our 15 minute 4K project this was one of our previous camera comparisons and it was a very demanding project with loads of titles and effects and this took the M2 Mac Mini 44 minutes and 29 seconds I told you it was a very demanding project the M2 air took 50 minutes and 52 seconds and the M2 MacBook Pro took 44 minutes and 2 seconds so the air was slower but not massively slower and that's because Final Cut doesn't push the CPU and GPU all the time it simply does a bursty export depending on your project then we also tested the media engines by exporting an h.65 4K 5 minute clip into prores and they should all be the same here as the midi engines are identical but the results were actually not the M2 Mac Mini took 59 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took 1 minute and 20 seconds so the mini was 1.35 times faster and the empty MacBook Pro took 1 minute and 13 seconds so again the mini was 1.23 times faster we then ran the same test but this time with a 6K 6 Minute clip and the Mac Mini took one minute and 33 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 10 seconds on the MacBook Air so the mini was 1.4 times faster and the empty MacBook Pro took 2 minutes and two seconds so the mini was 1.3 times faster so yeah it looks like the media engines although they are identical we do get notably faster performance with the Mac Mini and for all of you music producers out there we also tested out logic to see how many tracks you could play at the same time on each of these machines and the Mac Mini could play 69 tracks the MacBook Air could play 70 although after a while I couldn't really play back those tracks smoothly so it actually overheated and the MacBook Pro could play also 69 tracks then of course we had to test some gaming starting off with World of Warcraft which is one of the very few Apple silicon native games which is really the best way to test true gaming performance on a Mac nowadays so he set all of them to resolution of 2560 by 1600 and ultra settings essentially we set a graphics to as high as they could go and the Mac Mini got between 43 to 50 frames per second so that's an average of 46.5 which is very good for a 600 desktop keep in mind that once again the settings were maxed out the empty air got between 35 to 42 so an average of 38.5 but the thing is after 5 minutes the air started throttling heavily to about 20 frames per second or even lower sometimes as low as eight so yeah the air was just not suitable enough for gaming because of this and the M2 MacBook Pro Cut between 38 to 45 so an average of 41.5 lower than the Mac Mini but also sustained and then we ran one more game shadow of the Tomb Raider which is not a native Apple silicon game but it does use metal so it is fairly optimized in that regard we tested this at 2560 by 1600 on the MacBooks and 2560x1440 on the Mac Mini as we couldn't really get 1600 because of our 16x9 Aspen ratio monitor so do keep this in mind and here the Mac Mini got 18 frames per second the Aero got 13 and the MacBook Pro got 17 which would have likely been 18 or so with the low resolution of the Mac Mini so in conclusion the Mac Mini actually had better performance than both the M2 air and the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro in quite a few cases ranging from CPU to GPU and even to Media engines not only that but it also comes with more ports rather than just two thermal ports we also get HDMI we also get ethernet which can be upgraded to 10 gig and we also get two USB a ports and on top of this you can also configure this Mac Mini with the M2 Pro chip for the same price as the 13-inch Baseline M2 MacBook Pro and get significantly better performance and two extra thunderbol ports as opposed to just two on the base Mac Mini model although for most people this 600 Baseline M2 model is more than enough and the thing is if you buy it through Apple's educational program you can buy it for a hundred dollars less of course that you do need to add your own monitor your own accessories but the thing is you can upgrade those down the line whenever you want really and it's also very portable you can still put it in your backpack it is way more portable than something like a Mac Studio so yeah great job Apple this is what I would consider the best Mac ever made when it comes to what you get for your money and if you want to save some money there are some great deals on both the M2 and the M1 Mac Mini if you tap on the YouTube tropical cards down below then yeah let me know what do you guys think I'm Daniel sweenson of deck and I'll see you guys in the next one is enough Tech signing out cheers I Ithis Mac Mini cost 600 same as a mid-range phone so what if I told you that is 600 Mac Mini not only outperforms Windows PCS and Windows laptops at its price point pretty significantly by the way but it also outperforms Apple's M2 MacBook Air which costs twelve hundred dollars double and Apple's 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro which cost thirteen hundred dollars well we're going to run not 5 not 10 but 15 actually 16 different tests to see how powerful Apple's cheapest Mac really is starting off with a disc speed test so we ran this test using Aja disk speed and a 16 gigabyte 4K file so just looking at these results compared to the M2 base MacBook Air and the M2 base MacBook Pro the Mac Mini had the highest read and when it comes to again the MacBook Air the Mac lady had 100 megabytes per second faster right and close to 100 megabytes per second faster read still these speeds are a far cry from what we get on the 16-inch 1 entered by models of the MacBook Pros which are Apple's highest performing ssds we then tested the actual transfer speed using an external SSD with two folders full of video files and 18 gigabytes in total so we transferred all of that onto the internal storage and this is where things started getting weird you see the Mac Mini only took 28 seconds the empty MacBook Air took 1 minute and seven seconds same as the M2 MacBook Pro so how could the Mac Mini be so fast when in the SSD speed test that we've seen before it was just as slow as the M2 air and the m230 inch MacBook Pro while this is likely caused by the ssds cache so every SSD has a super fast portion inside of it where things get copied initially and then they get transferred slowly to the main SSD portion just to give you guys an example Samsung's 980 nvme Drive 500 gigabytes model that one has a cache of 100 gigabytes so the remaining 400 gigabytes are much slower meaning that once that 100 gigabyte gets full everything would be much slower so for a 256 gigabyte drive we likely have 50 gigabytes at most so probably 30 or so when it comes to the M2 Mac Mini and we can see this when we run Aja disk speed but this time with a 64 gigabyte file you'll see that eventually the speeds will end up dropping significantly on these low end machines as long as you're working with small files everything will be pretty fast it's just that when you're working with large files that's when you'll really notice a massive hit in transfer Spades then we tested the CPU performance with cinebench as you probably know all these machines have an empty chip with eight cores out of which four are performance scores and four are efficiency chords the main difference between the M2 Mac Mini M2 air and m230 inch pro is that the air doesn't have a fan the 13 Spangled Pro and the Mac Mini do both the Mac Mini is of course bigger the fan is larger and also more powerful so the question is will this actually impact performance well in our 10 minutes and and Tron the Mac Mini definitely scored the highest but the difference wasn't as much as I expected in fact the difference between the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air was only 7.68 so what about the temperatures well we measured these after a five minutes in a bench run and the empty Mac menu was at 79 degrees so really really good the empty MacBook Air was at 105 and the M2 MacBook Pro was at 102. so yeah the difference in temperatures between the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro was very significant the Mac Mini definitely has the best cooling system out of the three so how will this thermal system impact real world usage well we started off with Lightroom we imported 228 images of various sizes and formats from raws to tips up to 80 megapixels in size so some of these work just massive the M2 Mac Mini took 40 seconds to import the M2 MacBook Air took 37 and the M2 MacBook Pro took 31. so the back plane was actually the slowest one here very strong change then we've applied a bunch of effects and filters to one image and pasted all of those onto the remaining 227 images the Mac Mini took 1 minute and 15 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took one minute and the M2 MacBook Pro took one minute and one second so the Mac Mini was once again slower which shouldn't really happen as this app Lightroom is already optimized for the M2 Chip which is inside all of these machines so what's actually happening well we then ran a full export test so we exported all these edited 228 images to full resolution because this is really when the systems will be pushed to the max so hopefully we'll now see a big Improvement when it comes to the Mac Mini's performance and that is exactly what happens the M2 Mac Mini took 15 minutes and 45 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took 30 minutes and 36 seconds so literally twice as long and the empty MacBook Pro took 17 minutes and 25 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.1 times faster than a 13-inch empty MacBook Pro and 1.94 times faster than the M2 MacBook Air as it has of course better Cooling and it can sustain its performance for much longer we then ran the same test again but this time we compressed the images to a small file size the Mt Mac Mini took 6 minutes and 15 seconds the empty MacBook Air takes 17 minutes and 52 seconds so the Mac Mini was 2.85 times faster here as the air overheated and started throttling and the M2 MacBook Pro took 5 minutes and 40 seconds really interesting that the Mt MacBook Pro was faster than the M2 Mac Mini here so let's run a couple of more tests so let's do some 3D rendering Now using the CPU first in blender we use the classroom scene and the cycle CPU render the M2 pack mini took 9 minutes into 53 seconds the empty MacBook Air took 14 minutes and 28 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.46 times faster and the M2 MacBook Pro took 12 minutes and 41 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.28 times faster so really nice Improvement here but now let's test out the gpus and we actually have some different is here the Mt Mac Mini and the M2 MacBook Pro they both have the unbinned 10 core version of the M2 GPU the empty MacBook Air has the bin version which only comes with 8 cores so the M2 Mac Mini took 3 minutes and 56 seconds the M2 air took 5 minutes and 55 seconds so the Mac Mini was 1.5 times faster and the M2 MacBook Pro took 4 minutes and 11 seconds so very small difference from the Mac Mini but yeah the Mac Mini was still faster here and we also tested Final Cut Pro using our 15 minute 4K project this was one of our previous camera comparisons and it was a very demanding project with loads of titles and effects and this took the M2 Mac Mini 44 minutes and 29 seconds I told you it was a very demanding project the M2 air took 50 minutes and 52 seconds and the M2 MacBook Pro took 44 minutes and 2 seconds so the air was slower but not massively slower and that's because Final Cut doesn't push the CPU and GPU all the time it simply does a bursty export depending on your project then we also tested the media engines by exporting an h.65 4K 5 minute clip into prores and they should all be the same here as the midi engines are identical but the results were actually not the M2 Mac Mini took 59 seconds the M2 MacBook Air took 1 minute and 20 seconds so the mini was 1.35 times faster and the empty MacBook Pro took 1 minute and 13 seconds so again the mini was 1.23 times faster we then ran the same test but this time with a 6K 6 Minute clip and the Mac Mini took one minute and 33 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 10 seconds on the MacBook Air so the mini was 1.4 times faster and the empty MacBook Pro took 2 minutes and two seconds so the mini was 1.3 times faster so yeah it looks like the media engines although they are identical we do get notably faster performance with the Mac Mini and for all of you music producers out there we also tested out logic to see how many tracks you could play at the same time on each of these machines and the Mac Mini could play 69 tracks the MacBook Air could play 70 although after a while I couldn't really play back those tracks smoothly so it actually overheated and the MacBook Pro could play also 69 tracks then of course we had to test some gaming starting off with World of Warcraft which is one of the very few Apple silicon native games which is really the best way to test true gaming performance on a Mac nowadays so he set all of them to resolution of 2560 by 1600 and ultra settings essentially we set a graphics to as high as they could go and the Mac Mini got between 43 to 50 frames per second so that's an average of 46.5 which is very good for a 600 desktop keep in mind that once again the settings were maxed out the empty air got between 35 to 42 so an average of 38.5 but the thing is after 5 minutes the air started throttling heavily to about 20 frames per second or even lower sometimes as low as eight so yeah the air was just not suitable enough for gaming because of this and the M2 MacBook Pro Cut between 38 to 45 so an average of 41.5 lower than the Mac Mini but also sustained and then we ran one more game shadow of the Tomb Raider which is not a native Apple silicon game but it does use metal so it is fairly optimized in that regard we tested this at 2560 by 1600 on the MacBooks and 2560x1440 on the Mac Mini as we couldn't really get 1600 because of our 16x9 Aspen ratio monitor so do keep this in mind and here the Mac Mini got 18 frames per second the Aero got 13 and the MacBook Pro got 17 which would have likely been 18 or so with the low resolution of the Mac Mini so in conclusion the Mac Mini actually had better performance than both the M2 air and the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro in quite a few cases ranging from CPU to GPU and even to Media engines not only that but it also comes with more ports rather than just two thermal ports we also get HDMI we also get ethernet which can be upgraded to 10 gig and we also get two USB a ports and on top of this you can also configure this Mac Mini with the M2 Pro chip for the same price as the 13-inch Baseline M2 MacBook Pro and get significantly better performance and two extra thunderbol ports as opposed to just two on the base Mac Mini model although for most people this 600 Baseline M2 model is more than enough and the thing is if you buy it through Apple's educational program you can buy it for a hundred dollars less of course that you do need to add your own monitor your own accessories but the thing is you can upgrade those down the line whenever you want really and it's also very portable you can still put it in your backpack it is way more portable than something like a Mac Studio so yeah great job Apple this is what I would consider the best Mac ever made when it comes to what you get for your money and if you want to save some money there are some great deals on both the M2 and the M1 Mac Mini if you tap on the YouTube tropical cards down below then yeah let me know what do you guys think I'm Daniel sweenson of deck and I'll see you guys in the next one is enough Tech signing out cheers I I\n"