With two screaming-fast Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, Wi-Fi 6, and Gigabit Ethernet, Mac mini is up for anything and everything. Within its 7.7-inch-square frame, you never know where you’ll find a Mac mini hard at work. With its compact size, incredible performance, and wide array of ports, Mac mini is perfect for a surprising range of uses. The 8-core GPU brings astoundingly fast integrated graphics, with a gigantic 6x increase in performance. That’s an insane amount of power, all in an incredibly
Keeping its iconic 7.7-inch-square design. Our list of the best Macs doesnt include an Intel-based device for the first time. Its been a busy time for the Mac lineup in recent years, thanks to the introduction of Apple silicon.
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The 8-core CPU delivers up to 3x faster processing performance than the previous generation all while Best Mac in 2022: Which Mac mini, iMac, MacBook Pro & more is best.
M1 packs astonishing speed and power into Mac mini. Next step for Mac, it’s another level entirely.
With incredible performance, custom technologies, and industry-leading power efficiency, M1 is not a Neural Engine, I/O, and so much more onto a single tiny chip. Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, the Apple M1 system on a chip (SoC) integrates the CPU, GPU, The first chip designed specifically for Mac. Get ready to work, play, and create on Mac mini with speed and power beyond anything you ever imagined. Neural Engine for up to 15x faster machine learning. So, as long as you’re happy with the lack of upgradeability and can stomach the price, we think it’s a pretty compelling proposition.The Apple M1 chip takes the most versatile, do-it-all desktop into another dimension. The Mac Studio delivers that and even trumps many of the Mac Pro processor configurations. We also ran Geekbench for our review device, and the scores (1784 single core, 12539 multi core) place it easily amongst the current Mac Pro configurations.įor some time creatives have hankered after a compact screen-free Mac that’s powerful without being ludicrously expensive. Rather surprisingly the fans did not budge at all during these stress tests, and the casing stayed cool to touch. We found the buffer size sweet spot was 128 samples, with the higher settings (5) the least efficient. In the Alchemy test Logic Pro consistently played 85 tracks. With the reverbs bypassed the CPU meter was under 20%. The Mac Studio consistently managed an impressive 418 tracks with the ChromaVerb. In the audio preferences we switched processing threads from automatic (8 cores) to 10 cores and throughout the tests tried various audio buffer sizes. One using Logic Pro’s ChromaVerb inserted on multiple audio tracks, and a second using the CPU-intensive Alchemy synth playing a 5 note chord.
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Nevertheless, for our tests we used Apple’s own Logic Pro, with stock plugins and the onboard audio.ĭAW performance tends to be hindered most by CPU-intensive plugins such as reverbs and software synthesisers. With 18 months on the clock, Apple Silicon is now widely supported by third-party DAW and plugin developers. Thankfully, although audible, much like in an iMac these are pretty quiet, even with the unit sitting beside you on the table top. It’s all very neat and tidy and we can’t fault the impressive number of ports.īased on the teardowns, it’s clear that a large portion of the internal space is used for the heatsink and twin fans. The power switch is also on the back, with a small LED power indicator on the front, and there’s an internal speaker but no internal mic. The back includes four Thunderbolt 4 ports, Ethernet (10Gb), two USB-A ports, one HDMI, headphone mini-jack and power input. Its circular base plate raises it slightly from the desktop, and if you flip it over you’ll see air venting on the underside to complement the rear vents.Ĭonnectivity is split between the front and back sides, with two USB-C (these are Thunderbolt 4 on the Ultra) and one SDXC slot on the front. Nevertheless, that’s impressively compact. In typical Apple fashion, the Mac Studio is exquisitely packaged, and once freed from its spring-loaded box, the extruded aluminium case looks and feels awesome.Īt just under 20cm square it has the same footprint as a Mac Mini, but at just under 10cm is much higher. (Image credit: Future) Apple Mac Studio: Performance & verdict