The new Mac mini is the ideal starter Mac for music production
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After neglecting the little computer that could for close to 4 years, Apple is finally bringing the Mac mini back in line. The new Mac mini keeps its predecessor’s well-established aluminium unibody design, but it’s a totally different beast inside.
Thankfully, rather than continuing in the 2014 model’s rather underwhelming direction, this time Apple is touting a full-fledged professional computer with big boy hardware such as quad-core 8th Gen Intel processors, support for up to 64GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of space.
To sweeten things up, Apple is also bringing its new T2 security chip on board and switching the connectivity options around with four USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, HDMI, Ethernet, and two USB-A ports on the rear. Additionally, the new Mac mini comes in a space gray finish like most modern Mac computers.
Apple will start selling the new Mac mini on November 7th, starting at USD 799 for the base model with a quad-core Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage. You can max out the configuration with up to 64GB of RAM, a 4.2GHz six-core Intel Core i7 processor, 2TB SSD, and 10Gb Ethernet port for around USD 4,199.
If you ask me, the new Mac mini is THE starter Mac for music production – an affordable way to get into the macOS ecosystem and run Logic Pro X at full speed. The base model is quite the capable little fella and it will take a lot of plugin and sampler instances before it starts aching and panting. I think the new Mac mini was the most pleasant surprise at Apple’s October event. Hopefully, the gang at Cupertino won’t let it go again like it did with the 2014 model. In the meantime, we are waiting for a monster Mac Pro announcement in 2019 that will really put Apple on the professional computing map once again.
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Seriously, if there is one myth in the world refusing to die it is Apple being “ideal” for Music. Seriously, Gearnews is getting more boring with every article.
They didn’t say anything about it being ideal for music production relative to other platforms. They said it was the ideal starter MAC … i.e. if someone is looking to get a mac for production, it would be among the best bang for the buck in that ecosystem.
I spent the last 15 years working with both Macs and PCs for music production, and I still have major latency issues on modern PCs because of heavy reliance on 3rd party and ASIO drivers that I don’t have with Core Audio on Macs. I prefer PCs for almost everything else, especially gaming, but I get much better performance from Macs for music production.
I really don’t understand how pricey these new macs are. How can a macmini be a starter mac for music at that pricetag?
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive if you pimp it out
Ok, brace yourselves for a huge wage of outraged PC users, who between two reinstalls of their OS and an anti-virus update are going to freak out about how pricey Mac are…. Some people never understand!!