Mac mini M2

[...] My mid-tier, Intel 2019 Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM suddenly died by the end of 2023. I quickly got a basemodel 256GB/8GB MacMini M2 as a replacement. While initialy supposed to be a temporary replacement until my MBP gets fixed, I ended up using it for another year as my main daily machine for everything, inluding professionally (fullstack software dev). [...] Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2). [...] Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.

[...] I use it for certain projects that I just want to be lazy about (personal website with sensitive data committed to the repo) projects that are for friends/family and don’t need to be public. [...] I think the thing that sets it apart from others would be I run it on a m2 Mac mini? [...]

[...] My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves) To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. [...] The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. [...]

And if you use bluetooth IO (non-apple). I do on my Mac Mini M2, and yet I have maybe pressed that button 3 times in the year that I am using it as my main machine as I never power it off.

I bought a Mac Mini M2 last year to start playing around with some personal projects, and I did some tests using LM Studio running Mixtral models with pretty good throughput, I also tested Open AI's whisper models to do some transcriptions and those ran fine as well. I do, however, recommend that you upgrade the RAM, 8GB is barely enough as is, so getting at least 16GB would be better. (I don't recommend upgrading the SSD though, since because of Thunderbolt 4 you can have a fast external SSD for half the price that Apple charges for storage).

I have the Satechi hub for my Mac Mini M2 that I got a year ago... [...]

I got a Mac mini M2 last March. [...]

[...] With my Mac mini M2 Pro, there's just too many bugs. [...] The liquid glass update initially made things even less stable. Linux I swore off years ago, no distro ever survived either their system updates or my dissatisfaction after a year or so. [...]

This morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018, which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled enough to not be fun to use anymore — now this! However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.) Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive external keyboards, which I used to buy once a year or every other (due to broken key-hinges) and have been so incredibly positively surprised by getting used to the MX Keys now. Much better built, incredible mileage for the price. [...] My main machine is still a Mac Mini M2 Pro, which is perfect value/price. I like the Surface as a concept (replacable keyboards are a fantastic idea, battery however, super iffy nonsense), and I've got a Surface Pro 6 around, but it's essentially the same gloss-premium I don't need for my use. Are there any much-cheaper but somewhat comparable laptops (12h+ battery, 1 TB disk, 16-32GB RAM, 2k+ Display) with reasonable build quality? [...] Or is Apple actually providing the best value here? [...]

[...] Therefore they wouldn't be represented even though they are gamers, they spend money, and they have Macs. I don't have a PC for personal use, but I do have a lot of game consoles, an M1 MacBook Pro, and an M2 Mac mini. [...] So I wind up spending money on Switch games that would've gone to Steam if the publisher had bothered with a macOS release. [...] I'd say my money's on the table, but my money's in Nintendo's wallet. [...]

My iPhone 13 Pro and my iPad Mini don’t support it. 🎉 Tragically my iPad Pro M1 does, and I just upgraded my desktop to a Mac Mini M2 Pro last year. 😞

[...] The Mac mini M2 is maxed out with 32GB. [...] In fact when I bought it a couple of years ago I'd barely used Blender for anything. [...]

I tried this in my mac mini m2 16GB, unfortunately I have to use an usb disk for the model weights, and I’m getting 0.5 tok/s. Still, being able to run (heh maybe crawl is more accurate) a 100B model on this computer AT ALL is pretty cool. I see disk maxing out at 400 MB/s, this disk should be able to hit 1GB/s (it hits that eg when verifying the check sum of the weights), so there might be some optimization to be done there (I’m guessing it’s because the weights access is not pure sequential reads but involves some randomness depending on which expert)

[...] I have an older M2 Mac mini that does the OCR and visual description of all my screenshots. Screenshots are stored on my NAS. I like to screenshot things as a quick way to remember. They are things that I would not be comfortable sending a cloud provider (customer data, prototype screenshots, bank dispute details). [...]

nope just my normal m2 mac mini. I bought it just as a normal computer to do my taxes and whatever, so it’s mind blowing that I can run this kind of AI workload on it. Well, “run” might be generous, it gets like 3-5tok/s I’m working on a setup that’s more geared towards running tasks overnight so the slow tok/s doesn’t matter as much

[...] The Mac app reports 4.4 token/s in the Mac Mini M2 with 8GB RAM. [...]

[...] I have Mac mini M2 16GB, it does hold all the cameras I have. [...]

Having completed SotTR on my MacMini M2 8GB, the game plays fluent at 1080p around 40-60fps without any issues. There are youtubers showing Cyberpunk on the Neo on lowest settings running around 50fps. Cyberpunk being somewhat special as it is visually so beautiful, that I would not recommend to complete it on a Neo.

the windows version is playable on macos through wine. Even modern version, I got it running on a m2 mac mini on Macos 15 sequoia EDIT: this was for HL1 I’m not sure about HL2

I'm playing around with this in LMStudio (in huggingface - use this model dropdown - LMStudio) It's really impressive so far, so quick to respond on a mac mini M2. [...]

I've got a Dell dock that worked OK after I borrowed a windows laptop to update the firmware; but it only works with my M3 and M4 macbooks, but not my M2 Mac Mini.

[...] The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason. I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11. Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. [...]

[...] Then again, I transferred 4 iPhone photos to the imac 2 feet away and it failed. [...] It's flakey as hell, and this is a 3rd generation iPhone SE and M2 mac mini. [...] I really hate bluetooth. [...] FWIW, I got PhotoSync app (not free) long ago so as to share photos with "everything" and it runs in the background on the mac, but I stupidly hold to the notion that whatever comes with the operating system otta work.

[...] I recall, and Wikipedia corroborates, that the M2 Mac Mini could come with either two or four ports, but all were Thunderbolt. [...]

[...] However, next to it there's a M2 mac mini that uses all of 37 W when I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 so... [...] The last 10% of performance requires far more than 10% of the power. [...]

Daily-driver, zero-cloud stack (runs on a 16 GB M2 Mac mini): Ollama + llama3:8b-instruct-q4KM – 4 GB, answers code questions in <300 ms. [...]

I never not used Whisky on an Apple Silicon device. Recently played Control on my Mac mini M2 Pro with it.

[...] On my M2 mac mini: $ hyperfine "LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en" "LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en" Benchmark 1: LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en Time (mean ± σ): 2.007 s ± 0.005 s [User: 1.940 s, System: 0.064 s] Range (min … max): 1.997 s … 2.015 s 10 runs Benchmark 2: LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en Time (mean ± σ): 898.5 ms ± 9.7 ms [User: 2795.8 ms, System: 93.6 ms] Range (min … max): 875.0 ms … 906.9 ms 10 runs Summary LCALL=C gsort < subtitles2018.en ran 2.23 ± 0.02 times faster than LCALL=C sort < subtitles2018.en Info about the tools: $ which sort /usr/bin/sort $ which gsort /opt/homebrew/bin/gsort $ brew info coreutils | head -n3 == coreutils: stable 9.6 (bottled), HEAD GNU File, Shell, and Text utilities There are other tools in coreutils for which this applies as well. [...]

[...] Among the devices I use every day are a custom-built Windows 11 box, an M2 Mac Mini, an older PC running PopOS (Ubuntu-based), an iPad, and a Google Pixel. [...]

I have a Mac mini m2 with 8gb and it's clearly not enough. I'm only using it to test my flutter app on iOS and manage fragile xcode settings. Most of my work is on a Windows pc.

[...] Also, it always amazes me how many people respond to warnings like this (as seen in this thread as well) saying lower-resolution displays look just fine. I returned a M2 Mac Mini solely because it looked so awful on all of my monitors -- I tried 2 different 32" 2k displays, plus a handful of 24" displays. [...] The fact that so many seem to tolerate "low-res" or "mid-res" displays on the current M-series Macs is really puzzling to me... [...] but this time I am definitely going to have to budget for a 4k/5k display.

I do this exact thing with my M2 Mac Mini (plex, a few home lab things with no display). [...]

[...] My M2 Mac Mini that I got for $499 is my favorite gaming computer I've had in a long time. [...] And this was with 8gb unified memory, now with 16gb it'll be even better value. [...]

For many use cases you are correct. That said, I bought a 32G M2 Mac mini in January, and mostly using Ollama, I use local LLMs for many useful local apps and many experiments. I augment running local models with Colab Pro, Grok APIs, OpenAI APIs, etc.

[...] I have an M2 mac mini. [...] For example, in my clone of Linux (also on my M2 mac mini): $ git remote -v origin git@github.com:BurntSushi/linux (fetch) origin git@github.com:BurntSushi/linux (push) $ git rev-parse HEAD 84e57d292203a45c96dbcb2e6be9dd80961d981a $ hyperfine "rg '[A-Z]+NOBODY' ." "gg '[A-Z]+NOBODY'" Benchmark 1: rg '[A-Z]+NOBODY' . [...] That might be worth investigating. [...]

[...] I managed to get a 9 zero hash in under an hour on a M2 Mac Mini using it. [...]

Absolutely, 7B will run comfortably on 16GB of RAM and most consumer level hardware. [...] I ran this originally on a M1 with 32GB, I run this on an Air M2 with 16GB (and mac mini M2 32GB), no problem. [...] 7b is obviously less capable but the instant response makes it worth exploring. It's very useful as a Google search replacement that is instantly more valuable, for general questions, than dealing with the hellscape of blog spam ruling Google atm. [...]

My MacMini M2 has one built in. [...]

I upgraded from a MacMini M1 (Geekbench multicore pref: 8425) to an MacMini M2 Pro with 12 cores (Geekbench multicore pref: 14431.) That was definitely worth it. The only upgrade for the M3 line I would make would be to an M3 Max 16 core (Geekbench multicore pref: 21387) or an upcoming M3 Ultra 32 core (probably a Geekbench multicore pref: 30000), but it is very expensive and probably not available in the MacMini form factor, so I will hold off for now. All stats from here:

[...] Especially the higer i7/i9 models had thermal throttling issues when connected to an external monitor. My 3000€ i7 mbp16 2019 recently died and I replaced it with an "interim" base model, 650€ MacMini M2. The jump is huge, that freakin Mini beats my 3yo (I bought it in 2020) decked out MBP that constantly spun fans. [...]

Given how much I love my MacMini M2 Pro - its perfectly silent operation and its incredibly small form factor combined with great graphics performances, I can imagine that having similar machines available for Windows and Linux would be very attractive.

Now over a one week I have used macOS and it feels great OS for real. Some tricks and things are in another place than windows etc but overall feels great and my plan is to keep this Mac mini m2 and learn better macOS enviroment better to handle.

[...] Eventually I got a Mac mini M2 16gb/256gb. [...]

If you want to give the Mac Mini M2 another go, this project might help. I have used this for remoting. It's pretty good github.com/waydabber/Be...

Funny you mention the steam deck, because I want to get one of those portable PCs and use it for the rare gaming I do, rather than invest in a full gaming PC (I use a Mac Mini M2 as daily driver)

Updated to macOS 15.3. [...] Noticeable Bluetooth artifacting that doesn't happen with my iPhone. Could it be because I use a Mac mini M2? I've had bluetooth issues with it before, but they were fixed with later updates.

So I got a version of DeepSeek-R1 to run locally. On a Mac Mini M2 Pro it runs pretty quickly! However.

That's what I bought. A suped up Mac mini M2 Pro with 32gb ram and 1tb internal - refurbished.

I use a Mac mini (M2) as my primary driver. my laptop is now a test/play rig lol.

Of course, just as I got a Mac mini M2: www.macrumors.com/guide/m4-mac... Happened with my iPhone aswell, I got the 2020 iPhone SE in Dec 2021, like 3 months before the 2022 iPhone SE