How does the M2 Pro Mini perform with Adobe Illustrator? Particularly interested in the performance with a workflow of say 5-10 safari tabs, Illustrator loaded with 2-3 files, and perhaps even InDesign loaded with 2-3 files.
I’d LOVE a Mini as the form factor is perfect for my needs. But I’m just on the fence if I need a Studio…
Coming from a 2020 intel iMac 27 10 core i9 64GB RAM 2TB SSD (ram and ssd are both overkill but I wanted a loaded intel that I’ll never sell)
I have a Mac Mini M2-Pro, with 16GB RAM.
It would work well but people who look at Activity Meter would say it needs more RAM because the meter would say all the Adobe products don't fit in RAM at once. But perceived speed would be good because I bet a lot that
your mouse is only in one window at a time. The SSD swap is
SO FAST it does not matter. Except if you use instrumentation to monitor it.
If you do care about what Activity Meter says, buy 32GB RAM. It's only a few hundred bucks.
My tasks are robotics software development and running the robots in simulation. I will have lots of technical reference documents open in a browser and a few text editors and a simulation running and perhaps Quicktime is recording a screen video of a simulation. 16GB does this fine, But I don't have huge 100-megapixel Adobe files.
When editing Vacation Photos taken with a mix of iPhone and dSLR using Pixelmator, the computer keeps up with my corrections, I am the bottleneck, not the Mac.
That should be the true judge if a computer is "fast enough" -- is the computer or you the bottleneck?
Almost all of my work will fill all of the 16GB bit if I bought 32GB, it wold also befilled because macOS is programmed to use every bit of RAM you give it, if for nothing else but to cache files. So it will be full always if you are doing non-triveal stuff.
The M2-Pro is very good for lite to moderate professional-level tasks. Maybe go with the M3-Max if you do multi-camera work in 8K.
For profesional use even a $6,000 computer is pocket change. It might cost you $5 per day over its lifetime. We hope you'd be making 10 or 20 times that every hour.
I have not yet tried my M2-Pro for machine learning tasks. But I'd bet the cloud is the place for that, I can rent time on a $30,000 server for not much money. The Mini should work fine for testing the ML setup before moving it to the Google or Amazon server.
BTW the M3-Pro seems to be not much faster than the M2-Pro. If they were similar in price, I'd get the M3-Pro but if the M2-Pro is steeply discounted as might happen snatch one up.
