Will the New Version of Affinity Photo run smoothly on the New M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM ?

[augustya]

Hi Guys,

Ànd @James Ritson when I was just about to pull the trigger on an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM when Apple and thankfully so has dropped another M2 Mac Mini in the Mix now I am planning to order this against the M2 Mac Mini Pro. Do you guys think M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM should be good enough choice to make sure that Affinity Photo Version 2 works smoothly on it and at the same time, it is not too heavy on my budget which would be the case if I go with the Pro ?

in short will a M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM ensure that Affinity Photo Version 2 the newer version work smoothly on it ?

Do I need a Pro Mac Mini ?

[MikeTO]

It should work fine. 32GB would be preferable but 16GB will work okay. I have 16GB for my M1 Pro.

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, augustya said:

in short will a M2 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM ensure that Affinity Photo Version 2 the newer version world smoothly on it ?

Well the M2 chip/SoC Mac Mini is also available with a max of 24 GB RAM with a memory bandwidth to 100GB/s (...same here as the MBA M2). - The M2 Pro Chip/SoC would be needed here only in case you would opt for 16/32 GB RAM with a higher memory bandwidth of 200GB/s.

• Mac Mini M2 plain max 24 GB memory bandwidth to 100 GB/s
• Man Mini M2 Pro   max 32 GB memory bandwidth to 200 GB/s

Overall if Affinity Photo Version 2 works smoothly on a Mac Mini M2 with MacOS Ventura depends much more on it's APh2 bug fixing state. - And in terms of the 16 GB RAM memory it would also highly depend on how much high res RAW images etc. you would throw and work on it at once here and if you always also use a bunch of other memory hungy apps in parallel.

[augustya]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Well the M2 chip/SoC Mac Mini is also available with a max of 24 GB RAM with a memory bandwidth to 100GB/s (...same here as the MBA M2). - The M2 Pro Chip/SoC would be needed here only in case you would opt for 16/32 GB RAM with a higher memory bandwidth of 200GB/s.

• Mac Mini M2 plain max 24 GB memory bandwidth to 100 GB/s
• Man Mini M2 Pro   max 32 GB memory bandwidth to 200 GB/s

Overall if Affinity Photo Version 2 works smoothly on a Mac Mini M2 with MacOS Ventura depends much more on it's APh2 bug fixing state. - And in terms of the 16 GB RAM memory it would also highly depend on how much high res RAW images etc. you would throw and work on it at once here and if you always also use a bunch of other memory hungy apps in parallel.

I thought with the. 16GB RAm on the M2 Mac Mini would be plenty to work on Affinity Photo that's what people told me when I was thinking about getting the M1 Mac Mini.

[MikeTO]

20 minutes ago, augustya said:

I thought with the. 16GB RAm on the M2 Mac Mini would be plenty to work on Affinity Photo that's what people told me when I was thinking about getting the M1 Mac Mini.

The answer is it depends. As v_kyr stated, if you work with a lot of very large raw photos then you may find 16GB to be limiting. Or if you like to have very large files open in other apps while working in Affinity then that will reduce what is available to Affinity.

The old adage that you can never go wrong in buying too much memory is good. The problem is do you spend more on going for the Pro chip or not, or do you invest that money in more cores, or more storage. Choices, choices.

[augustya]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

The answer is it depends. As v_kyr stated, if you work with a lot of very large raw photos then you may find 16GB to be limiting. Or if you like to have very large files open in other apps while working in Affinity then that will reduce what is available to Affinity.

The old adage that you can never go wrong in buying too much memory is good. The problem is do you spend more on going for the Pro chip or not, or do you invest that money in more cores, or more storage. Choices, choices.

I am a follower of the Maxtech YouTube channel and those Brother Duo tested 2022 Macbook Pro in Real Life the difference between the 16GB and 323GB RAM and there was hardly any difference, or any extra speed that they noticed. For the M2 Mac Mini they are saying the sweet spot would be if someone is thinking of buying the new M2 Mac Mini is buy the extra space also which 512 GB SSD along with 16GB RAM because with the Unified Memory even the extra SSD Space along with the 16GB RAM would make things and tasks snappier and faster.

 

But in my case that shoots up my budget by leaps and bounds and I cannot afford it.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, augustya said:

I am a follower of the Maxtech YouTube channel and those Brother Duo tested 2022 Macbook Pro in Real Life the difference between the 16GB and 323GB RAM and there was hardly any difference, or any extra speed that they noticed.

Personally, I wouldn't give too much on what the sponsored and paid YouTubers (...who do all this for a living) tell. Those guys mostly do podcasting and video/music editing etc. with the hardware, do use different software and thus may make slightly different things here, as you may do in your daily workflows.

3 hours ago, augustya said:

For the M2 Mac Mini they are saying the sweet spot would be if someone is thinking of buying the new M2 Mac Mini is buy the extra space also which 512 GB SSD along with 16GB RAM because with the Unified Memory even the extra SSD Space along with the 16GB RAM would make things and tasks snappier and faster.

They might tell so, but did they also told you that most of that is then done via a bunch of SSD swapping too here if you throw memory hungry things on it? - Also keep in mind that if you want the hardware to amortize (...keep it up for some years to use) that you can't expand the on the SoC solded RAM memory later, same as the internal SSD capacity. Also keep in mind that software is size wise growing over time, be it the next OS or third party apps, since they are fat binaries (the executables and frameworks/libs are fat mutiarchitecture files nowadays, so bigger than in the past). - All in all you should take that into account too here if you want to use the hardware for some more years. And as Murphy's common law always tell (a rule of thumb) you can never have enough main memory in reserve.

3 hours ago, augustya said:

But in my case that shoots up my budget by leaps and bounds and I cannot afford it.

If you can't afford budget wise more, then go at least with those 16GB RAM and SSD wise with the faster 500 GB or 1 TB ones.

[loukash]

10 hours ago, v_kyr said:

in terms of the 16 GB RAM memory it would also highly depend on how much high res RAW images etc. you would throw and work on it at once here and if you always also use a bunch of other memory hungy apps in parallel.

Developing RAW images is not my main focus with APh, but every now and then I do.
And I do it on my 10 years old MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM…
Never noticed any memory issues in that context. 

So I think the new Mini will do just fine with 16 GB because the whole system is highly optimized elsewhere. From what I remember reading, 16 GB then with Intel and 16 GB now with Apple Silicon aren't even comparable 1:1.

3 hours ago, augustya said:

that shoots up my budget by leaps and bounds

The storage options is what really sucks.

Eventually I will have to replace the aforementioned mid-2012 MBP which now has a fast 2TB SSD, so that's what I'll need again. Apple's pricing here is just beyond reasonable. Even the basic 16" MBP with 2TB storage will set me back CHF 3400. Not to speak of having to buy a plethora of dongles, a new Wacom tablet, and a new multichannel audio interface for my studio because my old devices won't function anymore. 
I was also looking at a comparabe Mini, but even that would immediately rise to CHF 1750 which is not worth it – even though I have a bunch of old displays, keyboards and mice handy – because portability.
Sigh…

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

Developing RAW images is not my main focus with APh, but every now and then I do.
And I do it on my 10 years old MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM…
Never noticed any memory issues in that context.

Personally developing RAWs is not my focus at all, these are just side jobs that you can do either way on the side if necessary. Further I never in life bought a computer just in order to run a specific software at all, instead I buy computers to run all kind of software and thus not just for one specific purpose here.

For example when I do development project related works, I often have to deal with a bunch of software in parallel. So there are several things involved to be running at the same time, like one or several DB servers, an ApplicationServer and other needed backend parts (some of those installed stand alone or via Docker containers etc. Next some frontend parts and a huge development IDE, some build tasks ... and the like. All that together with some webbrowsers, word processor and communication tools ... etc. - Depending on the project size and all involved software parts 16 GB of RAM is what I would call an absolute minimum to have, which would lead partly to a bunch of SSD swapping here. For some huger projects even having 32 GB of RAM doesn't offer enough memory for an always fluid working and thus would be the minimum to have here then.

2 hours ago, loukash said:

The storage options is what really sucks.

Eventually I will have to replace the aforementioned mid-2012 MBP which now has a fast 2TB SSD, so that's what I'll need again. Apple's pricing here is just beyond reasonable. Even the basic 16" MBP with 2TB storage will set me back CHF 3400. Not to speak of having to buy a plethora of dongles, a new Wacom tablet, and a new multichannel audio interface for my studio because my old devices won't function anymore.

Well their optional price politics do always suck here, meaning they are always too expensive and do cost factor x for RAM & internal SSD storage upgrades. That's what they do the money with, since nowadays mostly all is soldered inside, you can't upgrade yourself something of that with much cheaper priced third party components (RAM & SSD storage). - Thus configuring whatever Mac hardware more powerful than the inital low/minimum equipped base configuration stuff, always catapults you into completely different price dimensions here then. Having to add a bunch of extra auxialiary pieces of hardware (adapters, cables, ... etc.) just makes it even more expensive.

 

[loukash]

4 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

I buy computers to run all kind of software and thus not just for one specific purpose here.

Yeah, I hear you.  
My "antique" MBP is at the moment doing some analog-to-digital audio recording via Firewire in the background while I'm browsing this forum and testing a few things in Affinity apps, including deliberately making them crash…
The good thing about Macs and MacOS is that they can handle multitasking pretty well, especially with fast SSD storage.

[augustya]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

Developing RAW images is not my main focus with APh, but every now and then I do.
And I do it on my 10 years old MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM…
Never noticed any memory issues in that context. 

So I think the new Mini will do just fine with 16 GB because the whole system is highly optimized elsewhere. From what I remember reading, 16 GB then with Intel and 16 GB now with Apple Silicon aren't even comparable 1:1.

 

So I am looking to Purchase the M2 Mini with the 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM so you are saying with occasional working of RAW file in Affinity Photo it should work smoothly based on your experience of all these years so far ? Right ?

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, augustya said:

so you are saying

Never trust just one anecdotal evidence…  
In other words, wait for more opinions. Investing your hard earned money shouldn't be an "impuls buy" based on what a bloke on Teh Interwebz forum says…

[Andreas Scherer]

26 minutes ago, augustya said:

M2 Mini with the 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM

I'm using the base model (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) of the Mac Mini M1 (both at home and at work) and it is definitively comfortable to use with the Affinity suite, so I'd be confident that the Mac Mini M2 would be a great tool as well (and allegedly, it's even cheaper than the M1 machine).

[augustya]

16 minutes ago, Andreas Scherer said:

I'm using the base model (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) of the Mac Mini M1 (both at home and at work) and it is definitively comfortable to use with the Affinity suite, so I'd be confident that the Mac Mini M2 would be a great tool as well (and allegedly, it's even cheaper than the M1 machine).

That too considering I am thinking to get the 16GB RAM that would be an added bonus isnt it ?

[augustya]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Personally developing RAWs is not my focus at all, these are just side jobs that you can do either way on the side if necessary. Further I never in life bought a computer just in order to run a specific software at all, instead I buy computers to run all kind of software and thus not just for one specific purpose here.

 

That is exactly is also my intention, when I say I want to go for 16GB RAM that is considering my all purpose use. And so I thought of asking here if 16GB RAM would be good enough to run Affinity Photo Version 2 smoothly.  But you started telling if I throw RAW files in the Mix then it would have tough time. But I have to take care of my other computing tasks also that I wanna do with the computer and not just use Affinity Photo !

And in that sense I have had a lot of people tell me yes 16GB RAM is a sweet spot for a budget conscious buyer.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, augustya said:

But I have to take care of my other computing tasks also that I wanna do with the computer and not just use Affinity Photo !

If you do just common enduser software tasks the 16 GB might be enough/OK then for you, though I would probably opt for a 512 GB SSD since the 256 GB SSDs are known to be not as speedy (...one NAND chip vs two here, as has been seen by the MBA M2 models). - Finally it's all your decision what you will then buy in the end here, we can only give you opinions and what to think about (...things that you might also want to consider in the long run).

[loukash]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

though I would probably opt for a 512 GB SSD since the 256 GB SSDs are known to be be not as speedy (...one NAND chip vs two here, as has been seen by the MBA M2 models).

The Mini not being necessarily a mobile device, it still has the benefit that you could actually get a good external SSD and use that as your boot volume(s) rather than the paltry 256 GB soldered inside.
Or you can use the internal drive as the boot volume but move your Documents folder to an external SSD. Even the old USB3 connector is fast enough for such tasks.
(Hey, been there done that, like booting my old MBP from a USB stick: e.g. with a high quality SanDisk it's almost as speedy as the internal bus.)

[augustya]

16 minutes ago, loukash said:

The Mini not being necessarily a mobile device, it still has the benefit that you could actually get a good external SSD and use that as your boot volume(s) rather than the paltry 256 GB soldered inside.
Or you can use the internal drive as the boot volume but move your Documents folder to an external SSD. Even the old USB3 connector is fast enough for such tasks.
(Hey, been there done that, like booting my old MBP from a USB stick: e.g. with a high quality SanDisk it's almost as speedy as the internal bus.)

No not just about having external storage, I have been made to understand that even higher SSD Storage results in smooth Multi-Tasking and Operations. That is worrying me because I am kind of sure I cannot buy more than 256 GB SSD but people are telling me, we are recommending you the 512 SSD not just for the storage but it can also act as a RAM to speed up certain Tasks. And going from 256GB SSD to 512 GB SSD will cost me an extra $300 that shoots up the entire purchase way...way...above and beyond the budget I have allocated to purchased the M2 Mac Mini.

[v_kyr]

18 hours ago, loukash said:

The Mini not being necessarily a mobile device, it still has the benefit that you could actually get a good external SSD and use that as your boot volume(s) rather than the paltry 256 GB soldered inside.

No not with Apple Silicon (M1/M2) devices anymore and especially here if the internal SSD died or the like. - See related ...

• If Mac M1’s built-in SSD died
• How bad is the M1 Mac's SSD failure problem?
• ... etc.

 

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

No not with Apple Silicon (M1/M2) devices anymore and especially here if the internal SSD died or the like.

Uh-oh… 

[v_kyr]

BTW, first Geekbenches show ...

• Mac14,12

[NotMyFault]

The excessive SSD wear after launch in 2021 seems to be solved, I didn’t hear any new complaints in 2022.

[loukash]

10 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

See related

So I read it.
It refers to the issue of a totally dead internal SSD. Which is an issue I didn't know about, and it sucks, but it's not that every M1/M2 Mac with soldered SSD will now become a doorstopper in three, two, one.
Actually the opposite might happen: By using an external Thunderbolt SSD as your boot volume, the internal SSD should in fact wear less. In theory at least…

[v_kyr]

16 minutes ago, loukash said:

... Actually the opposite might happen: By using an external Thunderbolt SSD as your boot volume, the internal SSD should in fact wear less. In theory at least…

A doorstopper no not at all, but the process under M1/M2 SoCs to boot from an external SSD device is more complicated than in the past Intel times, see also related ...

• How to start up your M1 or M2 Mac from an external drive

• How to boot an Apple Silicon Mac from an external drive

[augustya]

But the info that I have been given is that correct ? Having a Larger SDD in this case 512 vs 256 can that also result in Faster and smoother running of the Computer with the M1 or M2 Chip because of the Unified Memory set up ?