Here’s my beef about the new minis. 1. No more quad core. They are only offering duel core machines now. 2. The newer chips aren’t much more powerful, they supposedly use less energy. 3. Ram is no longer user installable. Apple charges 200 bucks for a ram upgrade. 16 gb of good ram fluctuates between 120 and 140. 4. I may be incorrect in this one, but they have fully moved to the chip architecture for the drives. What I’m not sure of is if this is true about the entry level model. My problem with this is the fact that 1 tb ssd’s are now around 400 bucks. Apple wants much more for the 1 tb chip. With the “Drive on a chip” method they’ve adopted, it’s much more expensive to get your machine to any kind of specs for recording that is acceptable.
In looking at the current specs, I’m extremely happy with my “Out of Date” machine. If I do the math, my machine, with some user installable upgrades, comes to roughly 1500 bucks. If I wanted a similar spec for the new machines, I’m looking at about 2 grand. A friend of mine maxed out a new mac mini, and that was the final damage. My advice is to go get yourself a late 2012 model. Quad core I7, get a certified apple dealer to install an SSD, or go with an external thunderbolt bay. Get the samsung EVO 1tb drive, which currently sits at 430 bucks on amazon, Compare the price of having a company to install it, with the price of an external bay. As far as speeds go, obviously, you’ll shoot for the highest you can get. As for me, I have the slower Quad I7, and Pro Tools works just fine on it. In my opinion, apple is again shooting for the lower end consumer market and dumbing these machines down in order to make them cheaper. Personally, I think the late 2012 models are the best bang for the buck currently. Your thoughts? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
