Apple's excellent 2023 M2 Mac Mini is just £600 from Amazon
A lot of computer for the price.
I'm someone who has been using a Mac in one form or another for nearly the last ten years as a machine for work and education, and it's been getting me thinking about maybe moving to one for desktop use. To this end, I've been keeping an eye on Apple's excellent new M2 Mac Mini, and today it's down to £600 on Amazon after a £50 discount - providing a ton of performance for the money.
The big thing with this new 2023 Mac Mini here is that new Apple Silicon M2 processor, which features eight CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. This makes it a powerful chip for video editing, and other creative endeavours, and of course it can deal with dozens of browser tabs without breaking a sweat. While it may only be more of an incremental upgrade on the older M1, the fact is that the M1 was already far above and beyond any of the older Intel Macs in terms of its performance, so you'll be hard pressed to find a more powerful computer for the asking price with this M2 Mac Mini.
8GB of RAM is enough for typical workloads, and while I'd normally suggest 16GB as a bare minimum for the kind of work you may be doing with a computer like this Mac Mini, the efficiency of Apple's M2 processor and the macOS operating system mean that it's only really 8K video editing that's likely to be a step too far for this configuration. Indeed, it's not something that the vast majority of people considering a cut-price Mac will really need to do, so 8GB of RAM isn't too much of a hardship. This spec M2 Mac Mini also comes with a 256GB SSD, which is sufficient for your programs but we'd recommend getting a fast portable SSD or other external or network-attached storage if you'll be doing video editing or storing large media libraries which you can have quick and easy access to. Of course, you can also use any number of USB drives or external HDDs you may have laying around, but a fast portable SSD will provide quicker access.
For such a small computer, the connectivity, both in terms of physical ports and wireless, the Mac Mini offers is exemplary. There's everything from a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports to HDMI out and a pair of full-size USB-A, with gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E for networking. This allows you to take full advantage of fibre broadband, and with those Thunderbolt ports you can even add in up to 10-gig ethernet via an adapter if you need truly rapid access to storage or other machines on your local network.
For £600, it's hard to ignore the excellent value for money on offer with this Amazon deal on an M2-powered Mac Mini. If you were thinking of investing in an iMac, you'd be better off grabbing this newer Mac Mini and spending the extra on a quality monitor, or if you want to get into the macOS ecosystem with a more affordable choice, then this deal is for you.