Hi there
Anyone have experience of using this combination as I am thinking of upgrading to the Mac Mini 4 using it as a standalone editing machine with just PL9 and Photo Mechanic
I’ve said elsewhere I was running PL7 on an M1 with 16GB and it was absolutely fine. PL9’s masking is a lot more intensive. I don’t know if it’s memory hungry or not. I currently have an M4 with 48GB.
256GB storage is, in general, the bare minimum, but at least with a desktop machine, permanently plugging in an external SSD is very practical.
I’ve a Mac Mini M1 with 8Gb memory and 512Gb SSD. I use Photo Mechanic and PL8, and have work images stored on an external SSD and work admin files are stored in OneDrive.
ie I store very few files on the system drive.
I also have MS365, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, the Affinity Suite, Topaz Sharpen AI and Gigapixel AI, a few other much smaller apps and fewer than 5 games from Apple Arcade (so no massive titles like Call of Duty, etc).
I have 169Gb left on the system drive, so if you stick with just PM and PL and the OS then 256Gb will be fine I’d imagine. But venture much past that and you may find yourself running out of space soon.
8Gb of memory has been mostly fine ith PL, it has noticeably slowed down if I’m multi tasking eg PM, PL8, Topaz Sharpen AI, Affinity Photo, Edge browser and Apple Mail all open at once. I don’t feel it would be happy trying to run PL9 with AI masking though.
I’ve been considering a machine upgrade for next year and personally I’ve decided that I’d be looking to get 512Gb storage and 24Gb memory as a minimum. My ideal would be 1Tb and 32Gb because as @zkarj mentioned, AI processing in the future is going to become a greaty beast I think.
I was considering the Pro version of the Mini, but I’m tempted to save on the processor and get the extra storage and memory instead as I think that may be more useful now in the long run (the NPU is the same in the base model and the Pro anyway, and that will export DeepPrime images quickly on both machines).
All the apps I have that are ‘AI enabled’ take up a massive amount more drive storage than the non-AI apps (games aside). I can only guess that it’s all the AI language models that need to space. Gigapixel AI takes up a massive 16Gb alone! Even Word takes up nearly 3Gb now…
Hope that helps your decision making.
Thank you all for your responses
I’m using PL9 on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro/16GB/512GB.
I would say it runs “fine.”
Occasionally it freezes up when doing certain actions (usually when I’m trying to index a folder with lots of subfolders and images), but I don’t think that has to do with my specs.
Performance wise, it is very slightly laggy with sliders and AI selections, but nothing unbearable at all.
I would imagine an M4 would be better, but I thought I’d also read somewhere that the “pro” versions of the M-chips have much better performance compared to the non-pro versions, even when comparing older to newer. This video shows a comparison, though I haven’t watched it all the way through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eqDjFGyoy8
The need for onboard resources (memory and disk storage) will only increase with the arrival of AI and cameras with ever larger sensors. It’s more expensive certainly, but I wanted to feel comfortable on my M4 Mac mini running whatever software I might choose down the road, so I went with 32GB memory and 2 TB internal disk storage. I have not regretted that decision.
I am running PL9 on a MacBook Pro M4 pro with 24Gb storage and experience no problems whatsoever. Masks are snappy and downloads and exports much quicker than on my M1 Pro that I replaced with this one.