I am trying to decide which Mac desktop to buy: Mini with M6, 32 GB vs Studio M5 Max. Big price difference. I only do one photo at at time, no batches. I am interested in smooth, lag-free work with sliders and brushes. I don’t care if it takes a little longer for full-file operation such as super resolution or denoise.
Any actual experience you can report will be appreciated. I’ve already spent many hours with some AI’s and watch videos. I’ve seen many benchmarks but want something more exactly relevant.
I lean toward adding PhotoLab to my toolkit but I’m happy with Pixelmator Pro and Photomator now. I could buy PureRAW but don’t mind the extra $$ to get it included in PhotoLab.
Thanks for reply. The M6 does not offer a higher RAM than 32. So the choice is to accept 32 or go to M5 Pro or even the Studio. What sorts of tasks and such are showing that constraint? My old (2018 MacBookPro with i9 Intel and good graphics card) never gets close to the limit (using Activity Monitor) when using Pixelmator Pro, Photomator, etc. But I am only doing one photo at a time. The detail would be very helpful. Thanks.
I had a Mac mini M4/32Gb/2Tb and it was a quite capable Photolab machine. Like you I only process one image at a time.
Because I’m retired and have “excess disposable income” I just set up it’s replacement, an M5 Pro with 64Gb/4Tb and all the cores. It’s noticeably faster and doesn’t seem to lag after several dozen AI masks are applied to an image. All my media files now live on an external OWC Thunderbolt 5 SSD. Several reasons I went with the M5 Pro are 64Gb RAM and the external ports are Thunderbolt 5.
That being said the M4 was just fine. Nothing tasked it except Photolab’s AI masks. I don’t run local AI models or anything similar so can’t speak to that.
I edit with High Quality Preview on but DeepPRIME off.
It really depends on whether you run only photolab or if you run other programs at the same time. If you run for example bridge or lightroom or some other asset manager then you need to allow for that memory requirement. If you plan to run some form of pixel editor called from photolab then that will also require memory.
The recommended (not minimum) memory size for photo lab is 32gb at the moment, doubtless future photolabs will require more. So if you plan to keep the machine for a longer period my advice is get more memory.
For what its worth - I have just got my M5 Max Mac Studio with 48GB Ram and Core upgrade - haven’t noticed an improvement yet in workflow performance yet although it is slightly better with Pure Raw Previews enabled.