Beanie wants to know if Photoshop works the same on the Mac Mini as it would on a similar small device from HP. Leo says that Photoshop is CPU bound,.
I bought a late-2012 Mac Mini a couple of months ago with 16 gigs of RAM and custom-done Fusion drive with a 256 gig solid disk drive. It's more than able enough to handle 5d MKII RAW files in Aperture or CS5. Well, I haven't tried merging 10 files into a huge panorama or anything yet, but opening and making edits to single images is instantaneous. Another bonus is that it has USB3, so importing off a USB3 card reader or backing up to a USB3-connected hard drive is way faster.
I have a 400 gig Aperture library and I find the Fusion drive works perfectly for me. On Adobe.com discusses how Photoshop CS6 leverages the GPU to accelerate certain functions. Some of these are supported by the HD4000, some are not. Tons of RAM and ultra-fast storage (like a SSD) will benefit Photoshop more, but Adobe's roadmap does show them leveraging GPUs more and more for core functions across the CS suite, so I would be hesitant to depend on integrated graphics moving forward. But that reflects my use case as a design professional; only you can answer how much it may impact you.
From all accounts, a top-of-the-line Mini with max'ed memory and an SSD boot drive is a surprisingly powerful machine for most uses. Totally true; I hope Apple does as well. One more bump and the Mini will be a truly amazing bit of power in that cute little package (not that it isn't already). But integrated graphics will always require a tradeoff: If their overall speed and improves, then the bottleneck may become their lack of dedicated, ultra-fast memory.
And again, for a wide range of users and uses, none of these things will matter, but it's wise to evaluate against the baseline of what you need your hardware and software to do/support. Not to mention the exhausting reality that a program like Photoshop is always going to target the high end in terms of hardware for ideal performance.
I am pretty much certain this is the year of the xMac! All it needs is for the Mac mini to get one PCIe slot and it will be all the computer I ever need.
I think it is more likely to be this rather than another huge Pro machine. (I just want to play Arma III and be ready for Chris Roberts' space sim. There's no other reason I need more than the mini's HD4000 GPU) Mac mini wouldn't be so mini with a PCIe slot. What you really need is a Mac Pro xCube with a desktop i7/E3 and something.
(Yes I refuse to let my new Mac cube dreams die). I am pretty much certain this is the year of the xMac!
If it didn't happen in 2007, it sure as hell isn't going to happen in 2013. For the first time ever, I'm thinking when the time comes to replace my iMac and MacBook Air (both have a little bit more life in them), I will replace them with a single Mac laptop. I have no use for a Mac desktop computer anymore. The laptops are fast enough for everything I do. I'll be purchasing some future MacBook. For the stuff I need desktop hardware for, I'll just run an OS other than OS X, probably Ubuntu. I love the Apple eco system with iTunes, my iPad, iPhone, etc, but my laptop can easily maintain that whole universe.
Other work will be on the Ubuntu machine which gives me more options for hardware and it's relatively unimportant what OS it runs. The Mac laptop will be my primary machine. The xMac isn't happening. Storage ends up in the cloud or NAS devices, the laptops have enough power for most users.
The people with the highly customized hardware needs can just use another machine and another OS and they're so few Apple doesn't care about them. I'll do 95% of my computing on my MacBook, and use other hardware for the stuff it requires. I have a MacPro 1,1 (dual, dual core) with an upgraded graphics card (5770) and an SSD. Will a new mini smoke my machine?
Thx PP Here's some actual benchmark data: Mac Pro 1,1: ✓&q=MacPro1%2C1 Current gen Mac mini: ✓&q=Mini+2012 So 'Smoke'. Depends on definition. But put up a good fight against? And beat in plenty of use scenarios. I'd say that it would smoke your system (4 core) in most cases, beat the 8 core version of your box in others, but you have the slight edge in expandability (I say slight, because you don't have as many drive bays as a later Pro would have). Which would I rather have? I hate to say it, but at the moment, I'd take the mini.
I'd need 8 cores in a Mac Pro before I'd start considering it an option (having said that, my home box is a Hackintosh with the same CPU as a quad-core MacPro 3,1. And yes, the Mini beats it in some categories as well. But I can overclock.