It seems we’ve been having a number of sales recently of state-of-the-art Macs. This site’s exclusive advertiser, for instance, has two particular models on sale at the moment you might want to think about. Note that both these deals are today (Monday) only.
- At the true budget end, we have the Mac Mini. My minimal Mini configuration is currently US$200 off at US$1100 [advertiser link]. That gives you an M2 processor with 10-CPU/16-GPU/16-Neural cores, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. 16GB’s of RAM is technically okay for single image post processing work with only LR/PS open, but you need to keep the SSD having plenty of empty space for virtual memory spillage. Thus, you add a Satechi Mac Mini hub for US$100 and populate it with a 2TB M.2 SSD (another US$100). So, for about US$1300 you have a very fast machine with 16GB RAM and effectively 2.5TB SSD. Again, the 16/512 M2 is the lowest end Mac desktop I’d recommend these days, but that’s a lot of desktop for the current price. If you need more, pay attention to the on again, off again discounts B&H and Amazon seem to be putting on recent Mini models.
- At the high price end, we have the MacBook Pro. B&H currently has a whopping US$1700 discount on the M1 16” MacBook Pro [advertiser link] with 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD. I have essentially the same machine in 14” form, and it is ridiculous at how much it can do, and how fast. It’s better than the maxed out iMac Retina I’ve been using. This is a great portable solution that can also be used as a desktop with an external monitor. I don’t know of anything else at this price that is so good. I’m sure an M2 version would be even better, but you’re not going to believe how good the M1 version is, and you’re not going to get an M2 version close to this price.
While Apple has long been the “high price” solution, what we’ve been seeing in the Apple Silicon era is that discounts are an ongoing thing that make models briefly the best equivalent you can buy from anyone. You just need to have some patience to wait for the model you really want to hit someone’s discount list.
