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- Rob
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I've being looking at options to replace my 21.5 inch iMac for a while now. I've been on the fence between going back to a PC but I'd like to stay with apple as I've generally had less issues in the last 7 years with the iMac (that may be in my head) and I have thunderbolt 2 storage devices that I'd like to keep using with Carbon Copy Cloner. Since March I've been working from home and I bought a 27 inch 4K USB-C monitor at the start of lock down. It was mainly for work use but I was also thinking that I could also use it for photography in the future too. It makes sense for me to have one monitor that can be used for both my works laptop (via USB-C connection) and a home computer for photography. We don't ready have room to setup 3 computers in our house (the wife is also working from home part of the week and the iMac for photography makes up the third one). The mac mini seems ideal due to its small form factor and it lets me stay with apple.
I had heard apple were bringing out their own chips. Am I right in thinking they have been recently released and will be out soon? Does anyone have any thoughts on the new chips or know of any photography orientated reviews of their performance?
My main uses will be lightroom. I was thinking of the following spec for £1299.
One thing I have noticed is the new mac minis only have 2 USB-C ports and 2 USB-A ports. Thats a little annoying as previous versions have 4 USB-C ports. I have a set of G Tech storage drives I was thinking of running off one Thunderbolt 3 port (I could daisy chain the two drives via thunderbolt 2) and have a 4TB USB-C portable drive as my main photography RAW files drive. That will take up both USB-C/thunderbolt 3 ports leaving only 2 USB-A ports, one of which will be taken up by a SD Card reader. That leaving just one USB-A port for my graphics tablet and loupe deck which means I can use both any more unless I can get a USB hub. Potentially I could free up a USB-C port by using one of the drive ports in G Tech G Dock EV 2 drive unit (currently I have one drive for time machine and the other for off site backup). Is there a way to set up Time Machine to back up to a wireless hard drive or to cloud storage?
I had heard apple were bringing out their own chips. Am I right in thinking they have been recently released and will be out soon? Does anyone have any thoughts on the new chips or know of any photography orientated reviews of their performance?
My main uses will be lightroom. I was thinking of the following spec for £1299.
- Apple M1 chip with 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 16GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- Gigabit Ethernet
One thing I have noticed is the new mac minis only have 2 USB-C ports and 2 USB-A ports. Thats a little annoying as previous versions have 4 USB-C ports. I have a set of G Tech storage drives I was thinking of running off one Thunderbolt 3 port (I could daisy chain the two drives via thunderbolt 2) and have a 4TB USB-C portable drive as my main photography RAW files drive. That will take up both USB-C/thunderbolt 3 ports leaving only 2 USB-A ports, one of which will be taken up by a SD Card reader. That leaving just one USB-A port for my graphics tablet and loupe deck which means I can use both any more unless I can get a USB hub. Potentially I could free up a USB-C port by using one of the drive ports in G Tech G Dock EV 2 drive unit (currently I have one drive for time machine and the other for off site backup). Is there a way to set up Time Machine to back up to a wireless hard drive or to cloud storage?