Mac Pro vs. Mac mini — On a Budget!

SPONSOR: Go to https://molekule.com/ and enter the promo code ‘vector’ to save $75 off your first order. Apple’s got a new Mac Pro and it’s almost everything everyone who loves the Mac Pro wanted. It’s got a bunch of PCIe slots for expansion, all wrapped up in a mini tower case that can grate cheese in more dimensions than ever. If you want to, you can kick it up to 28 Xeon Cascade Lake cores and 1.5 Terabytes of memory. That is, if you work for ILM or Pixar or Skywalker Audio because just going out to buy those cores from Intel will cost you 7 and a half to 10K, and just getting that RAM from… anyone will cost you another 20K. Even the base config will start at 6K, which works out to roughly 3K worth of parts that most industry pros will just rip and replace with their own cards and network storage anyway, and 3K for the case to hold and attach it all. And if you think 3K for a case is a lot, wow do I have a Pro Display stand to show you. Never mind wheels. So many wheels… Or, god, anything made by RED or Hasselblad. But, let’s say you don’t work for a company that makes Avengers movies, and have jobs that let you bill 50K builds directly to mega-corporations or pay them off in a few months, or involves the use of cameras that make the Mac Pro, even tricked out, look strangely normal by comparison. Even on YouTube. Apple has said in the past that the vast majority of their customers buy iOS devices, not Macs, and the vast majority of their Mac customers by notebooks, not desktops, and the vast majority of their desktop customers buy iMacs, but lets say that you, like me, are one of those few, those proud, those loud, single-digit percentage Mac customers and you want something for your desk that doesn’t start at 5 or 6K. There’s the iMac, sure, but there’s also the Mac mini Apple resurrected last October. It’s not a tower but you can stack it. It doesn’t have any internal PCIe slots, but it does have Thunderbolt 3. So, I got to wondering just how far you could take it or, rather, if you couldn’t or wouldn’t afford the Mac Pro, if you could take it far enough to make it into a Mac mini Pro? SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/vectorshow?su... LINKS: Mac mini at Apple: https://www.imore.com/e?link=https%3A... Sonnet eGPU Enclosure: http://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=15... AMD RX 580: http://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=15... Belkin USB Hub: http://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=15... More info: https://www.imore.com/mac-mini-vs-mac... MORE: Merch: https://standard.tv/vector Gear: https://kit.com/reneritchie Web: http://www.imore.com/vector Podcast: http://applepodcasts.com/vector Twitter:   / reneritchie   Instagram:   / reneritchie