So…I know that I probably sound anti-Mac a lot of places I discuss these things. That’s not true, but…there are some serious considerations about the new Macs.
The big one is that Apple’s NVMe is actually a little weird. Their controllers report a disk write as finished once it’s in the cache, rather than actually on disk. For a laptop, that’s not that big of a deal…it can keep power on until the cache flush is finished when shutting down normally or on external power loss. Every other new Mac really needs to run off a battery/UPS with a monitoring app that can shut down the computer safely without your intervention. This information comes mostly from people trying to port ARM Linux to apple silicon, which requires a much deeper look under the hood than what most people do.
They’re showing application and even system corruption from power loss technically during writes but after they’re reported as completed. It’s kind of scary. One example was from a power loss while saving a Garage Band project. GB knew it was supposed to re-open the project, but the project file was corrupt, so GB wouldn’t start again. It took a lot of dorky tech work to get it to open again, but the project couldn’t be recovered. And, apparently, the only way around it is to use slow drives that don’t have a cache (think USB thumb drives). For PG…it looks like flush() doesn’t actually guarantee disk writes, only cache writes. There’s a separate syscall for forcing disk writes, but doing so drops IOPS to more like hard drive values rather than SSD values or especially NVMe values.
It’s a really picky technical thing that seems to have been ported over from iOS, probably because they can always assume there’s a battery as well as particularly long shutdown process that the battery management can trigger if it needs to.
And, it’s possible that the first symptom of a problem would be your DAW just refusing to open, a project just not working, or the computer just not booting…and it theoretically could happen even if you do the normal thing of saving early and often just depending on the timings involved.
So…yeah…make sure you budget for a good UPS. You should probably do that anyway, but it’s an even bigger deal with modern Macs than modern PCs.
As for everything else…the processing and especially video seems like overkill for what I do. A normal Mini should actually be fine for me. But…I’m also fine on PC without the complexities/weirdness of pretty much having to rely on Thunderbolt…which is weird. Apples-to-apples, a comparably powerful PC is actually more expensive…but because I don’t own any Thunderbolt things, changing to Mac would be more expensive for me right now. The opposite may be true for people who’ve been on Mac (I haven’t owned one in a while).