Week 8 (I just HAD to do it ...)

[billtils]

I've been a Mac user since the mid '90's when I headed up a not-for-profit that provided QA and training for crime labs in the US. There were around 350 of them at that time and we moved from costly face to face to online delivery. The training group's response was "Great, but we need Macs if you are serious about this". They got their Macs and when my Windows machine was up for replacement I joined them and have been a happy chappy ever since. Now that I'm well and truly retired I've generally kept up to date but believe I've avoided GAS syndrome and chose the minimum spec options and waited a reasonable amount of time when a replacement was justified (no comment on "Justified").

Until now. I did an upgrade from my iMac to a Mac Mini two years ago and purchased what looked to be the best value from the Apple Refurbished store, and compromised on the HD size - bad move.

It lasted 2 years and has been traded for a new one with the M4 chip 2TB of hard drive and 24GB of memory.

[The amateur]

It looks you do not need a new monitor !

[billtils]

Yes, as the saying goes, it's old but gold. It's a BenQ SW240, nothing fancy but all my competition work requires digital images no higher than 1200px, no wider than 1600px, and sRGB colour space, so there's no point in spending money on a 4K (or higher) res screen

[lunaticitizen]

Was there no possibility of using external Thunderbolt 3 drives with the previous Mac Mini?

I checked their price and they cost probably more than the Mac Mini itself so maybe I got my own answer here

I'm happy with a dedicated NAS for my data storage. It's cheaper than a TB3 drive, too. Slower, though.

[billtils]

Leo, I had a couple of those connected to the previous mini**. Whatever the reason, the previous mini (predictably) went from reasonably fast to s-l-o-w as soon as I hit it with any complex Photoshop edit and the onboard disc near full. The updated hardware just zips along without missing a beat so I'm happy .

** They are connected to the new rig, one as a duplicate library disc and one as a Time Machine backup.

[lunaticitizen]

Yes, I've been told that working with an enormous number of Photoshop layers or stacking operations involving hundreds of images can grind Mac (or PC) to a halt.

I've never experienced it since I've never dabbled with any of the above.

Anyway forcing a computer to use swap because of insufficient RAM can indeed never be good, so I guess it couldn't be helped that you had to upgrade the Mac.

I run a lot of virtual machines with my Mac, but since any of them requires less than 2 GB of RAM, even 20 of these virtual machines have never caused me any problem.