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Take your pick between these two marvellous M2 Mac deals

Return of the Mac (here it is).

The dust has only just settled on Apple's mega WWDC last week, and with the announcement of some new Apple products, it makes sense that we're seeing some decent reductions on some Macs. Here for you I've got a pair of Mac deals, one for the desktop fans, and one for fans of all things laptops, from Ebuyer and Amazon respectively.

The decision as to whether you want either one of these machines comes down to whether you want a laptop or a desktop, given the internal components are the same. Both the Mac Mini and MacBook Air offered here comes with Apple's M2 processor. It comes with eight CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. This makes it a powerful chip for video editing, and other creative endeavours, and of course it can deal with dozens of browser tabs without breaking a sweat. While it may only be more of an incremental upgrade on the older M1, the fact is that the M1 was already far above and beyond any of the older Intel Macs in terms of its performance.

As well as both of them offering an M2 processor, both of these Macs also come with 8GB of RAM. That's enough for typical workloads, and while usually I'd sneer at 8GB on a computer in 2023, with the efficiency of that M2 chip and macOS in general, it means these Macs will be suitable for virtually everything apart from 8K video editing. These Macs also comes with a 256GB SSD, which is sufficient for your programs but we'd recommend getting a fast portable SSD or other external or network-attached storage if you'll be doing video editing or storing large media libraries which you can have quick and easy access to. Of course, you can also use any number of USB drives or external HDDs you may have laying around, but a fast portable SSD will provide quicker access, and it's good fortune that we're seeing a lot more portable SSD deals in line with seemingly continiously falling flash storage prices.

As I said earlier, whichever deal of these you go for depends on the form factor you want to go for. The Mac Mini is almost half the price of the MacBook Air, but you don't get access to the latter's 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display that should provide accurate colours as well as an especially vibrant experience. However, it's swings and roundabouts, as the Mac Mini offers a much better port selection than the pair of USB-C ports found on the MacBook Air. With the Mac Mini, you get everything from a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports to HDMI out and a pair of full-size USB-A. Moreover, you also get gigabit ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E for networking. This allows you to take full advantage of fibre broadband, and with those Thunderbolt ports you can even add in up to 10-gig ethernet via an adapter if you need truly rapid access to storage or other machines on your local network.

Whichever option you do got for though, the fact remains you're getting one of the most powerful computers for the money. As someone who has been a macOS user for nearly ten years, take it from me - they just work - and Macs are fantastic for creatives and generalists alike, especially for this money.

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