Advice about hardware

Hi!

Here Jaime from Michael Schmid lab in Fribourg.
I wanted to write to you to ask for a recommendation regarding hardware. We are going to start a new psychophysics setup (eye tracking + displaying stimuli where color and precise timing are key variables). For this, we are planning to purchase a Mac mini.

What I wanted to ask you is: what would you recommend between the M1, M2, and M2 Pro models? I am not sure if a regular M1 (which we have on the shelf) would do the trick.

Thank you very much in advance for the advice.
Have a good one!

Jaime Cadena

Hi Jaime,

If you already have an M1 Mac mini, I would say to start with that and see how it works. I use an M1 Mac mini as one of my MWorks test machines, and I’ve been doing all my MWorks development on an M1 iMac for several years now, so I can confirm that MWorks runs quite well on the M1.

If you find that you get a lot of skipped display refresh warnings or are maxing out the CPU cores (or something) with the M1 Mac mini, then you could try an M2 Pro Mac mini. Personally, though, I would probably spend the extra money to get a base model Mac Studio, as that’s a considerably more capable machine than the Mac mini.

Cheers,
Chris

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