Challenge accepted, Apple. – Mac Studio Review

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, darknessblade said:

Even if it is supposed to be the most powerful PC you can buy now. Just like DELL/HP/Alienware PC's It is nothing but a pile of E-waste, when you cannot upgrade it yourself

I sincerely feel sorry for your extremely narrow-minded world view

[maplepants]

2 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

 At least 95% of the bread and butter workstations will have a fast (SC and MC) CPU and a top-tier GPU, something like a 12900K and a 3090 for example. That's exactly what you would find in a workstation computer.

A ThinkStation with a Xeon and an Nvidia Quadro is not going to have the same performance characteristics as an i9 and a gaming card. There's more to a good workstation than just a "fast" CPU and GPU. Different hardware is optimized for different workflows.

 

The reason why a ThinkStation, for example, would be a better comparison to the Mac Studio than this gaming PC is that the ThinkStation and the Mac Studio are designed to handle many of the same workflows. Machine learning, CAD, development, and many other pro workflows just wouldn't be done on a gaming rig like the comparison they used here, but would be done on the Mac Studio.

 

Obviously every method has their shortcomings, and this method would leave out DAW comparisons because Xeons just aren't made for the kind of single threaded performance that audio engineers need. That said, choosing to build a pro workstation, no matter what it's geared towards, would have been a more interesting comparison than the gaming PC they built.

[Jorgemeister]

8 hours ago, caosio said:

i get this on youtube and yeah i belive is some kind of scam with the LTT logo... i know that becouse i never win any prize at all on my lifeXD 

 

i have to say i enjoy your reviews Anthony and have a nice day people.

What prize did you get though?

[HenrySalayne]

2 hours ago, maplepants said:

Machine learning, CAD, development, and many other pro workflows just wouldn't be done on a gaming rig like the comparison they used here, but would be done on the Mac Studio.

Have you ever been in an engineering office? Actual professionals using anything more than a 5950X or 12900K are the minority. There is simply no need to get a Threadripper, Epyc or Xeon, because today's consumer lines offer enough performance for all of these workloads. They are cheap, readily available and it's better to just replace the entire PC after 3 years when the write-off period has ended and buy a new and faster one.

You need really specific workloads to get anything out of big-boy workstations or the Mac Studio. Which was the entire point of this video.

 

2 hours ago, maplepants said:

Obviously every method has their shortcomings, and this method would leave out DAW comparisons because Xeons just aren't made for the kind of single threaded performance that audio engineers need. That said, choosing to build a pro workstation, no matter what it's geared towards, would have been a more interesting comparison than the gaming PC they built.

What? Since when do you need SC performance for DAWs? The number of tracks and plugins is limited by the MC perfomance. I have never heard nor seen a plugin that would saturate the SC perfomance of a CPU.

[maplepants]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Have you ever been in an engineering office?

Yes, and they all need Xeon + Quadro because for AutoCAD RAM, VRAM, and core counts are a big deal. At the county planning office where I used to work, the drawings were huge. You've got grades, sewage, water, utilities, and on and on. 

 

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Actual professionals using anything more than a 5950X or 12900K are the minority. There is simply no need to get a Threadripper, Epyc or Xeon, because today's consumer lines offer enough performance for all of these workloads. They are cheap, readily available and it's better to just replace the entire PC after 3 years when the write-off period has ended and buy a new and faster one.

Getting the proper hardware saves companies enormous amounts of money. Every second your team spends waiting for files to open, waiting for code to compile, waiting for tracks to bounce, is time the company is paying them for nothing.

 

No serious business would skimp out on their work stations in the name of saving a buck. That's only something you'd do as an indie, and only if you're willing to just work a lot more hours.

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

You need really specific workloads to get anything out of big-boy workstations or the Mac Studio. Which was the entire point of this video.

There are specific workloads that the Mac Studio and other workstations are made to be good at, this is true. But that wasn't actually the point of the video. The video spent a quarter of its time talking about gaming, and very little time at all talking about the kind of workloads one might buy a Mac Studio. Obviously part of that is the comparison rig that they got, a gaming PC, isn't well suited to the CAD, development, heavy photo editing, VFX, etc, work that one might by a Mac Studio or workstation for.

 

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

What? Since when do you need SC performance for DAWs? The number of tracks and plugins is limited by the MC perfomance. I have never heard nor seen a plugin that would saturate the SC perfomance of a CPU.

Single threaded performance is extremely important for recording audio. This beginners guide to choosing a CPU for audio workstation has a great explanation of why single core performance matters so much. Of course multi core performance dose matter, but it's single threaded performance that's going to allow you to keep your audio buffer and latency low, without running into errors.

[HenrySalayne]

3 hours ago, maplepants said:

Yes, and they all need Xeon + Quadro because for AutoCAD RAM, VRAM, and core counts are a big deal. At the county planning office where I used to work, the drawings were huge. You've got grades, sewage, water, utilities, and on and on. 

AutoCAD is severely single-thread limited. This is what AutoCAD does if you work on a large and already lagging file:

 

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

Every second your team spends waiting for files to open, waiting for code to compile, waiting for tracks to bounce, is time the company is paying them for nothing.

Exactly, but the PC just needs to be fast enough. In most cases, processes are limited by the user and anything faster is just a waste of money.

That's why a 12900K and the 3090 is a good representation. Same price. good SC and MC performance and enough VRAM for most tasks. If your specific task is MC CPU limited -> Threadripper; if your specific task is VRAM limited -> Quadro; if you just buy a random Xeon workstation because you have no clue what AutoCAD needs (SC perfomance) -> epic fail.

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

No serious business would skimp out on their work stations in the name of saving a buck. That's only something you'd do as an indie, and only if you're willing to just work a lot more hours.

Knowing where the bottleneck are and how to mitigate them is actually improving efficiency. Just throwing money at the problem, not, as your Xeon workstation for AutoCAD has shown.

 

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

Single threaded performance is extremely important for recording audio. This beginners guide to choosing a CPU for audio workstation has a great explanation of why single core performance matters so much. Of course multi core performance dose matter, but it's single threaded performance that's going to allow you to keep your audio buffer and latency low, without running into errors.

If you use just one incredibly long FX pipeline, you will eventually run out of SC performance. But that just means you have a little bit more latency while mixing and mastering. If you run out of SC performance (on modern CPUs) while recording, you did something wrong.

 

4 hours ago, maplepants said:

Obviously part of that is the comparison rig that they got, a gaming PC, isn't well suited to the CAD, development, heavy photo editing, VFX, etc, work that one might by a Mac Studio or workstation for.

You are so preoccupied with your opinion you can't see why a PC running a 12900K and a 3090 is in fact a workstation.

[maplepants]

13 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

AutoCAD is severely single-thread limited. This is what AutoCAD does if you work on a large and already lagging file

Depends on your workflow. For example, with 3D models AutoCAD is primarily GPU limited, not CPU limited. But obviously this is workflow dependant. 

13 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

In most cases, processes are limited by the user and anything faster is just a waste of money.

This depends hugely on your workflow. For one example, lots of app developers need to compile their app and run quick tests many times per day and lots of engineers need to open and work in many different files in a given day. 

13 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

But that just means you have a little bit more latency while mixing and mastering. If you run out of SC performance (on modern CPUs) while recording, you did something wrong.

This kind of attitude just wouldn't fly in a working environment. It's fine for an indie or a home user, but "just deal with the latency" or "you're recording wrong" is how you'll get your audio engineers to quit in the real world.

 

I've worked on IT projects with radio stations, as well as a big project with a company who films live opera performances to broadcast simultaneously to movie theatres. It wasn't with The Met, but it was something like this. I can tell you right now that "it's just a little bit more latency" just isn't how the professional world works. 

13 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

You are so preoccupied with your opinion you can't see why a PC running a 12900K and a 3090 is in fact a workstation.

The point I'm making isn't that there's 0 overlap between what an i9 + 3090 can do and what a Mac Studio, but rather that Mac Studio buyers are more likely to be comparing it (especially the M1 Ultra) to a ThinkStation or some other real workstation than they are to compare it to an i9 + 3090.

 

I think that a video where they built up a $4000 workstation and compared the Mac Studio to that workstation in professional workloads would have been more interesting than comparing the Mac Studio's gaming prowess and power draw to a high end gaming PC. It's just not a valuable comparison, and is one that I think shows the blinders that LTT can have sometimes for thinking that gaming is the best way to compare performance between any two random computers. 

[Paul Thexton]

On 6/23/2022 at 11:09 PM, hishnash said:

To do this:
1) open Xcode (anyone can download this no dev account needed) 
2) in the menu bar top left click 'Xcode -> Open Developer Tool -> Instruments '

3) In Instruments create a new `blank` profile (so as to avoid any perf impact from additional profiling tools)

4) Top right clip the '+' search for `display` and click the `Display: Records display an vscyne events` 
5) In this search box now search for `Metal` and select `Metal Application` (yes do this even if the game is openGL as openGL on macOS runs as an emulation within Metal) 
6) Top right you will see you Macs name followed by a `>`  with `All Processes` now start your game and then here if you click on `All Processes` you should find the game, select it. (so it only records events from the game as much as possible.. vscyn is not filtered per app as it is more hardware related)
7) click the record and record some data (not to much) when done click stop and then explore. 
8) to explore frame times select on the `Metal Application` entry, in the detail inspector at the bottom of your screen you will see a breakdown for each frame, how long it took etc ('Max' is the time it took after the last frame finishes and Total it the total time from when that frame started to when it finishes think of this as latency) when you use frame time numbers on other platforms you are comparing to the max number (time between frames). 
9) if you want to copy out this data you can expand the GPU section and select 'Drawable Presentable` then in the detail view select all the entires and copy them out these can be pasted into a spreadsheet application. These are the exact times that frames were deliverable (some frames may be skipped by the system if they happen at a faster rate than the screen can refresh of course). 

 

Another thing you can do once you've got up to Step 5, is choose `File -> Save As Template` and give it a name of your choosing, so you can quickly get started.

 

You can also do the recording from the command line utility to avoid the Instruments.app attempting to do live analysis of the data to draw graphs on the fly etc, which might help with reducing performance overhead still further.

 

This is something I do when doing performance and memory leak testing of software in my day job, but I've never actually done it for Metal/Frame time stuff before, so I just did this for a couple of minutes of walking around MetroExodous on my 14" M1 Max by starting the game, then switching to a Terminal window and running the command

 

xctrace record --template 'HishNashTemplateRecommendation' --time-limit 5m --output metro.trace --attach $(pgrep MetroExodus)

When the recording is finished, it can take a while to save the trace output.. but once it's done that you can then open it in Instruments and look through the data.

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

14 hours ago, maplepants said:

Depends on your workflow. For example, with 3D models AutoCAD is primarily GPU limited, not CPU limited. But obviously this is workflow dependant. 

On 6/25/2022 at 4:00 AM, maplepants said:

Yes, and they all need Xeon + Quadro because for AutoCAD RAM, VRAM, and core counts are a big deal. At the county planning office where I used to work, the drawings were huge. You've got grades, sewage, water, utilities, and on and on. 

I didn't know they 3D modelled all pipes at the county planning office.

You were the one trying to argue a "gaming machine" was the wrong tool for AutoCAD. As a matter of fact, a 12900K, a 3090 and a good chunk or RAM is the perfect machine for AutoCAD. Even more so, because AutoCAD on Mac lacks vital functionality compared to the Windows version.

 

15 hours ago, maplepants said:

This kind of attitude just wouldn't fly in a working environment. It's fine for an indie or a home user, but "just deal with the latency" or "you're recording wrong" is how you'll get your audio engineers to quit in the real world.

People ignoring the limitations of the tools they use are not professionals. People who don't understand how latency settings impact the performance and which setting they have to tweak to work around limitations are not professionals. So my attitude is not towards professionalism, but the lack thereof.

 

15 hours ago, maplepants said:

I've worked on IT projects with radio stations, as well as a big project with a company who films live opera performances to broadcast simultaneously to movie theatres. It wasn't with The Met, but it was something like this. I can tell you right now that "it's just a little bit more latency" just isn't how the professional world works. 

Little do you know. Especially in live broadcasting audio is always ahead of time and needs to be delayed to be in sync with the video signal. Your 20 ms of video latency are an eternity in audio production. So yes, a little bit more latency on your audio is not only acceptable but a requirement.

And you will not find a computer running a DAW in a broadcasting environment but mixing consoles from Digico, Lawo or Studer, completely defeating any point you're trying to make.

15 hours ago, maplepants said:

The point I'm making isn't that there's 0 overlap between what an i9 + 3090 can do and what a Mac Studio, but rather that Mac Studio buyers are more likely to be comparing it (especially the M1 Ultra) to a ThinkStation or some other real workstation than they are to compare it to an i9 + 3090.

No, they should compare the performance for their specific workload. That's why LTT tested a broad range of common software to draw a granular picture.

 

15 hours ago, maplepants said:

I think that a video where they built up a $4000 workstation and compared the Mac Studio to that workstation in professional workloads would have been more interesting than comparing the Mac Studio's gaming prowess and power draw to a high end gaming PC. It's just not a valuable comparison, and is one that I think shows the blinders that LTT can have sometimes for thinking that gaming is the best way to compare performance between any two random computers. 

This is quite exhausting because I'm just repeating myself:

 

A computer with a 12900K, a 3090 and a good chunk of RAM is a workstation.

 

There is no question about it. "It's good for gaming" is not an argument against it.

[maplepants]

50 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I didn't know they 3D modelled all pipes at the county planning office.

Yes, they do. The world is 3D, and so plans that are approved for new subdivisions, highway interchanges, airports, etc are all 3D. To take one simple example, slope / grade is an extremely important measurement for every document the county planning office creates or approves. In order to capture slope, you need 3D drawings. For pipes specifically, slope / grade is one of the most important parts of your design.

54 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

You were the one trying to argue a "gaming machine" was the wrong tool for AutoCAD. As a matter of fact, a 12900K, a 3090 and a good chunk or RAM is the perfect machine for AutoCAD. Even more so, because AutoCAD on Mac lacks vital functionality compared to the Windows version.

The point I'm making is that what machine you need for AutoCAD depends on your workflow, and the for the AutoCAD workflows where somebody might be considering a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra they wouldn't be comparing that machine to an i9 + 3090, they be comparing it to a something with a Quadro + Xeon or Epyc. 

 

Your point about AutoCAD not being the same on macOS and Windows is true. They're quite different. So wouldn't it be great if the review for this M1 Ultra Mac Studio spent some time on these trade offs?

 

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

People ignoring the limitations of the tools they use are not professionals. People who don't understand how latency settings impact the performance and which setting they have to tweak to work around limitations are not professionals. So my attitude is not towards professionalism, but the lack thereof.

Good engineers can work around the limitations of their tools, this is true. But if you don't buy them the right tools for the job, they'll quit. To bring this back around to where it started you said:

On 6/25/2022 at 12:30 AM, HenrySalayne said:

What? Since when do you need SC performance for DAWs? The number of tracks and plugins is limited by the MC perfomance. I have never heard nor seen a plugin that would saturate the SC perfomance of a CPU.

And this just isn't true. Single core performance is absolutely critical in any audio pipeline. If you give your audio engineers work stations built to favour multi core performance at the expense of single core, you'll make the good ones quit and the ones who remain less productive than they would be with the proper tools.

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

Little do you know. Especially in live broadcasting audio is always ahead of time and needs to be delayed to be in sync with the video signal. Your 20 ms of video latency are an eternity in audio production. So yes, a little bit more latency on your audio is not only acceptable but a requirement.

And you will not find a computer running a DAW in a broadcasting environment but mixing consoles from Digico, Lawo or Studer, completely defeating any point you're trying to make.

If you don't think there are computers involved in the pipeline here, I don't know what to tell you.

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

No, they should compare the performance for their specific workload. That's why LTT tested a broad range of common software to draw a granular picture.

Except, they didn't. That's my complaint about the video. They spent a quarter of the run time on gaming benchmarks, had *one* development workload, did an okay job with video benchmarking, but focused too much on PugetBench for photos. And just a bit of context for why I keep brining up the gaming thing, they spent more time on WoW performance discussion than they did on all non-video workloads combined. Do they honestly think that WoW performance looms larger in the minds of potential Mac Studio buyers than these other workloads do?

 

To me, this doesn't really count as covering a wide range of software or a granular picture. It's too focused on gaming and gives only a glance at the workloads people would actually buy this machine to run.

[HenrySalayne]

56 minutes ago, maplepants said:

And this just isn't true. Single core performance is absolutely critical in any audio pipeline. If you give your audio engineers work stations built to favour multi core performance at the expense of single core, you'll make the good ones quit and the ones who remain less productive than they would be with the proper tools.

No, it is not the defining criteria. It might be in the future, but up to this point it wasn't. Audio engineers are mostly limited by MC perfomance long before SC would become an issue. Daisy-chaining dozens and dozens of plugins is not something you would find while recording, mixing or mastering.

1 hour ago, maplepants said:

If you don't think there are computers involved in the pipeline here, I don't know what to tell you.

Exactly what somebody would say who doesn't know anything about the system architecture of a broadcasting studio.

1 hour ago, maplepants said:

And just a bit of context for why I keep brining up the gaming thing, they spent more time on WoW performance discussion than they did on all non-video workloads combined. Do they honestly think that WoW performance looms larger in the minds of potential Mac Studio buyers than these other workloads do?

The time spent talking about a subject is not a metric to evaluate the video. Especially the WoW perfomance testing and gaming in general needed some explaining. They did a really good job covering as many aspects as possible an they gave a good overview.

And I'm pretty sure the target audience for this video is not somebody looking for an in-depth dive into a particular workload.

1 hour ago, maplepants said:

It's too focused on gaming

Oh no, you are right. Four minutes out of a 20 minute video is waaay too much.

[maplepants]

36 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

No, it is not the defining criteria. It might be in the future, but up to this point it wasn't. Audio engineers are mostly limited by MC perfomance long before SC would become an issue. Daisy-chaining dozens and dozens of plugins is not something you would find while recording, mixing or mastering.

I encourage you, again, to read this beginners guide to choosing a CPU for audio production.

37 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Oh no, you are right. Four minutes out of a 20 minute video is waaay too much.

It really is way too much. If it reflected how much Mac Studio buyers care about gaming performance, it would have been 0.

37 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

The time spent talking about a subject is not a metric to evaluate the video. Especially the WoW perfomance testing and gaming in general needed some explaining. They did a really good job covering as many aspects as possible an they gave a good overview.

And I'm pretty sure the target audience for this video is not somebody looking for an in-depth dive into a particular workload.

Time spent on subject matter, and how subject matter was discussed is, I think, the best way to judge a review like this. The time spent on WoW, and gaming, was time wasted. Nobody considering whether the M1 Ultra is right for them cares about gaming. 

 

I think the target audience of this video was gamers. They approached this review in the exact same way they review new gaming video cards. Talk a lot about frame rates across a range of games, do a super short segment on productivity, then talk thermals and power draw. It's a format that works great for the 3070 Ti review, but in my opinion it was the wrong way to approach this machine.

 

But this is where I'm holding out hope for LTT Labs. Hopefully that team will be able talk about hardware through something other than this gaming heavy prism. 

[HenrySalayne]

22 minutes ago, maplepants said:

I encourage you, again, to read this beginners guide to choosing a CPU for audio production.

I'm using DAWs like Protools way back since the days you could only bounce tracks in real-time and somehow all these years I didn't even notice I'm lacking SC performance. Thanks for opening my eyes!

 

[maplepants]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

I'm using DAWs like Protools way back since the days you could only bounce tracks in real-time and somehow all these years I didn't even notice I'm lacking SC performance. Thanks for opening my eyes!

 

Happy to help. We’re never too old to learn. 

[Chiyawa]

On 6/24/2022 at 9:31 PM, Commodus said:

I don't think LTT or anyone is claiming that $4,000 is an "average consumer" price.

Yeah, I know. But some consumer may be attracted by it because the form factor, the aesthetic design as well as simplicity. But yeah, those consumer that could afford Apple products are wealthy indeed. I with my low end job could only drool in my dream. I actually like these small form factor PCs and was really amazed how Apple can pull it off when they launch their very first Mac mini.

[Ginger Penguin]

Sidebar but this video highlighted an issue with Floatplane that a number of us have been trying to get resolved for ages. The transcoding benchmark is yet another example of the pointless extra resolution the 4K option on Floatplane has. And it's not the aspect ratio. I would be willing to bet that the 2160x1080 file would do just fine. Can we please stop using it and go with, in Anthony's words, consumer 4K so that the number of us for whom this over-4K resolution breaks compatibility can actually watch in the resolution we paid for? Or at least give us that extra option if you want to preserve 4320x2160 for people who have 8K TVs or something. Not that they're really getting any benefit since your cameras only shoot DCI 4K anyway (4096x2160).

[PowerUser513]

So i wanted to ask something if it is possible...
I will be a college student in some time (Btech in CSE top priority- anything coding related) in India. I'm gonna do part time job as well of any kind, probably vid editing, toteaching with wacom tab, telecalling, idk.
I was planning to buy a m2 macbook air, but i needed a good-ish display so i thought i should get a mac mini as well as an ipad pro and remotely use it like, keep the mac mini at the hostel room plugged in (so i get a fan, full power of m1 and can use it as a desktop at home).
I also have a Lenovo ideapad 330 15ikb as my primary [ specs - i3 7100u , amd rx 530 with the reg intel hd 600, Ram currently 4gb 2133 (planning to upgrade to 8gb (max 2133 supported by cpu), and an hdd (definately gonna upgrade to a ssd) as well as gonna buy an external 1 tb ssd (probably thunderbolt, to use in the long run for everything)
i will also buy a monitor if i feel the the need of it very much.

USECASE 1 :- So i thought to buy ipad m1 pro 12.9inch (wifi+cellular) and the magic keyboard with pencil, and a mac mini (storage not decided), then keep the mac at the hostel room plugged in 24x7 and wifi then use the college wifi to remote into it as a full fledged macbook.
so concluding, i get a mini led display, an "EXTRA" ipad (perfectly capable of, well, anything a m1 can do on ipad), "TOUCH" Display, and 120hz, pro motion,etc all the good stuff
and a mac with m1 , extra ports to use it at room, a FAN, small.
Like using the IPAD as mac mini's display portably.

USECASE 2:- (I'M GONNA PREFER TO THIS MOOOORE, cuz i already have a good-ish laptop, just need the juice of m1)
SO 1st, upgrade the ram to 8gig , an NVMe SSD, Done!
Then get a MAC MINI (probably 512gig), a portable router gigabit capable.
Then setup the mac in a way like i can use ALL OF MAC from the lenovo laptop as it is.. NO COMPROMISES. I am very good at the pc stuff. I can troubleshoot stuff as well and i use Kubuntu primarily.
But if possible i want to set it like :-
1) Connect mouse and probably a keyboard to the lenovo and passthrough to mac over LOCAL network, ssh will be fine too.
2) Should be able to do anything a macbook can too, expect for the impossible (i.e camera, connnectivity,)
I dont care much for user experience, as long it works perfect on 1080p60fps screen of my primary lenovo and just do anything a mac mini can do over network, like using my lenovo as a wireless monitor with able to connect devices like a dock and audio passthroughs. I can compromise ipad if this USECASE works fine.

USECASE 3:- carrying lenovo around with a portable router (gigabit capable) then the mac mini as well then plugging it nearby (wherever I can find the power outlet withe router)
(IDK VERY MUCH ABOUT THIS PART and whether will i need any stuff) use a LAN key to wake the mac and then it should automatically connect to the portable router (can also use the builtin wifi of mac mini but idk if it'll work nicely enough so I thought use a portable router ) then use the laptop to connect it.
I dont have joined a college yet so i dont know if they provide seamless connectivity over the campus and they MUST be having a bandwidth issue cuz a lot of students and also in india very few colleges give high bandwidth unlimited internet hence the portable router (battery powered). Even if they give high speed internet there will inevitably be heavy traffic over it and thats why i thought to drop the USECASE 2. It still can be considered an option but the probability of it working seamlessly is kinda very low. And there always lies a risk of anyone on the network hacking into my pc so its always a good choice to use personal router.

So PLEASE guide me I am in kind of stuck over decision. the main issue is budget. Well there is the option of 14 inch macbook pro BASE model (10c cpu, 8p+2e, 512ssd, 16gb mem) , it has everything. But it also has a price tag of 2,00,000 INR roughly 2501 dollars US. which is not feasable for me considering i also have to buysome other necessities for my college life. Main purpose is, that my existing laptop gets utilised nicely ( cuz its capable of that much) and then the mac mini is a good value considering the student discount as well.
the mac mini (8c cpu and gpu 8gb ram 256gigs ssd) is roughly 800 usd without the discount so ican afford it + i wont need any docks and can do the heavy work at the room. The 512gig model is nearly 1080 usd  in my region (without student discount) so maybe i'll stick with the thunderbolt ssd which can stay plugged into the mac all the time.
At any given time i mostly have spotify, a music equaliser and effects generator, a file explorer (because it takes time on my current system to open literally, anything, i keep this open) , system monitor (this as well currently. to kill any UN-necessary tasks eating up memory and if anything crashes which is highly unlikely), a local music player, and the apps i WILL need in college eg. xcode, chrome,etc.
I may probably stream csgo at 1080 60 so it should be enough to sream, again its one of my least priority.

THE THINGS WHICH HAVE TOP PRIORITY ARE-
1) The MAc should work perfectly with remote device (be it the laptop or ipad)
2) it should start to work as soon as it boots up.
like i plug the mini to the wall , then after pressing the power button, it should connect to the portable router automatically, and start whatever service required to use it on the laptop/ipad.
3) The laptop will become kind of like a wireless dock with display, keyboard,trackpad,and audio.
4) If possible i want to passthrough my lenovo's webcam and the wired mic connected to lenovo as a source for the mac....that too over network wirelesly ( or wired atleast)
5) it should create close-to-no issues while daily driving , like one time complete setup then good to go forever.
6) Should create no issues while web developing (as a web browser is needed to test it live) , or coding, compiling, or anything related to coding.


so let me know ur thought. i ssly need help. and ANY advice or changes are welcome. just make it resonable enough so that i dont have to spend a lot money close to buying a macbook pro 14 inch.
u can reply me here or on mail samuraidemon513@gmail.com