I am not hardware knowledgeable enough to know if what they are telling me is true or not but they said that the faster chip speed of the new i7 in the Mini makes up for the fewer cores in the i7 (dual rather than quad) and that most photo editing software does not take advantage of multi-threading. I am sure that either the 21' or 27' iMacs would be faster than my current MBP but the Apple people keep telling me that the new Mini would be just as fast even though the Mini i7 chips are only dual core rather than the quad core in my MBP and even though there is no separate graphics card. Photo editing using LR (and using Photoshop CS5.1 or Affinity Photo as an external editor) is probably one of the most processor intensive things that I do on my system along with running iMovie and I was wondering if anyone on this forum is running a similar configuration to any of the above. I currently work on a 15' MacBook Pro Retina, 2.7GHz i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, NVIDIA M650 video card with 1GB of memory running El Capitan and find LR6 runs very quickly on this machine with OpenCL turned on or off and ran just as quickly on Yosemite.įor a variety of reasons I may be replacing my MBP soon and have been trying to decide between replacing it with a Mac Mini (3.0GHz i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB Fusion drive, Intel IRIS graphics) and a 21/27' iMac (i7, 16GB RAM, 1 TB Fusion drive, separate video cards).

Mac mini 2018 photo editing