Apple Mac mini M2 (2023)

What owners say

The cheapest version of this machine has the slowest disk in the range, and it is the version most likely to need a fast one. Apple put its 256 GB of storage on a single memory chip where the previous generation used two, and a teardown plus a disk test measured about 1,500 MB/s, between 30 and 50 per cent slower than the same capacity a year earlier. The same machine with 512 GB reads and writes at roughly 3,200 and 2,900. Apple did not deny it: the company said the single chip is denser and that real-world work is still faster. Now set that beside 8 GB of memory, which is what this configuration has. When memory runs out macOS writes to the disk, and here the disk is the slow one. Nobody has published a measurement of what three years of that does to the drive, so treat it as a mechanism rather than a verdict. What the machine does well is stay calm. A lab could not measure it at idle because it sat below the room's own noise floor, and it reached 29.4 dB(A) only with processor and graphics at full load for two minutes. Idle draw peaked at 2.6 W. And unlike the laptop with the same chip, it has a fan, so it does not slow down under sustained work.

For whom

Everyday desktop work where 256 GB and 8 GB are genuinely enough, for someone who will keep their files on an external drive.

Not for

Anything that fills 8 GB, because the overflow lands on the slowest disk Apple fits to this machine, and neither can be changed afterwards.

Our own summary of 6 published sources, reviewed Sep 17, 2026. We have not tested this Mini PC ourselves; the sources are listed under About this data.