Mac Studio vs Several Mac Minis

DEVONthink
1

I find myself fairly often running DT4 tasks which are fairly time-intensive and I want to run in the background while I do other work. Combining large sets of documents, OCR of large document sets, and long AI scripts to summarize documents are most typical.

My initial thought was to upgrade to a Mac Studio with M3 Ultra.

But I am wondering if it would be better to buy one or even several Mac Minis which I would sync to DT4 and then initiate long document processing jobs by remoting into those computers. It would cost less than a Mac studio; I am pondering for multiple tasks whether 2 or 3 Mac Minis is better than 1 Mac Studio.

Is there any way I could estimate/calculate which is better with actual performance data?

2

Without buying and comparing the machines? Probably not. Especially as Apple offers multiple configurations for each of them.

E.g. OCR on multiple machines processing small documents concurrently might be faster but how would you distribute the workload efficiently? And theoretically each machine could run one of your AI scripts but this should be also possible using osascript in the Terminal on one machine. In both cases the scripts could be slower or fail due to overload or throttling by the AI provider.

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