I bought a new Mac Mini a couple of years ago, and set it up with 2 nice 27" UHD monitors, a good keyboard, and an excellent mouse. I love this setup so much. Since it's always plugged in, it's optimized for performance, not portability. There's no issue with docking, as everything's always where I left it. And finally, I have a desk in my home office and that's where I work. When I leave my office at the end of the day, I'm done doing "serious" work.
I have an iPad Pro I carry around the house for content consumption and doing lightweight work like blogging (with a keyboard case) or replying to emails. But while I could write software on my iPad, it's just so much more comfortable at the desk in my office that in practice I'm not going to.
So far, separating between "work" and "play" modes has been a huge success for me.
The Mac Studio looks like a perfect replacement for my always-docked 2017 MacBook pro. If you were replacing this today, would you stay with the Mac Mini or go with the Studio?
There was always such a wide gap between the Mini and the Mac Pro that I have preferred a decently specced MacBook to the Mini. But I think the Studio changes that for me.
I have an M1 air, which is the same chip as the mini, and I haven't hid a performance point for coding yet and that is with the air throtting after about 8 minutes on max CPU (something which the mini won't do, because it has a fan).
Of course if you do GPU intensive stuff, that might be an issue. Do keep in mind that the single core is not much faster on the studio, there are just more cores.
If I were buying one out of my own wallet, I'd probably get a Mini. It's such a great little computer. If work's picking up the tab, like if it's time for a hardware refresh, I'd definitely get the Studio. It's not that much more than a nice MBP and seems to be a beast.
I have an iPad Pro I carry around the house for content consumption and doing lightweight work like blogging (with a keyboard case) or replying to emails. But while I could write software on my iPad, it's just so much more comfortable at the desk in my office that in practice I'm not going to.
So far, separating between "work" and "play" modes has been a huge success for me.