Hi guys - I'm on the edge of getting a pimped out 2018 Macmini to replace my 2015 Macbook Pro. The only thing I cannot decide on is having normal Ethernet or a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connector.

I'm not a Ethernet user. Ever. But I kind of feel that 10 Gigabit Ethernet is a pretty big thing and even makers of audio interfaces is starting to take notice.

What's your take on 10 Gigabit Ethernet?

/C

Hi,

the optional choice makes sense with NAS or other computers with 10G interfaces in your studio. So for instance if you'll be doing some video editing with central storage or have studio with multiple workstations, where you often exchange data, I'd say go for that.
1G Ethernet caps you at approx. 110 MBytes/s of bandwidth, so for example with some 4K video and fluent work with certain codecs directly from NAS instead of local drives, you'll actually need that.

With audio over IP that's not really necessary, unless we're talking about some backbone networking at large sites, because you can easily transfer hundreds of audio channels back and forth over single 1G Ethernet from multitude of devices. So no, for this particular use case, I don't think, vendors of audio interfaces will be adopting 10G Ethernet ports.
Such move could be possibly motivated "just" by necessity of bandwidth increase, because isolated transport latency (not talking about total latency in your DAW, that depends also on used endpoints) of audio over IP connections is already very low (sub ms) and rather depends on complexity of network topology (eg. amount of hops) than bandwidth.. So they won't gain anything there by shift to 10G with regards to latency.

Michal

Thanks for taking the time to post such an exhaustive answer. Much appreciated.

/Carl

You most likely wont need it, I've recently bought a house and networked it for CAT 6A for future proofing, but then bought normal networking gear (ubiquti which is great) because well, it was too expensive, I'm a video editor by trade but do all of my work at our studios. If comes a time I can work from home, i will upgrade everything to 10 Gbe

To put in qualative terms; if you're a heavy network user going from 1Gb to 10Gb is a similar experience to moving from HDD to SSD

For example, rendering large 96K+ audio files on a network drive via a 10Gb lan is noticeably faster
Storing and loading sample libraries from network drives becomes a doddle @ 10Gb

I'm planning to buy a top-specced Macmini 2018 so that I will be futureproof for whatever Apple has in store for their hardware and/or OS. It will be a Mojave station until at least one year when all software have caught up to 64 bits. So since I'm planning to stick with this box for at least three years - I thought that maybe 10 Gigabit had the possibility of becomig the next big thing in audio further on.

Thanks guys for clearing that out for me. Really, really appreciate it.

/C