Apple’s M4 Mac Mini Review: Small Size, Big Power

Introduction: A Tiny Yet Mighty Machine

So this is the new M4 equipped Mac Mini and it’s something special first of all it’s very small if you compare the size to uh the previous generation of Mac Mini it’s like a much smaller footprint but then when you compare it to the current generation of Mac Studio it’s like it looks like a completely different class of product but you’ll see in a minute the benchmarks and performance of this thing can many cases keep up with the Mac Studio so I bring up the conversation of size at the start of of this video because there is nothing else on the market that is of this size that has this kind of performance and also is priced as well as this thing is so this thing starts at $600 retail $500 for students and I’d argue that it’s one of the best valued products that Apple has ever put out at least for the base model.

Design and Build Quality

Now a couple thoughts about the design the power button is located on the bottom and when I first saw that I was like that’s kind of weird but having used this for a week it’s such a light and small device that just to like tilt it up and hit it it’s effortless like you won’t accidentally press it or anything like that and how often are you actually turning on this on and off this machine it’s like very easy to do it even one-handed uh the other thing is if you’ll notice on the bottom there’s a circular Grill here so this serves as an intake and the exhaust so typically on the Mac desktops there’s like a rear mounted exhaust that kind of sucks cool air in and then out the back but because it’s such a small device there’s no rear exhaust it’s just it sucks the cooler in goes through the device then comes out the back portion of this circular exhaust and it’s just a neat way for them to cool a device that’s super small because they just didn’t have the capability to put an exhaust on the back like they typically would on the larger desktops uh the other thing is the built-in speaker is significantly better than the one that was on the previous generation of Mac minis it’s still not a great sounding sound system it’s just that for people that want that super clean setup with no like speakers on their desk uh you can do that on this I think they’re good enough and loud enough for that if you want want that speakerless setup but also there is no mic so if you want to have like voice calls and stuff you need to have a webcam or some kind of audio input device for your Communications.

Ports and Connectivity

Now in regards to Ports there are three Thunderbolt ports on the back they’re either going to be Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 depending on the chip that you go with in terms of configurations and on the front there’s also two more USBC ports these are not Thunderbolt enabled but if you’ll notice there are no usba a ports at all on this device and if you plan on connecting a keyboard to this thing like a wired keyboard there are a lot of keyboards out there that still do not support like a direct USBC to USBC connection you might need some kind of dongle to make it work now Apple’s own peripherals have been updated they now support USBC charging so instead of the lightning charging hole it now supports like a regular USBC connection the mouse the Magic Mouse has also been updated to USBC but it’s still on the bottom like this came out in 2015 I want to say it’s been like a decade of memes of upside down charging memes on this thing they didn’t care they’re like yeah here is the new one more upside down charging.

Chip and Performance: M4 vs M4 Pro

So the Macon itself this comes in either the M4 chip or the M4 Pro chip the pro gives you more CPU and GPU cores it also has more RAM and storage at the base and also at the top end but the M4 Pro chip also gets you Thunderbolt 5 ports now Thunderbolt 5 ports are significantly higher bandwidth than Thunderbolt 3 and four of the past but the reality is that there’s not a lot of utility to Thunderbolt 5 outside of displays like if you’re trying to connect super fast drives Thunderbolt 3 and four are more than enough for it if you want to connect ultra high resolution displays three of them to this machine then yeah the Thunderbolt 5 connection would be useful just the base model though already has really good connectivity for external displays you get three of them so the M4 and M4 Pro chips are incredibly fast these chips perform really well on benchmarks and workflows that lean on really fast C performance the multi-core performance of the m M4 Pro is particularly impressive to me now in terms of GPU performance the M4 chips are a decent step up over the M2 chips from a couple years back but depending on your workflow these new chips can be very impressive.

Real-World Usage and Workflow

So the way that I shoot my videos that I have four 4K cameras running simultaneously so I have one in the back there and then I have one over here and then I have two in front depending on the camera angle that I want to use I’ll switch them in real time using the uh stream deck and I’ll just swap them depending on what I want to show you what I want you guys to look at at a particular moment I do this stuff during my shoot like I don’t I try not to edit so much later on I try to do this stuff at the moment just so it feels a little bit more live for you guys now in order to pull this off this needs a fairly powerful system because this has four 4k camera feeds being encoded at real time at once and to do this I have an M2 Ultra system I used to use uh like a regular Windows system RTX 490 but that thing was very loud because you’re running this thing the whole time of the shoot and if you’ll notice it’s quiet I couldn’t do that with any window system that I built but this GPU or the the GPU cores that are inside the system are being pushed pretty hard I wouldn’t say that’s like full but that’s probably you know 60 70% of the GPU usage and this whole thing works the only reason why it works is because that M2 Ultra is as powerful and as quiet as it is so the Mac Studio handles my workflow very well but how does the new M4 Mac Mini do this is the same camera setup so it’s four 4K cameras being fed into the system but it’s being run off of the M4 Pro Mac Mini and you can tell the GPU pressure is pretty high right it’s going full blast and the 14 CPU cores are ripping but it keeps up and this is all real time like it’s being recorded and encoded off of that device now when I first set this up I tried to use the M2 Pro Pro Mac Mini to tie everything together and it wasn’t even close this thing was dropping frames like crazy and I think it was just the it’s just a very demanding workflow when you have realtime encoding of multiple cameras it’s tough especially if you want to do it quietly so when the M4 Mac Mini showed up I was like I wanted it to work so badly cuz this is so small and compact it’d be such a testament to how powerful this thing really is if it could do this and it did granted the M2 Ultra Does It Better there’s more Headroom on it but that thing’s like four times the price and like six times the size and to do it on this system that’s so crazy cool now it does get warm when it’s going full blast for a long period of time but it’s still very very quiet and for all intents and purposes it’s pretty much a silent machine.

Gaming Capabilities

Now quick note on gaming so I think because this thing is priced the way that it is relatively inexpensively and because it’s as powerful as it is at that price point I’ve already seen a lot of kind of Articles and Publications clickbait around the idea of like you know the Mac Mini is the is a p is five killer it is not so yes it does have inexpensive Hardware like a console and it does have very powerful capabilities kind of like a console way more powerful than a console but it does not have the library of games that makes a gaming machine so like if you want to install crossover and play with wine and tweak all that stuff or do like a Windows installation or a windows partition you can it’s just that I think there’s just no it’s not a gaming device it’s gaming capable and every that goes by it’s even more capable but we’re so far away from being able to call this a gaming device that’s just my take on it.

Pricing and Configuration

Okay I want to move this conversation to what I think is the most important thing the pricing and the configuration so at the base price it’s a very good deal but any kind of upgrade any kind of tweak to this configuration at the base massively increases its price and I just have thoughts about that this unit here that did most of my testing on is the M4 Pro chip it’s the one that they sent out for reviewers to kind of give the best impression of what the M4 Mac Mini is capable of however I think the vast majority of people should never even look at the pro chip because the base M4 is already very capable and unless you know that your workflow demands some kind of very powerful CPU and or GPU I would not even look at that Pro pricing just because you get amazing value at that base chip now in terms of the RAM and storage the ram is horrifically overpriced the moment you start adding stuff it’s $200 for an extra 8 gigs of RAM and then $400 for an extra 16 gigs of ram it’s painful just looking at those numbers on their website now I did think that when I was looking at these things I thought we should all be really thankful that Apple intelligence came to life like if Apple intelligence didn’t come out then Apple wouldn’t feel the need to have 16 GB models on their base model and we might still just be looking at 8 gigs of RAM on this on this machine like for real that in an alternate universe that could actually have been the case uh but so yeah Ram I wouldn’t I wouldn’t spring for more unless you have a very clear clear need in your mind of like particular workflows that need it I wouldn’t even say most video editing would need it if you’re kind of like mid moderate levels of uh video editing the other thing is storage and the storage is equally painful to look at I think most people at this point recognize that you can get external options and I think on a system like this you’re not carrying it around it’s just makes much more sense to have an external drive there are two kinds of externals I want to talk about there’s the regular fast USB drives that are relatively inexpensive but then there’s the ultra fast USB for Thunderbolt type drives and these are crazy fast they’re still not as fast as the internal storage of the Mac Mini but if you need really fast St if you’re working with like really large media files and you need to process it and just ingest it quickly on these systems uh I would highly recommend like a use or Thunderbolt type Drive instead of the regular USB 3.2 or slower drives in case you’re unfamiliar with those things.

Choosing Between M4 and M4 Pro

Last thing the chip for the people that are trying to decide like should I get the the pro or the non-pro the pro it’s like probably three $400 more just for the chip itself you do get more RAM and storage but if you’re unsure and you’re like not you know immediately aware of that you need to get the pro I would just get the regular one and also think that if you want to resell the stuff later on like let’s say you do get the regular like base M4 and you find out a year later oh you know I want something faster it is I think it’ be very easy to sell off a base M4 for close to what you paid it for that’s just what I think.