M4 Professional Mac mini evaluate

Apple instructed us the brand new Mac mini was smaller. It reveals us pictures and movies. And nonetheless, after I took it out of the field, I used to be considerably unprepared for simply how small it truly is.

On this mighty little microcomputer is Apple’s new M4 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The efficiency and worth on this base configuration, for simply $599, are fairly good. It is a desktop pc that may serve the common consumer nicely for years at a really inexpensive worth.

However then you definitely begin to take a look at what it takes to do just a bit extra, and the worth vanishes. Apple hasn’t modified its reminiscence or storage pricing construction in years and it stands out much more now with a greater base mannequin. Increased RAM configurations are shockingly costly. Extra storage prices a small fortune. You may very rapidly worth your self right into a system that isn’t a great deal in any respect.

We reviewed the model of the Mac mini that comes with the M4 Professional processor, a souped-up model with extra CPU cores, double the GPU energy, greater than twice the reminiscence bandwidth, and extra. It, too, is an honest worth at its beginning worth however rapidly escalates due to Apple’s horrible improve pricing.

If you’d like an excellent Mac desktop, the brand new M4 Mac mini needs to be excessive in your listing, however solely in sure configurations.

M4 Mac mini: Processor and upgrades

The bottom mannequin Mac mini contains an M4 (with 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU), 16 GB of RAM, and 256 GB SSD, for $599. You’ll want so as to add a monitor, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad, but it surely’s a system that may serve somebody nicely for basic on a regular basis duties for years.

At $1,399 you may step as much as an M4 Professional, albeit a cut-back model of the chip with 12 CPU cores (relatively than 14) and 16 GPU cores (relatively than 20). It has 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Each of these entry-level configurations are a decent worth. Because of Apple’s latest change to incorporate extra RAM in its base configurations, you may even name them a “whole lot,” as Apple merchandise go. However as with all trendy Apple merchandise, you can not add RAM or storage after buy, so it’s essential pay Apple’s improve costs if you purchase it. And people costs are, frankly, freeway theft.

Need to leap from the cut-back M4 Professional to the total model with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores? That’ll be an additional $200.

Bounce from 16GB of RAM within the base mannequin to 24GB? $200. Need 32 GB as an alternative? That’s $400. Leaping from a 256GB SSD to 512GB is $200. To hop as much as 1TB, it’s $400. Apple’s costs for RAM and flash storage are obscene, many instances larger than the price of the elements or equal retail merchandise. Right here’s a 2TB SSD that, on the time of this writing, sells for $150 and delivers efficiency akin to Apple’s inside storage, as one instance.

Get this: The entry-level M4 Mac mini, with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, is $599. Boosting that to 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD is an further $600. Apple’s improve pricing is so loopy that for the worth of a further 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD, you should purchase an entire second Mac mini with the identical quantity of RAM and storage, plus the processor, ethernet, case, and your complete remainder of the pc!

Our evaluate unit is an almost top-of-the-line mannequin. It’s a full 14/20 core M4 Professional (+$200) with 48GB of RAM (+$400) a 1TB SSD (+$200) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (+$100). The grand whole is $2,299, about $300 greater than the entry-level Mac Studio that also has an M2 Max.

M4 Mac mini: Small however mighty

The brand new Mac mini is just 5 inches sq. and a pair of inches tall. That’s lower than 1 / 4 the amount of the Mac Studio, which isn’t precisely a big pc. It shares extra in widespread with the Apple TV 4K (3.66 inches squared and 1.2 inches tall).

Up entrance, you’ll discover a headphone jack and two USB-C ports. Across the again is Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, and three extra Thunderbolt/USB-C ports (Thunderbolt 4 is supported on M4 Thunderbolt 5 on M4 Professional). There are not any USB-A ports and no SD card reader.

Foundry

Regardless of the tiny dimension, the facility provide is built-in, so that you don’t must plug an enormous adapter into your wall or take up a number of plugs’ price of area on an influence strip.

It’s a wide variety of ports for such a small pc, although the overall exclusion of USB-A is greater than a bit of annoying. Many trendy gadgets, from wi-fi dongles for mice and controllers to audio interfaces and microphones, nonetheless use USB-A. And in case you’re ever handed some knowledge on a USB thumb drive, there’s a great likelihood it’s USB-A. You’ll need to increase your Mac mini with an inexpensive USB-C hub.

Foundry

The ability button is on the underside of the back-left nook, raised off your desk by the fan riser. The hole isn’t sufficiently big for many fingers, so that you’ll have to elevate your Mac mini just a bit to press the facility button. It’s not excellent, but additionally not a dealbreaker; we expect most customers enable their desktop Macs to fall asleep relatively than energy them down utterly, so it’s not as if you’ll have to do that usually.

The small dimension doesn’t depart a lot room for lively cooling, however Apple’s distinctive airflow resolution works nicely. Air is pulled in through a vent across the raised backside of the Mac, circulated, after which exhausted out that very same little riser. Throughout day-to-day duties, the Mac mini is nearly silent.

Foundry

In lengthy video encoding jobs or when enjoying high-end 3D video games, the fan spins up and turns into fairly audible. It’s not a jet engine, and I’ve definitely heard louder cooling techniques, but it surely’s there. I ought to notice that I ran all assessments with the Mac in Excessive Energy mode (solely accessible on the M4 Professional Mac mini) for max efficiency. This permits the fan to spin up larger, preserving the system cooler throughout lengthy intervals of intense work at the price of some noise.

M4 Professional Mac mini: Efficiency and effectivity

I’ve been impressed with the efficiency of the M4 Professional chip. For such a tiny and power-efficient processor, the benchmark numbers are fairly good. The bottom M4 performs extraordinarily nicely for a sub-$1000 pc, and the M4 Professional holds its personal in opposition to computer systems within the $1,500 vary. The storage efficiency is nice, too.

We’ll evaluate in opposition to the bottom M4 (in an iMac although the Mac mini ought to carry out about the identical), the newest high-end Mac mini (with an M2 Professional), and the Mac Studio with an M2 Max within the configuration with 38 GPU cores and 32GB of RAM. That’s the opposite Mac desktop pc priced about the identical as our take a look at system ($2,399 with 1TB SSD).

Geekbench 6

Starting with the favored standby Geekbench 6. It’s clear Apple’s CPU cores have come a good distance, rapidly. These are a few of the greatest Geekbench efficiency scores you could find. That single-core rating tops any Intel or AMD CPU available on the market by a great margin. And with solely 14 cores, it nonetheless delivers a multi-core rating of over 22,000. That’s in the identical ballpark because the M2 Extremely (24 cores) or the newest Intel Core i9 (with 24 cores).

The Geekbench 6 compute benchmark makes use of the GPU to carry out computational duties not associated to 3D graphics rendering, like background blur, face detection, and particle physics simulation. The 20-core GPU within the M4 Professional reveals a great enchancment over the M2 Professional, however it might’t sustain with the 38-core GPU within the M2 Max. It’s roughly on par with an older, mid-range discrete laptop computer GPU like a Radeon 6600M or a GeForce RTX 2060.

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench performs high-end rendering of the sort utilized in TV or movie and could be run fully on the CPU or use the GPU. We see that new M4 CPU core flexing its energy once more right here, with a single-core rating approach above the perfect Intel and AMD chips and a multi-core rating that matches Intel and AMD chips which have 16 or extra cores. All of which devour much more energy.

The GPU rating of over 9,000 beats the M2 Max even with fewer GPU cores—you may thank new options like mesh shaders and ray tracing acceleration for that. It’s across the similar efficiency as a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or Radeon RX 6800.

Handbrake 1.8.2

The Handbrake video encoder is a good way to check CPU efficiency for media creation apps. We encode the Tears of Metal 4K video right down to 1080p H.265, utilizing each a CPU-based x265 encoder and the “videotoolbox” encoder that leverages Apple’s devoted video encoding {hardware}.

In each instances, we see a pleasant huge leap over each the bottom M4 and Apple’s earlier desktop Macs. It’s nearly twice as quick because the final Mac mini with M2 Professional, and even flies previous the M2 Max within the Mac Studio.

iMovie export

We additionally run a fast export take a look at with Apple’s personal shopper video modifying software program, iMovie, which tends to be well-optimized for brand new Macs. We export a 4K dwelling film mission utilizing each ProRes and Excessive export settings. The M2 Max manages to drag forward when making the H.264 file with Excessive settings, maybe due to having two video encode engines. Regardless of having just one video encode engine, the M4 Professional manages to edge out the M2 Max when exporting to ProRes.

Recreation benchmarks

There are quite a few the explanation why a Mac shouldn’t be somebody’s first selection for gaming, however they are succesful (if dear) sport machines. The improved CPU and reminiscence bandwidth make an enormous distinction in Civilization VI. Rise of the Tomb Raider nonetheless runs higher on the M2 Max due to its larger GPU, however the newer and extra environment friendly GPU of the M4 Professional isn’t all that far behind. This degree of efficiency is a bit of decrease than what you may count on from a $1,000 gaming PC.

Blackmagic Disk Velocity

Lastly, a fast examine of SSD efficiency with the Blackmagic Disk Velocity take a look at. We are able to see that the bottom mannequin M4 iMac is half as quick because the Mac mini, which retains tempo with different high-end Mac desktops. In some Macs, the 256GB configuration makes use of a single NAND chip and subsequently has half the SSD interface width, leading to decrease efficiency. However our M4 iMac is a 1TB mannequin, so it’s doable that each one common techniques have half the SSD efficiency, whereas the M4 Professional- or M4 Max-based techniques are quicker.

Regardless, Apple hasn’t improved SSD efficiency for the reason that M2 technology.

Must you purchase an M4 Mac mini?

I actually like the brand new Mac mini. As a lot as I want it had even a single USB-A port and I feel the facility button placement is an personal purpose, I’m impressed by its compact stature, quiet operation, and wonderful efficiency.

Now that Apple ships all Macs with at the least 16GB of RAM, the entry-level M4 Mac mini, at $599, is a fairly whole lot. So is the bottom M4 Professional mannequin, which comes with 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD and prices $1,399. But it surely additionally highlights Apple’s insane improve pricing. Most individuals will need greater than 256GB, and an improve to only 512GB is a downright avaricious $200. If you happen to truly need to use your pc for just a few years, we might counsel 1TB, which is a $400 improve.

A RAM improve wouldn’t harm both, and that’s $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB, or $400 to go to 32GB. That’s $200 for every 8GB of RAM, and it’s freeway theft. For the M4 Professional mannequin, leaping from 24GB to 48GB is $400, and the 64GB improve is $600. (Don’t ask me why $400 buys you 24GB of RAM within the M4 Professional mannequin however 16GB in the usual mannequin.) This isn’t simply “Apple premium” costs, it’s arbitrary and predatory company greed at its best. You don’t have any different, so that you’ll pay 5x as a lot because it ought to price.

The M4 Mac mini is a good pc at an excellent worth—simply so long as you don’t purchase the upgrades.