The M4 Mac Mini is Incredible!

Summary

So usually, one crazy thing about a new piece of tech is enough to get my attention, just something out of the ordinary about it. But this new M4 Mac Mini has three things about it that are insane. So instead of having an event this year, Apple decided to do a bunch of press releases in a row for the last week of October to update their whole Mac lineup to M4. And one of them was for this new Mac mini. Now, a lot of us might not give

too much thought to the Mac mini, like, yeah, maybe it holds an important place as the most affordable Mac, but if you’re not buying one, you’re not really thinking about it too much. But the number one most insane thing about this refresh is, well, I mean look at it, it’s tiny. It is absolutely tiny. Apple’s gone through and redesigned basically all of their computers now that have gotten the Mac silicon update. Well, except this one, this is the same design as a while ago, but the Mac mini was kind of technically

Highlights

• 🚀 Incredible Size: The Mac Mini is remarkably tiny, measuring just 5x5x2 inches.
• 💰 Best Value: Starting at $599, it offers a great deal with 16GB of memory and M4 chip.
• 🔌 Versatile Ports: Includes Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and multiple Thunderbolt ports for connectivity.
• 🤔 Quirky Design: The power button’s placement is oddly positioned, inviting some criticism.
• 📦 Portable Workstation: The maxed-out version serves as a powerful, portable editing machine.
• 💻 Best Performance: Outperforms many existing Mac models in benchmarks, showcasing power and efficiency.
• 👨‍🎓 Student Discount: The price drops to $499 for eligible students, adding to its appeal.

🏆 Compact Design

overdue for a redesign. And the new one, it actually kinda looks a little bit more like a shrunken Mac Studio than a shrunken old Mac mini. But it’s now a five inch by five inch footprint and two inches tall. I’ll say that again, a five by five by two desktop computer. Now I like small desktops, and yes, you could get a tiny desktop computer before, there’s plenty of amazing mini ITX build videos all over the internet that I’ve watched for years. They’re sick. But there’s levels to this, there’s small computers and then there’s tiny computers.

And this Mac mini is smaller than my R5 with a lens on it. It’s smaller than a new roll of duct tape. It’s smaller than the footprint of the new iPhone and barely bigger than the absolutely tiny Apple TV. Apple’s seemingly had this obsession with making certain computers as small as possible, even before Apple silicon came along. So this has just kind of unlocked another level for them to push it even further than ever before. Yeah, there are fans in here, but there are also ports on the back. Gigabit ethernet by default, full size HDMI is still here.

💸 Unbeatable Value

And then three Thunderbolt ports on the back and then there’s two USB-C 3 ports on the front plus the headphone jack. So still no SD card reader. And there’s obviously now no more USB-A. If you tried to build or buy another computer to match this thing, you will either end up building a computer that’s just as small but nowhere near as capable, or a computer that’s just as capable, but nowhere near as small. It is just a hilariously unnecessarily tiny computer. It’s great. I would also like to start a new conspiracy theory.

I would like to use this video to start a conspiracy theory. I think that there is someone whose job it is at Apple, someone whose sole purpose (sinister mysterious music) is to come up with one obnoxious thing to complain about for every new Apple product redesign. Like this is the person that put the notch on the iPhone. This is the person that put the charge port at the bottom of the Magic Mouse. And this person’s best work is right here on this new Mac mini, putting the power button on the bottom of it.

🔗 Connectivity Options

Like, why? There are so many better places to put a power button, like at the front or the side, or literally anywhere on the back, like all the other small Mac desktops. Or at the top. That would’ve been fine too. But no, they chose behind the back corner, which is (sighs) just… I mean, I don’t use that button very often. I don’t really turn the Mac on and off with a button almost ever. I might sleep it and wake it back up, and maybe every couple of weeks, I’ll have to remember that the button’s back there.

But yeah, it’s just dumb enough to get memed on and complained about without actually being an issue. Well played, guy. But yeah, you know, the typical consequences of a computer getting smaller are battery, speakers, and thermals. There’s just less room inside for those things. Battery of course doesn’t make a huge difference on a desktop, who cares? Speakers, kind of the same thing, who cares? And thermals have been redesigned in a way that seem to be working just fine. This thing hardly gets over a peep.

🤷‍♂️ Design Flaw

If you do heavy stuff, the single fan spins up and you can hear it, but it’s always been quiet, sitting on the desk, you can hardly hear it. So then the number two insane thing about the new Mac mini is that the base model is kind of an incredible deal now. No, like I don’t think you understand it. I think it’s actually one of the best deals in tech. It’s certainly the best out of any of Apple’s new product offerings right now. And I mean, I’m kind of not used to saying it, but it is a really good deal.

So this base M4 Mac mini costs 599, right? So for that, you get the base computer with the M4 chip, which has quietly doubled to 16 gigs of unified memory instead of eight from before. So the 10 core CPU and the 10 core GPU. Now we’re four generations into Apple silicon and the gains are actually kind of starting to stack up versus M1. We already know it was a huge difference from the Intel chips, but I actually wanna get a little bit more into that in the MacBook Pro review because I’ve been using an M1 Max MacBook Pro

for three years since it came out. And the M4 Max is the first one that’s actually tempted me to upgrade between generations of Apple silicon. It’s really interesting. So get subscribed and stay tuned for that video when it comes out. But the main thing you need to know is this base M4 chip is great, it’s super solid and power efficient at everyday normal activities like web browsing and music streaming and multitasking like crazy. And it can handle what I think I would call medium-grade activities very easily.

Not heavy stuff like graphically-intensive gaming or a heavy video editing, but pretty much anything short of that. This could be a coding and developing machine, this could be a photo editing machine. Pixelmator runs like a dream. And fun fact, Apple just bought Pixelmator, interestingly. But yeah, just having a ton of Arc tabs open, stuff like that, like just running around, multitasking, it runs like a dream, it’s great. It’s as good as you’d expect the world’s fastest single core performer to do.

🎒 Portable Powerhouse

So yeah, Mac mini, you know, four years, like I said, it has been the most affordable Mac, the sort of entry point for anyone to get into Mac OS. But this year with the doubling of the base memory, it just feels like a particularly good deal. Think of it this way, the M4 iMac that also just got refreshed is basically the exact same computer, but just in an upright desktop with a non replaceable display. That starts at $1,299. So you can use that $700 difference to kind of get whatever screen you want.

Now, you can obviously also upgrade from the base Mac mini, but I don’t think you should, and I’ll explain why. See, Apple is known for building what I’ve called a price ladder, and they’re just trying to get you to climb as high as possible. They do this across all their products, but there’s basically always a really tempting upgrade sitting right above the base model. And then when you spend that money, you’re kind of right underneath another tempting upgrade, and then they kind of walk you up,

trying to get you to spend as much money as possible. It’s really smart, they do it with iPhones and with iPads and with everything else. This base Mac mini, I’m telling you is a good deal, but it only has 256 gigs of storage. And many people are fine with that and they can live with that, that’s great. But if you know you’re gonna be working with a lot of media, a lot of video, then you start looking at upgrades to the storage, and that’s where you’ll find that walking it up to a terabyte costs 400 more dollars.

🌟 Performance Leader

Or if you plan to do some wired networking, bumping it up to 10 gig ethernet costs 100 more dollars on top of that. for the price of just those upgrades, you could almost get an entire nother MAC mini. It’s crazy. Like basically, across the board, Apple’s upgrade pricing is pretty crazy with this computer, which is why I’m specifically saying the base model is such a good deal. And actually if you’re lucky enough to have a .edu email address right now, the student discount drops it down to 499, which is sick.

But once you know you’re gonna be doing upgrades to the pre-purchase spec, which you have to know before buying it, ’cause you can’t upgrade it after the fact, all the memory, everything is built in, then it becomes more of a normal deal. I do wanna say this though. So the third and final crazy thing about this Mac Mini is that the maxed out version has a case for the best portable workstation Mac. Now this doesn’t apply to everybody. This is coming from me, someone who used to drag an iMac Pro in a Pelican case

📚 Educational Incentive

through the airport to events because it was the fastest editing machine that I could reasonably travel with, and it actually made sense for me. So coming from that perspective, this new Mac mini is sick. So looking at the Mac Studios, those aren’t upgraded to M4 yet, they’ve all got the M2 generation. And it’s also not gonna be the Mac Pro, which is also still on the M2 generation and obviously not portable. The iMac is on M4, but there’s no Pro chips, so it’s just the base M4 chip. So this Mac mini is the easiest way

to pack an M4 Pro chip with you and just throw it in a travel bag super easily. An equivalent spec’d MacBook Pro with M4 Pro starts at $2,000, which is actually another decently good deal as far as performance. But if you don’t need a laptop or if you just wanna plug and play into monitors wherever you go, 1399 gets you the M4 Pro Mac mini. And that upgrade also gets you the back Thunderbolt ports being Thunderbolt 5 instead of Thunderbolt 4. So it can support three 6K displays instead of two. So I’ve had and been testing the M4 Pro here

with 48 gigs of memory, and fun fact, if you run through some synthetic benchmarks, this runs up the highest CPU score of any desktop Mac ever. That includes the Mac Pro and the Mac Studios and all of them. This is by far the most powerful single core we’ve ever seen by a lot. And then Multi-Core just barely tops Geekbench’s all time Mac list, though as we know, CPU doesn’t really bump up all that much when you go from base to Pro to Max to Ultra, it’s way more GPU stuff. And so when you look at GPU benchmarks,

the most powerful Mac mini here with the M4 Pro, it was putting up M1 Max numbers, which again, shows how much these generations over time have been improving and stacking on top of each other. I’ve been editing videos on an M1 Max laptop for three years now on the MacBook Pro. So this Mac mini feels like one of those impossibly small computers Apple’s like always kind of wanted to make, even before Apple silicon. Like you probably remember some of their earlier attempts, like the “Trashcan” MAC Pro,

no doubt, they wanted do something crazy. They wanted to put a workstation-class computer on the desk cooled by a single fan. We saw how that went with the Intel chip inside, or even some of those razor thin i9 MacBook Pros that started having overheating issues. But now that Apple silicon has gotten this good and this efficient over time, they’re actually able to make tiny, powerful computers like the Mac Studio and now like this little Mac mini over here. Nobody was asking for the Mac mini to be even smaller, except for those people in the Spaceship Campus somewhere in California. Well played. Well played. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.