Don’t be fooled – they start affordably, but the upgrades soon mount up!

Apple’s Mac mini was unquestionably the star of this week’s show.

If you are taking the time to read this then I won’t need to tell you that we have just had quite the week for us Apple fans. In a not-quite-unprecedented turn of events, Apple decided to announce their new Macs one at a time, day-by-day and I think it’s fair to say there was one star of the week.

The new Mac mini decided it was time to come from the shadows and that it was its turn to shine.

The little but mighty Mac announcement was sandwiched between Monday’s iMac release and Wednesday’s MacBook Pro lineup. Both of those Macs were given solid improvements – but nothing headline-grabbing. The iMac was merely given the vastly improved M4 chip, a lick of deeper-hued paint and a nano texture option – a theme that ran through the week. Oh, and the iMac, like all Macs now starts with a minimum of 16GB of memory.

Apparently, something called Apple Intelligence is coming…

The flagship laptop Macs were equally only spruced up. Now coming in Space Black & Silver, the 1080p 12MP camera now supports Centre Stage (as it does on the iMac). SDR brightness is up from 500nits to 1000nits and other than the fact that base storage now starts at 512GB – and that was kind of it, well, kind of…

That is apart from one little detail that was first showcased the day before when the Mac mini was announced… the higher-end MacBooks are now packing Thunderbolt 5 ports for massively improved connectivity.

M4 Mac mini stands front & centre

We had known for some time that the Mac mini was getting a big makeover – and we weren’t left disappointed!

It has been shrunk to an almost unrealistically small 5 inches by 5 inches and is stuffed with awesome connectivity and almost unparalleled power. Whereas the M3 architecture had always seemed flawed and doomed for a short lifespan- the M4 chipset looks to be the real deal.

With all this power on tap, it suddenly made me start to wonder if I could consider the unthinkable and retire my 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with the little imposter.

I have a big thing about future-proofing so I decided to take my time and pour through the spec sheets and do my best to A/B compare and take a good look at if this mini could realistically be expected to replace its big brother.

So after a few days of pondering, let me walk you through what I have chosen – and why.

It was always going to be Pro

To give me and the Mac any chance I thought I had to go for the higher-end M4 chip, so I went with the un-binned M4 Pro option.

My Mac mini will come with a 14-core CPU & 20-core GPU config which was a £200 upgrade on top of the starting price of £1399. Looking just at figures on the sheet it’s a case of swings and roundabouts. My MacBook Pro has only a 10-core CPU but a 32-core GPU. Also, the MBP has a pair of media encoder & de-coder engines. Will that affect my video export times?

Memory bandwidth is down from 400GB/s to 273GB/s but I have a feeling the way that the newest 3nm architecture will behave should largely negate that.

Next on the options list was the memory. Although I am a fairly tidy worker and don’t have endless apps open for no reason, neither do I want to feel restricted or slowed down by not spec’ing the mini with enough memory. So here, I have gone mid-ground.

With the benefit of being able to use my MacBook as a yardstick, I can fairly accurately gauge what I’m going to need. The MBP has 32GB of memory. I have never beach-balled it or felt that I have even come close to it. So, for the work I carry out I have gone with 48GB of memory. That means the Lewis pile is lighter by another £400.

Storage – the next big question

We all know that Apple makes its margins on the options – and on none more so than it does with storage.

There are a couple of points I need to go through here and why I have ended up taking the route I have. Generally I hate the mess of external storage. The fewer cables and mess the better for me. Add to that I have always found that onboard storage is quicker and more robust.

But, the Mac mini will spend most of its life as a desktop. That means I can plug in the external SSD and find a remote place to hide it and never see it again. And there is another reason I feel I haven’t gone bonkers with Apple’s storage options – and that is those Thunderbolt 5 ports I mentioned earlier.

No one saw those coming and for me, they have possibly been the game-changer of all the announcements from the past few days. Transfer speeds of up to 120GB/s are possible with Thunderbolt 5 which opens up all sorts of realistic possibilities of working meaningfully and seamlessly with external SSDs.

The jump from the basic 512GB to 1TB of storage has already cost me £200. But to jump another 1TB from Apple would cost an eye-watering £400. Although Thunderbolt 5 SSDs are thin on the ground now, after Apple’s announcements this week you can bet it won’t be long until they are more common. I found one option online – an OWC 2TB SSD for only £350 which means it’s very nearly half price when compared to Apple’s offering.

The other thing I need to seriously look into is a NAS backup/archive system. I’ve never had one but it does sound like something I need to look into. Although not cheap I think the time has come to jump to the next level when it comes to my backup systems. Any advice? Are they simple to set up and use? Are there any do’s and don’ts or best options?

Again, referring to my MacBook which has 4TB of storage over 3 years of heavy use I have only used nearly 1TB. As a matter of routine I always edit my videos from the desktop – but the moment I’m done with them, I archive the files. And with cloud storage being so good now and with Dropbox and Smart Sync for example, most of my big files don’t need to be stored locally anyway. And if I do in time go the NAS route, then I think the 1TB onboard storage I have will be plenty.

Win win

So although this week has been expensive, I am pretty happy with the choices I’ve made. To recap my new M4 Mac mini will look like this;

• M4 Pro – with a 14-core CPU & 20-core GPU
• 48GB unified memory
• 1TB of storage
• Gigabit Ethernet
  

It’s set me back £2199 but with everything I’ve been reading and learning I think the M4 Pro will more than hold its own against the older M1 Max which was built on the archaic 5nm architecture. Was I worried about the notion of trading down from a Max to a Pro chip? Hell, yeah, but in my heart I knew that so much would have changed in that time.

The proof will be in the pudding I guess. Where I had originally thought the Mac mini would sit not doing much underneath its new home of the lush Studio Display, now I am starting to think I am going to put this thing to the test quickly and see what it’s really made of.

Annoyingly, being a customer-spec’d machine, I will have to wait 2 or 3 weeks for it to arrive – but that’s fine. My MacBook Pro is still working just fine – but now I’m curious as to how quick this M4 Pro chip will feel.

And here’s the win-win I alluded to…assuming I have a monitor at home, the Mac mini could easily become a portable rig. I mean it’s way lighter and smaller than the MacBook. On the face of it, this thing is almost too good to be true.

Mac mini – I’me ready for ya! Come and wow me!