Be honest with yourself – do you need M4 Pro Apple silicon?
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of M4 Apple silicon.
In one way or another, I’ve been working on M4 devices for the past 6 months. The M4 Apple silicon odyssey started last summer for me with the M4 iPad Pro. Since then I’ve bought an M4 iMac, an M4 Pro Mac mini and an M4 Mac mini, although the Mac mini got returned once I’d decided that the M4 Pro Mac mini was going to be my daily for the next little while.
And I have nothing but good to say about the latest iteration of Apple silicon. M3 was a bit of a stopgap (I had an M3 MacBook Air). I mean it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have the cache of either M1 or in particular M4 Apple silicon. But whatever device you put M4 Apple silicon inside of it simply shines. And it’s not just benchmark stats that are quick, it’s when you’re using these things there’s a feeling of snappiness to them that’s hard for me to get over to you.
Part of Apple’s brief in hoping to persuade us to trade up to M4 Apple silicon is convincing us that, apart from the stunning performance, these Macs represent great value for money – and it’s that I want to look into a bit deeper.
Can you honestly do more, for less with M4 Apple silicon? Meaning, can you get high-end productivity, the kind that used to be the reserve of the highest spec’d Macs but now on a shoestring budget.
And that leads me to the question I get asked so often – should I go Pro or can I save money and go for a non-Pro M4 Mac?
For starters
Initially, as I just said, I bought two M4 Mac minis – a Pro and a non-Pro version.
For what I do here, that made for an interesting comparison. The basic mini performed well – and in all honesty, it would possibly have been good enough for me to use as my main Mac. But, I’ve learned from experience that workflows tend to get more intense over time, so I erred on the side of caution, returned the basic mini and kept the M4 Pro Mac mini. And life has been good!
The mini is an odd one – it looks great value on Apple’s website – that is until you start specking it out to become a viable working Mac that’s ready for use day in and day out.
But I want to help save you money and find out if you need to splash out on the more expensive M4 Pro Apple silicon or not. So, in short, I want to compare chips for you.
Although I don’t have a ‘cheap’ M4 Mac mini in the studio any longer, I do have a base M4 Apple silicon Mac – the M4 iMac. That iMac is about as basic as you can get. It’s the £1299 model – and it delivers fairly humble specs.
Apple loves having some cheap, attractive, headline ticket prices on their website for obvious reasons – it brings in a new audience to Apple and Mac and those cheaper Macs act as gateway Macs. Apple knows once they get their claws into you, there’s generally no turning back.
Once you’ve got some flesh in the Apple ecosystem they’ve got you for life!
Early on, these cheap Macs caught me out too. The thing is, if you’re not clued up it’s easy to buy a wrong’un. They all look great and the first time you see a Retina display the things look so impressive that it’s easy to overlook what’s going on under the hood – all that dazzles…
Apple silicon and certainly M4 Apple silicon makes it far harder to make a mistake – but even so, the specs need looking at.
Everything is not quite as it seems.
Under the hood
Later on, I’m going to see if this cheap ticket price is just a headline or whether it actually performs and gives you value for money, but first, it’s worth reminding you of the specs of the M4 iMac I’ve bought.
For £1299 you get an M4 iMac with an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB of unified memory and 256 GB of Apple SSD storage. It has a 16-core Neural Engine, just two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports and a headphone jack. There’s no Ethernet port, but you do get a Magic Mouse and keyboard – and of course that lovely 24-inch 4.5K Retina display.
From a value point of view, it begins to look like a steal – I mean you also get a 12MP Centre Stage camera with the iMac, six speakers, and three mics and all of that is wrapped up in that lovely, convenient, easy to set up, all-in-one body. But of course for us, it will only be value for money if it can hit above its weight.
Apple decided not to offer an iMac with an M4 Pro chip, so to compare we’ll have to look at other Macs.
The cheapest M4 Pro Mac out there is the M4 Pro Mac mini. That starts at £1399 – already £100 more than the basic iMac. The cheapest M4 Pro Mac starts with a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of memory and double the storage of the iMac at 512GB.
There is no display, mouse, keyboard, cameras or mics, but you do get some speakers and a Gigabit Ethernet port. You also get waybetter I/O. On the front, you have two USB-C ports and on the back three silly-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports and an HDMI port. The M4 Pro Mac mini shares the same 16-core Neural Engine as the iMac – and nominally, both are Apple Intelligence ready – whatever that means! The Media Engines are the same, which, trust me, will be tested later.
Memory bandwidth explained
The memory bandwidth is important yet often underplayed.
It tells us the speed at which data is transferred between the CPU and RAM – essentially how fast information can be read or written to the memory you’ve paid good money for. In the case of these two entry-level M4 Macs, the figures are interesting – the iMac only has 120GB/s whereas the M4 Pro Mac mini speed is over double that – a whopping 273GB/s. The higher the number, the better, and these figures come into play with the more taxing tasks like gaming or video editing. Just to put these numbers into some context though, with a fully tripped-out M4 Max chip you’ll be getting speeds of 546GB/s.
If a multi-display set-up is important to you, it’s worth noting that the base iMac can only support one 6K display @60Hz whilst the M4 Pro chip can simultaneously support up to three displays.
As I said, the devil is always in the detail with Apple’s specs.
M4 Apple silicon – is it worth it?
I mentioned earlier, I keep on getting asked do I need a Pro M4 Apple silicon Mac or not. Part of the answer to the question is quite obviously what you expect to do with your Mac, but let’s see if we can’t throw some light on that question and help with your decision-making.
This isn’t so much a test between the iMac and the Mac mini – it’s more of a test between the Apple silicon inside them – the M4 and M4 Pro Apple silicon chip and trying to get to the bottom of whether you need to stretch yourself and go Pro.
As I’m trying to give you a hands-on story about whether you can save money – let’s just take a look at my iMac with its 256 GB of Apple SSD and see how that’s getting along.
Firstly, let me get this off my chest – in my opinion, nearly everyone should avoid buying a Mac with only 256 GB of storage – I simply reckon that in the real world, it’d fill up too quickly and ultimately lead to buyer’s remorse. Don’t forget either that SSDs work best when they’re not pushed to their limits – they like some headroom, so always factor that in when buying a Mac.
I’ve had my M4 iMac now for about 6 weeks and I’ve used 77GB of the available 256GB. Bear in mind that for me, this M4 iMac is very much a secondary device and in under 2 months of light and by no means daily use, I’ve already used up over 25% of the storage. The biggest culprits are 17GB worth of apps and the OS itself – that’s hogging up a massive 21GB alone!
But, it’s still running fine and has that now familiar snappy M4 feeling to it that I mentioned earlier on.
Pro or no?
Over the past few days, getting ready for this story, I installed Final Cut Pro on my M4 iMac and most of my MotionVFX plugins including the 3D graphic ones that I use.
With only a 256GB SSD on the iMac, I’ve had to use an external SSD for this test. I’ve saved an entire FCP project from last week’s video on an Acasis TBU 405Pro M1 40Gbps NVME enclosure. I chose that enclosure, which has a 2TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus SSD in it, as it best matches the speed of the Thunderbolt USB 4 ports on the M4 iMac. And as a side story, I guess we’ll also find out how the enclosure holds up and if I ever have to use the fan that Acasis have built into the enclosure.
But what I’m really interested to find out though is to see how the project loads up, how smooth the timeline is and then crucially, how the export times compare between the M4 iMac and the M4 Pro Mac mini.
Before getting into the test – it’s worth reminding you that this isn’t an entirely fair race. The Mac mini it’s up against isn’t exactly an off-the-shelf mini! It’s got 48GB of unified memory, and it’s the upgraded Pro chip in it with the 14‑core CPU and 20‑core GPU option and, if you remember, much quicker memory bandwidth too.
But, crucially, from a value point of view, the test still stands, I spent £2400 on the M4 Pro Mac mini and only £1299 on the iMac. Actually, I didn’t even spend that much as I traded in my M3 iMac with Apple London when I bought the M4 iMac.
By the way, if you haven’t tried Apple’s trade-in, I’d suggest you give it a go. Although you may not get top dollar, the lack of hassle, packing, comebacks and queries makes it a winning option for me. I got £285 for my year-old iMac – oh, and they didn’t even ask for the keyboard, mouse and charging brick back either, so you can effectively add that back on to the money I got.
So, for virtually half the price of the M4 Pro Mac mini, can the M4 iMac come anywhere near matching the speeds of its more expensive big brother?
If the timeline is smooth, the general workflow effortless and the export times comparable, then I think we’ll have ourselves an answer. Up until this point of writing the story, I haven’t even plugged the SSD with the project on it into the iMac – so let me go and try that, and once I’ve seen how we’ve got on I can come back and finish up with my thoughts and chat over the results.
Findings
Although I had installed all the necessary MotionVFX plug-ins, what I hadn’t factored for was that all the files would need re-locating when I first opened up the project from the external SSD.
After that simple fix though, everything ran smoothly. There were no beach balls, no lagging timelines or dropped frames. On the face of it, I’d be hard pushed to tell what chip I was using. This harks back to my few weeks with the cheaper M4 Mac mini.
But the acid test would be the export times and whether the fans would kick in on the iMac or on the SSD for that matter.
Well – everything was quiet – no fans as I exported the 15 minute, 5.7GB 4K video. The M4 chip in the iMac exported it in 6 minutes & 29 seconds. The same file on the M4 Pro decked out Mac mini exported the same file in 5 minutes 50 seconds.
The fact there was only 40 seconds difference in export times shocked me – I mean properly shocked me. I’m only using video as an example as it’s the most stress I put my Macs through.
The M4 iMac was £1100 cheaper and includes that display panel too, and on this finding was performing almost as well. Just a few years ago, my 27-inch Intel iMac was my pride and joy – yet that took about 40 minutes to export this kind of file – that is how much we’ve come on since the advent of the M-series Apple silicon Macs.
I wrote recently about how we are living in a golden era of Mac right now and this test has proven that. Only you can decide if you need to go for the Pro or not, but the only nugget of advice I can offer you, is think carefully.
For most tasks and I dare say for most users the standard M4 non-Pro Macs will be more than capable. Apple silicon changed everything and it continues to iterate and improve year-on-year.
A golden era indeed.
