It’s still possible to buy a good value Mac if you’re smart!

M4 Apple silicon is the real deal! It’s powerful, fast, efficient, quiet and can be inside a Mac on your desk from as little as £600.

But if you’re looking to buy an M4 Mac, which Mac do you choose? Should you opt for a base M4 model or upgrade to a Pro, Max or Ultra variant? To help explain the differences, I thought I’d in this story I’d do something that I rarely do – and that is benchmark testing!

I’m going to look at what the differences are between a basic M4 chip and a well spec’d M4 Pro chip.

Normally, I’m not the biggest fan of benchmarking as it can be somewhat artificial, but in this instance, I think it will be the best way to highlight the differences between the £1300 M4 iMac I have in my studio and my £2300 M4 Pro Mac mini.

Last week, I wrote about how I now can see I over spec’d my Mac mini, and if I were going to spend that much cash on a desktop today, I’d go about it very differently.

But I’m always keen to help you make better choices, even if it is at my expense.

I stand by the fact that any M4 Mac will serve you well, but I’m keen to see you spend the least amount of money possible to get a Mac that’s going to do what you want of it.

There will always be that nagging question of is the base M4 good enough or will it lead to buyer’s remorse within months.

Is it ego making you buy that chip, or necessity?

Sometimes the best way to answer that is with numbers – thus the benchmark tests.

M4 Apple silicon – a little back story

You’ll already know I’m a massive fan of the M4 Pro Mac mini and that for the past seven months it’s been my main Mac. When the M4 Mac minis were released last year, they caused quite a stir – and rightly so.

But the unsung hero last November was undoubtedly the M4 iMac. It got a more than decent makeover. It got a colour-coded USB-C keyboard and mouse, there was a Nano-texture glass option now available, and it got the Centre Stage camera treatment as well. All that was on top of the M4 Apple silicon that was inside. So last year’s M4 iMac release was more than just a lick of paint, even though from the outside it looks pretty much unchanged.

Although I now only have the pimped out M4 Pro Mac mini (I returned the basic model I had), in its more basic form, there are quite a few similarities between it and the M4 iMac that could represent a bargain. As with everything Apple, though, the devil is in those pesky hidden details.

The base M4 Mac mini chip has 4 perform­ance cores and 6 efficiency cores with a 10-core GPU. On the other hand, the chip inside the cheapest M4 iMac has only an 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, with an 8-core GPU. Worth bearing in mind…

My eyes always go straight to the GPU as I always think that is where the magic happens. Don’t forget, in the tests we are about to run through, I’m pitching a £1300 iMac against a Mac mini that is approaching double the price. I want to show you where the money is going and if it’s worth it.

(For reference my M4 Pro Mac mini has a 14‑core CPU and 20‑core GPU. )

Feeling the heat

Apple silicon seems perfectly happy running at high temperatures – Apple clearly doesn’t seem concerned by it at all.

The Mac mini has some very nifty thermal management, which kept the temperature to around 40 degrees. The Mac mini felt warmer than usual to the touch, during these tests but not worryingly so. After running this series of tests back-to-back, the fan didn’t come on either the M4 iMac or M4 Pro Mac mini.

And even though the base M4 iMac only has a single fan to deal with any residual heat again it didn’t feel overly warm. These M4 Macs deal with heat pretty well, it seems.

So let’s look at some numbers starting with the read/write speeds of the iMac and the Mac mini. I used the 5GB Blackmagic Disk Speed test;

Straight away, you can see where your money is going with a write speed being about 215% quicker and a 75% quicker read speed. Being such a big believer of external SSD storage, it was interesting to see how favourable the speeds were using an Acasis Thunderbolt enclosure via the Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back of my M4 Pro Mac mini.

Other tests proved the obvious speed of the M4 Pro chip but equally suggest that the basic M4 chip in the iMac stood up pretty well;

These numbers are a good indication of quite how good M4 Apple silicon is – but equally how important it is to be honest with yourself about what you’re going to be using your Mac for.

A hidden gem

For £1300 the iMac still looks like a forgotten bargain to me. For a Mac that you can get out of the box and have up and running in well under half an hour, there is nothing not to like about it!

I’m trying hard to find a way to use mine more.

You get a beautiful 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, something that looks more like a piece of furniture than it does a computer and colour-coded accessories.

Annoyingly, on the cheapest iMac, you don’t get to have the power brick with the Ethernet port, and from what I can see, you can’t even buy it as an option later. You’re stuck with it being a Wi-Fi-only iMac – unless, of course, you plug a dock into one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports that has an Ethernet port on it. And don’t fret about not getting the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID – if you’ve got an Apple Watch, that’ll do the job of unlocking your Mac anyway.

Although this is a binned chip in the base M4 iMac in day-to-day use, you wouldn’t know it. For the kind of work you’d be using an iMac like this for, it’s more than up to the task.

Although I bought the cheapest iMac, I wouldn’t suggest that it is the best Mac for you to buy. For starters, it only has 256GB of storage, which is ridiculous. MacOS alone takes up about 25GB. Apps on mine are taking up almost 20GB, and system data is hogging up over 100GB.

Even though I would use an external SSD on the iMac, you still need enough headroom on the iMac itself just to run it. You’ll also know about my feelings about memory as well – so with all that said, the iMac I’d suggest for most people would be;

Don’t forget that £1699 is an all-in price – display, keyboard and mouse. Yes, the display is only 24.5 inches, but it never feels small when I’m using it. I think it’s because it’s such an immersive and colour-rich display that you get absorbed into it.

Hell, at a push you could even take the iMac home with you at weekends if you needed to such is the simplicity of it. Whichever way I look at these latest M4 iMacs they look good value. But again don’t make that mistake of over-spec’ing it and spending too much money on it. As I’ve banged on about about over recent weeks, don’t try to make this iMac into something it’s not. Buy only what you need.

Know your goals

The best way to save money when you are buying a Mac is to be honest with yourself before you get to the store. Be honest about what you are going to be using your new Mac for.

If I didn’t edit videos every week, I reckon I could live quite happily with the basic, binned M4 iMac. I could easily and happily write on it, edit my podcast on it and do all the general day-to-day stuff on it that running a business involves.

For £1700 I’d have a Mac that would last me easily for the next five or six years at least.

The basic Mac mini costs £600, but if we spec it as closely as possible to the iMac, we need to upgrade to 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage. That brings the price up to £1000.

A Magic Keyboard will set you back another £99, and the Magic Mouse a further £79. So you’re already at a touch under £1200, and that is without a 4.5K monitor.

The Mac mini is still an awesome Mac – but so too is the iMac, which got overlooked & forgotten about last year. It’s always thought of as a fun Mac for kids, grandparents and storefronts. In honesty, though, it’s so much more than that!

After all, it’s an M4 Apple silicon Mac!

The M4 iMac needs to be revisited – it’s real winner of a Mac. Ignore it at your peril.