After all that praise – does it represent great value for money?

The M4 Pro Mac mini was a pretty big departure for me, and after 3 months of daily use, I have quite a bit to say about it. There was one big change I made that surprisingly hasn’t proven to be as much of an issue as I’d suspected it may have been and is it as good value as everyone would have you believe?

Although I’ve been using it for quite a while now because it’s such a radical departure, many of you I know have had an M4 Pro Mac mini sitting in your basket and yet still haven’t quite dared to pull the bandaid off and buy it.

I get it – the tiny little body is both part of its charm and yet also its downfall. Can something this small really be powerful enough to be considered a serious player in a professional workflow?

If this is to be the only Mac that you are going to purchase for the next few years, then it needs to be able to cut it.

So, to that end, I thought it might be useful if I ran through what’s on my M4 Pro Mac mini and what it’s been like switching to it, and do I have any regrets?

M4 Pro Mac mini and the on/off debate

For all the words I’ve written on the M4 Pro Mac mini over the past few months, I think I must be one of the few not to have mentioned the power button – and there’s a reason for that…

Do you recall when it was first launched, there were all these clickbait videos and Tweets about the power button being oddly placed? Well, the reason that I’ve not mentioned it until now is because it’s not a problem!

I think it’s pretty fair to say that Apple is generally in a purple patch right now – ok you could debate over the iPhone, but if you look at their iPad and Mac lineup, there’s something for everyone at pretty much every price point.

Inevitably, when things are this good it drives folks to try and find fault and focus on ridiculous details like the placement of a power button. But here’s the thing – it never gets used, so how can it be in the wrong place?

After all, we’re talking about a desktop Mac – one that has historically often been used as a server. It’s used and almost designed not to be powered down. I hardly ever turn the M4 Pro Mac mini off. Honestly, the only times I have turned it off in the past three months were when I tore the studio apart from a Christmas spring clean or when I need to shoot thumbnail pics of it for videos. That’s it, though! Other than those rare occasions, the only other time it’s switched off is if I decide to take it home to work on, but other than that, the M4 Pro Mac mini stays powered up 27/7.

Right – that’s my venting done on that – let’s get on to what it’s been like to use.

Moving on

Until the little M4 Pro Mac mini landed on my desk, my daily workhorse for the past three years had been the M1 Max MacBook Pro.

In itself, that was a departure for me as it was the first time I’d used a laptop as my main Mac. But everything happens for a reason, right? The one valuable lesson COVID taught me was to adopt a more flexible approach to how I worked, which has stood me in good stead.

If I didn’t do this writing and reviewing lark for a living, I probably wouldn’t have changed Macs so soon. The MacBook Pro still felt fast and more than capable of what I was asking of it – but comparison is a tough taskmaster.

My biggest concern in moving from the MacBook Pro was that in theory I was trading down – not even sideways, but down! I was about to hedge my bets on the fact that a newer, but less powerful M4 Pro powered Mac mini would offer me enough grunt to run my channel and business.

Remember that big change I mentioned at the top of this piece, well that was in my monitor set-up. Since buying the MacBook Pro, I’d always worked on it in conjunction with the Studio Display – meaning I had a dual display setup, which I’d become accustomed to.

Part of the appeal of the M4 Pro Mac mini though was the tiny footprint of it and the clean aesthetic it could bring to my desk. Once I saw how handsome it looked alongside the Studio Display I knew I wanted to capitalise on it for that ultra-clean desk look.

It’s surprised me how quickly I’ve adapted to working on a single display – and possibly using its real estate better. Sure, there have been odd times when I’ve had to use a second display and on those occasions, I either plant the MacBook back on my desk or use Sidecar with my M4 iPad Pro.

But most days working on a single display has been fine and I love the lack of cables and clutter. Switching to the M4 Pro Mac mini as my main Mac has offered me the chance to have the cleanest desk setup I’ve ever had.

The specs

So, what’s at the heart of the Mac that I’ve been sitting in front of for the past 12 weeks…

I ticked most of the boxes on my M4 Pro Mac mini. It has the upgraded chip in it with a 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU, which was a £200 upgrade – but one that I figured was worth it. You get three memory options, and I went with the mid-range 48GB of memory. I was tempted to choose 64GB of memory, but equally, I’d had experience with Apple silicon – M1, M2 and M3 and I know first-hand quite how efficient & optimised it is.

Storage is the big one of course – and the most costly too, and is one I’ll talk about at more length in a bit, but I’ve gone with only 1TB of Apple SSD and so far, it looks as if I made the right choice. Lastly, knowing that before this year is over, there is a good chance I’ll be moving over to a NAS drive in the studio, I decided to future-proof the M4 Pro Mac mini and popped the 10 Gigabit Ethernet port on it.

That all meant that the M4 Pro Mac mini sitting on my desk cost £2299. A tidy sum true enough, but then again this thing was hopefully going to be at the heart of what I do every day.

So, what’s on it and how’s it fairing?

The USB-C life

When I started to work on the M4 Pro Mac mini, I knew pretty much immediately that it was going to suit my style of working.

To that end, I decided to treat myself to a new USB-C Magic Keyboard, trackpad and mouse. Although they don’t need charging that regularly, being able to lose one cable from the desk was a win – it meant everything on my main production desk was now USB-C.

I know a lot of Mac users love the MX peripherals from Logitech, and some even use mechanical keyboards, but I’ve always followed the principle of it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Apple’s keyboards & mouse have always worked for me, which is why I stick with them.

But this new mouse has been a bit glitchy. Too often, for my liking, it freezes. I can be trying to right-click to copy or paste, or trying to drag a file or folder, and the file just hangs and sticks. I can switch over to the trackpad, and it’s perfect, but I have to reboot the mouse to reset it. By the time I realised it was an ongoing problem, I’d missed my return window – so I’m stuck with it now.

Living day to day with the Mac mini

You know what – I think I nailed the specs on the M4 Pro Mac mini.

My daily workflow varies from the less taxing tasks of writing, emailing, or replying to sponsors and viewers to the more demanding tasks of audio and video editing. I also spend a fair bit of time in Lightroom and Photoshop, and never have I felt compromised by the fact I’m working on a Pro chip rather than a Max.

I was caught up early on in being concerned that I was downgrading, but all the information and data leading up to the release of this new Apple silicon suggested that it was going to be a quantum jump forward in performance – which has been born out.

Whenever I check the Activity Monitor, it backs up what I’m feeling – that this Mac is never stressed. I’ve never noticed any memory swapping going on, I’ve not had any spinning beachballs, and it’s never felt slow or laggy. You know you get a feeling of how your Mac is running and performing – well, this M4 Pro chip feels fast and responsive.

The way it opens up apps and deals with my workloads, even though this is only the mid-tier 48GB model and only a Pro chip, it’s handling everything that I throw at it.

Ok – because of what I do, I may at some point in the future buy a Mac with a Max chip in it to review – but I can tell you this – it won’t be out of necessity. This leads me to another question – who needs an M4 max chip or an M4 Mac Studio when they presumably land later this year?

I’m not sitting here saying that my workflow is anything special, but at times I think I ask a bit more of my Mac’s performance than is average. When I’m working in Final Cut, those timelines are handling transitions, ProRes log & 4K footage and it never complains or breaks sweat.

When I first started using the M4 Pro Mac mini, I checked to make sure I wasn’t shooting myself in the foot by switching from the M1 Max MacBook Pro by timing export speeds – and there was next to nothing in it. The M4 Pro mini was around 30 seconds slower on exporting a typical 15-minute 4K/5GB video – but that was more than made up for by the overall feeling of this new Mac being quicker in everything else I was doing on it.

The thing is, having also tried a non-Pro Mac mini, I reckon, at a push, I could have used that – the speed Apple silicon is progressing is scary! Most Macs and even the iPad Pro could handle most reasonably taxing workflows with ease!

As I said, from a Mac perspective, we are in a great place.

Value

When the new M4 Mac minis came out, a lot was said about what great value for money they are – my thoughts on this, though, are kind of mixed.

Sure, the £599 entry price looks attractive and will be more than good enough for many Mac users. But, as we know, that ticket price assumes you already have the keyboard, mouse and monitor.

And even if you do have those bits, you are still only getting 256GB of storage. Whilst the new entry-level of 16GB of memory will be ample in most cases, the 256GB of storage probably won’t be.

As we know, Apple tempts you into upgrading as you start to build your Mac – and the options can get very expensive, very quickly. Another 256GB, for example, will cost you £200, and if you want an extra 8GB of memory, then you can wave goodbye to yet another £200. Suddenly, that value notion is looking a lot less locked in.

And when it comes to the M4 Pro Mac mini, value is even harder to quantify – that model starts at £1399. Now, don’t get me wrong, you are getting a lot of Mac for your money, but £1400 is still a lot of money.

So, my overall take on the value side of the Mac mini is that it’s reasonably priced rather than being a stunning bargain. With Apple, you rarely get a bargain, but you do get quality and something that you know is going to work hard and last.

A quick health check

So, how is my M4 Pro Mac mini holding up after 3 months of pretty intensive use?

Pretty well!

The combination of Apple silicon M4 and macOS Sequoia has been solid. I had a spell of about a week when AirDrop and iPhone Mirroring stopped working, but other than that, even though I’m running betas, it’s all been good news.

I’m pretty cautious about what I install on my Mac, storage and archiving and that caution has meant that I’ve only used 165GB of the terabyte that I originally bought – so I have plenty of headroom.

If you’ve read some of my recent stories, then you’ll know I’m like a kid at Christmas over the revelation of how good external SSDs are. They have forever altered how I will buy any Macs from now on.

Whether it’s the iMac or the M4 Pro Mac mini, using external SSDs means I’m saving a fortune; they are expandable, fast and flexible. Routinely now, I’ll often take an SSD home with me to carry on editing – which means I’m being more productive than ever.

For the past few weeks, I’ve edited videos from one of my Acasis enclosures and Samsung SSDs, and it’s been as if I was working from the SSD on my Mac. I was worried and sceptical at first – but boy, has Apple shot themselves in the foot when they gave us the three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back of the M4 Pro Mac minis. I started with a 1TB SSD, then 2TB and now I have a 4TB SSD in it, meaning I should be good for the best part of this year. I shouldn’t even need to access the archive – I should be set for months of hassle-free, speedy editing.

My go-to apps

We all buy and spec our Macs on a very personal and individual basis. But, if I tell you what’s on mine and how it’s been behaving, then it might give you the courage to jump in and buy yours.

Of that 165GB I’ve used on this M4 Pro Mac mini, 61GB of those have been eaten up by apps. I have a few essential apps that I’ll have on all my Macs for seamless continuity & productivity. Adobe Creative Cloud is one of the first that gets downloaded, and from there, I’ll install Photoshop, Lightroom, Audition, Acrobat & InDesign. I’ve been a big Dropbox user for years, but make sure to enable Smart Sync to only have folders and files downloaded locally that are essential on the Mac.

The other apps I can’t do without are Final Cut Pro, Ulysses, Grammarly and Chrome. Although I am a Safari boy through and through, I use Chrome to upload my videos to YouTube, as there are a couple of extensions that are Chrome-only. I also have Edge installed – but I only ever use that for RiversideFM when I’m recording my podcast.

Closing thoughts

My first 3 months with the M4 Pro Mac mini are all positive. The Mac hasn’t once let me down and has changed how I work. I have a more flexible workflow now than ever before. Whether that means physically taking the Mac mini home with me or simply popping an SSD in my rucksack, it means I can choose where I work more than ever before.

The clean aesthetic of my desk also makes for a more creative workspace as well – so all-in-all, I couldn’t be happier with the switch to working on the M4 Pro Mac mini.

It’s been a change not for change’s sake but a positive change for the better. An old dog learning new tricks!