My M4 Pro Mac mini is possibly my best Mac yet, but would I still buy one today?

The M4 Pro Mac mini was announced in a bit of a fanfare last November.

Recently, too many of Apple’s ‘new’ products have been nothing more than a chip upgrade and a lick of paint. They’ve lacked innovation. But the latest Mac mini broke that run of form. This was a genuine belt-and-braces new Mac mini from the ground up. And Apple held no prisoners. Everything about it was new, and by the looks of what we saw, it was going to be pretty special.

The highlights were that it was much smaller, had the M4 Apple silicon chip inside, and the Pro model also featured Apple’s new toy – the Thunderbolt 5 port.

I’d never owned a Mac mini, but this one got my attention. I knew I wanted to try one out and find out if it could live up to the hype in heavy daily use.

M4 Pro Mac mini first impressions

Initially, I bought two Mac minis – an entry-level one and an M4 Pro version.

Although I returned the cheaper one, it was a genuinely impressive bit of kit. Putting it through its paces, it did everything I asked of it and was nearly as fast as the M4 Pro Mac mini.

Using history as my teacher, I decided to return to it, knowing that workloads and workflows tend to creep up on you over time. I wanted a bit of extra grunt in the tank to see me safe for a few years to come.

I’ve made the mistake one too many times of thinking I could bag a bargain, only to realise a few months on that I’d shot myself in the foot.

I aimed to replace my go-to Mac of the previous few years – my M1 Max MacBook Pro. That Mac had been one of my best purchases to date. I’d used it almost every day since May 2021, and it still feels as quick as it did the day I started working on it.

I was intrigued to see if a Mac that, in theory, wasn’t quite as powerful as the MacBook could hold its own and demonstrate how far M4 Apple silicon had come.

It wasn’t hype – M4 Apple silicon was the real deal!

Now laying it on the table – I have worked pretty much exclusively on my M4 Pro Mac mini since November and have zero regrets – but the thing is, if I had my time over, I wouldn’t buy it again.

I made a mistake.

Mistakes made

Just to defend myself for a moment, when I bought my M4 Pro Mac mini, the M4 Max Mac Studio wasn’t available.

I ticked a lot of boxes when I bought my Mac mini as I knew what kind of work it would be doing and also, as importantly, what it would be replacing. The mistake I made was in ticking too many options and spending too much on it.

The specs I chose were;

• M4 Pro with 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU
• 48GB memory
• 1TB SSD
• 10GB Ethernet
  

Those specs cost me £2299. Now, sure, I can justify it by citing what I do for a living and that I’ve used it heavily almost every day. It earns its keep, but if I were chatting with you now, and you were looking to drop £2000 on a desktop Mac, I’d probably steer you away from an M4 Pro Mac mini.

The sweet spot

The Mac mini is one of the few times that Apple comes perilously close to offering up a bargain – if you choose wisely.

With it starting at £599 (I’ve just seen it’s now available for £529 on Amazon, which is a steal!), you’re getting a whole load of Mac for not toomuch cash. And that’s the secret sauce of the Mac mini – buy cheap and hammer the hell out of it!

You remember I mentioned that I initially bought a base Mac mini. Well, the thing is that the £599 Mac mini was probably good enough to have dealt with nearly everything I could have asked of it. In the tests I carried out before returning it, including benchmark speed tests, it was ever so close to the £2000 more expensive M4 Pro model.

It was ridiculously good!

Having used the non-Pro mini, I reckon it would be more than good enough for most people.

I’ve written recently about the iPad mini being brilliant because it wasn’t trying to be what it wasn’t. That same truism should be carried through to the Mac mini. It’s great because of what you get to do with that base model. It’s tiny and will fit into almost any desk setup, doing its job cooly, silently and quickly.

If I were having that chat with you today, depending on what you were going to do with your Mac, I’d still recommend the Mac mini but not the very cheapest model.

Getting it right

After using Apple silicon for this many years, I can tell you hand-on-heart that the only choice you need to concentrate on is the memory.

Storage should not be the consideration it once was. Even the base M4 minis have Thunderbolt 4 ports, and that opens a whole world of options for after-market external SSDs. I use them all the time, and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between working on an external SSD or Apple’s onboard storage – they’re that quick.

Sure, you need enough storage in your Mac, but I reckon you could cap it comfortably at 512GB – particularly if you also have a decent amount of iCloud storage too for pictures and the like. The Mac mini is, after all, a desktop Mac, so having added storage attached to it isn’t an issue. I have a 4TB Thunderbolt 5 external SSD attached to my M4 Pro Mac mini permanently. On it, I have all my recent video work for quick access. I also archive it on my NAS for remote access. I have it tucked away behind the riser on my desk, and I forget it’s even there!

So, having saved some money there, I’d suggest spending some of your savings on the memory. I know all Macs now start with 16GB of memory, but I’d suggest opting for at least 24GB to be safe. In my experience, that will be the only pain point you’ll ever come across with Apple silicon Macs.

The Gigabit Ethernet option is a niche choice, and most wouldn’t need it.

So for me, when it comes to the Mac mini, the smartest config would be;

• M4 chip 10-core CPU & 10-core GPU
• 24GB of unified memory
• 512GB storage
  

That’s going to cost you £999 and will eat up all your picture editing, basic audio & video editing and of course all your general workflows. That is a bargain and is what the Mac mini should be all about. Do a lot for not a lot!

My mistake

In hindsight, and certainly now that the M4 Max Mac Studio is around, my mistake was pimping out the M4 Pro Mac mini to be almost something it’s not.

I spent an extra £200 to get my mini with a 14-core CPU & 20-core GPU. And if you recall, I also increased the memory to 48GB, which cost me a further £400. Even with those two upgrades alone, an M4 Pro Mac mini is going to cost £1999.

The base Mac Studio starts with an M4 Max chip inside. You get 36GB of memory and 512GB of storage. At £2099, that Mac Studio would only cost you £100 more than that M4 Pro Mac mini we were just looking at. But you get a lot of other benefits from buying the Mac Studio.

At 410GB/s, the memory bandwidth is significantly faster than the 273GB/s of the M4 Pro Mac mini. You’ll get two video encode and decode engines. You get improved I/O with an extra Thunderbolt 5 port and some USB-A ports as well. You even get an SD card slot. It supports more external displays – 5 rather than 3, and even the 10GB Ethernet Port I paid £100 for is standard on the base M4 Max Mac Studio.

All around, for someone doing the kind of work I do, the M4 Max Mac Studio simply makes more sense.

In true Apple style, though, there is one minor downside to the otherwise perfect M4 Max Mac Studio solution. You can’t spend £200 on bumping up that 36GB of memory to 48GB. Well, that’s not quite true – you can, but first you’ll have to spend £300 to get the 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU chip.

If you tick that box, Apple will automatically upgrade you to 48GB of memory, but then you’re suddenly spending £2599. Based on how well my M4 Pro Mac mini has held up with a 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU, I’d be tempted to go with an off-the-shelf base M4 Max Mac Studio.

Live and learn

I’m still more than happy with my M4 Pro Mac mini, but compared to the Mac Studio, which is only fractionally bigger than the mini, I can now accept I’ve overspent.

Yes, I have 48GB of memory, but 36GB would be ample for what I do, and, OK, my mini has 1TB of SSD storage, but having now used external SSDs, I know I could get away with 512GB without any problem.

But we live and learn. Any M4 Apple silicon Mac is going to perform, and there will always be something new around the corner. But if you are looking for a desktop Mac right now and you do any kind of creative work, take a close look at the M4 Max Mac Studio.

It is the bargain to be bagged right now.

One other takeaway from this story would also be to stop trying to dress up the gear we’re buying. Don’t attempt to make it something it’s not. It was true of the iPad mini, and it’s certainly true for the M4 Pro Mac mini.

There are bargains to be had right now in the Apple world – we just need to be sassy enough to shop around for them.