Apple’s lineup of desktop Macs is possibly the best, so does the Mac mini have a place in the mix?

I’ve been using my M4 Pro Mac mini for around 6 months now, and I’ve never been happier working on a Mac.

It’s been responsible for changing the way I work and has made me look at new and better ways of working. But, since I bought the M4 Pro Mac mini, the M4 Mac Studio has been released, which made me wonder if the Mac mini is already old news?

M4 Pro Mac mini and me

The moment Apple announced the series of M4 Mac minis, I was hooked.

The Mac mini was one of the Macs that I’d never owned or worked on – the others being a Mac Studio & Mac Pro. But with M4 Apple silicon inside this latest iteration, the Mac mini was now looking a pretty serious bit of kit, serious enough to tempt me to make some big changes.

My main daily working Mac for the past three years has been an M1 Max MacBook Pro. When I started to work on that, I switched from working on desktop iMacs to working on a laptop for the first time, and here I was, about to go full circle and go back to working on a desktop again.

But this time, the desktop set up was going to look very different. Whereas the iMac dominates the desk, the Mac mini is tiny and opens up so much desk real estate. But as we know, its size belies just how powerful it is – and that is the point of the Mac mini. It offers ridiculous amounts of power, more than most of us will ever utilise, whilst sitting innocuously almost out of sight under your display.

When I bought my Mac mini, I already knew I was going to go the whole nine yards and spec it out. I’d decided that it was going to replace my M1 Max MacBook Pro, and that meant it would have to handle a fair bit of work.

Specs

I was worried about the notion of trading down from a Max to a Pro chip, but I was pretty certain that the newer M4 chip technology would hold its own – even if it was only a Pro.

By the time I bought my Mac mini, I’d already tasted the M4 chip in my M4 iPad Pro. These M4 chips are built using second-generation 3-nanometer technology, offering better performance and efficiency. Nothing in tech stands still, and in the case of Apple silicon, things are moving at a helluva pace. The M4 era of Apple silicon is probably the most meaningful upgrade since the switch from Intel to M1 happened in 2020.

Bearing in mind the kind of work I do, I decided to go for a fairly high-end spec on my Mac mini.

I opted for the Pro chip over the standard M4 option. The base M4 chip comes with a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU and tops out at 32GB of memory. The memory bandwidth is only 120GB/s on the base Mac minis, whereas that jumps to 273GB/s on the M4 Pro Chip.

There are other meaningful advantages to choosing the M4 Pro chip, as well. I went for the higher-end option of a 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU. With M4 Pro silicon, you can also go up to 64GB of memory, although I finally decided that 48GB would be enough for me, and so far, it seems I was right.

It has taken me these past 6 months to realise that the secret to spec’ing these Apple silicon Macs correctly is all about getting that memory option correct. That is the thing that will slow you down the quickest and create a pinch point in your workflow. Choosing your new Apple silicon Mac without enough memory is what will cause buyer’s remorse.

If there is one carry-away you take from this story, I hope it would be to spend your money on memory not storage. If onboard storage is a concern to you, though, you can take it up to 8TB – if you happen to have a spare £2400 kicking about that is! Yes, you read that right!

In the end, the specs I chose were;

• M4 Pro with the upgraded CPU and GPU
• 48GB of memory
• 1TB SSD storage
• 10GB Ethernet
  

That option list meant my Mac mini cost £2199, and six months on, I still think I chose well.

Easy on the storage

I mentioned that the Mac mini had taught me new ways to work, in particular when it comes to storage.

The argument against the Mac mini is that the moment you start to spec it out, it loses its value, and I can kind of see that point of view. The most expensive options you can tick for a Mac mini are the storage options.

Jumping from the base 512GB that it comes with to 1TB will cost you an extra £200, 2TB £600, 4TB £1200, and as I’ve already mentioned, 8TB of Apple’s SSD storage will cost a ridiculous £2400!

We know Apple tax is a real thing, but with the M4 Pro, they both shot themselves in the foot and gave us options. Thunderbolt 5 came to the M4 Pro Mac mini, and with it 80GB data transfer speeds.

It didn’t take long for the aftermarket companies to get in on the act, and within weeks, there were external SSD options available. And it was because of Thunderbolt 5 and the Mac mini that I took my first look into external SSD.

I’d always been a slave to buying Apple’s expensive onboard storage solutions, partly because I didn’t know any better and partly laziness. My MacBook Pro, for instance, has 4TB of SSD on it – I hate to think how much I paid for that! But those days are a thing of the past for me now – particularly for desktop Macs like the mini.

I now have a 4TB enclosure attached to my Mac mini permanently and another enclosure I move about with me. I am now a total convert on external SSD’s. Speed-wise, away from benchmarks, all I can tell is you don’t notice the difference between working on the Macs storage or the external, and of course, they are highly expandable as well.

These things are quick!

Mac mini vs Mac Studio

I had a solid three months of productive work out of my M4 Pro Mac mini before the M4 Mac Studio was released. We knew the M4 Mac Studio was coming, but we didn’t know quite when. So I took the approach of a bird in the hand. I wanted change, and I didn’t want to wait.

The Mac Studio is a clear competitor to the M4 Pro Mac mini. For more or less the same money as I paid, you’ll get more CPU & GPU cores and a quicker memory bandwidth. You get better media encoders & decoders and improved display support.

Unless you start upgrading the chip, though, you’re stuck at 36GB of memory on the Mac Studio, but honestly, that is more than enough for virtually everybody. The basic M4 Max Mac Studio comes with only 512GB. Even with the option to use external storage, I wouldn’t feel comfortable only having 512GB of built-in SSD, and by upgrading to 1TB, that means the M4 Max would cost £2299 – the exact amount I paid for my Mac mini.

The only area my Mac beats the Mac Studio is that I have 48GB of memory, but other than that, it loses out in every other area. And let’s not forget the I/O is vastly better on the Mac Studio as well.

I have three Thunderbolt 5 ports compared to 4 that the Mac Studio has. The Mac Studio comes with a 10GB Ethernet port as standard, whereas I had to pay £100 extra to get that option. You also get two USB-A ports on the back and an SD card slot on the front.

In the cold light of day, I have to admit that the case for buying the Mac Studio over the Mac mini looks pretty compelling.

No regrets

The point to remember is that when I bought my M4 Pro Mac mini, the M4 Mac Studio wasn’t available, and in that time, I’ve used my Mac mini daily to write, edit and create on. In other words, it has earned me a living, so I have no regrets.

This Mac mini is the best Mac I’ve worked on. It’s quick, quiet, powerful, and compact. It has handled anything I have asked of it without breaking a sweat. I can’t recall a single spinning beachball, and I don’t think the fans have ever come on.

And that’s the point, we have more power available to us now in fairly affordable Macs than we’ve ever had. We are spoiled rotten.

And even though the Mac mini struggles with I/O when compared to the Mac Studio, again, the aftermarket companies have caught on to that, too. There are a whole host of options that you can buy that will improve the I/O and, in some cases, the storage as well.

Due to having the Mac Studio in the lineup now, I think it’s more important than ever to spec your Mac mini correctly. Firstly, be honest with yourself about whether you need the Pro chip – there is a decent saving to be made there for starters.

24GB of memory is probably more than enough for the majority of users, and you should limit the Apple SSD to only 1TB, and after that, go the external route. And quite possibly, you wouldn’t need the 10GB Ethernet port either.

That configuration with an M4 Pro chip will cost you only £1599, or with the standard M4 chip, only £1199. Ok, so you only get Thunderbolt 4 on that chip, and the bandwidth is slower, but daily, I bet you wouldn’t notice those things at all.

So, yes, the Mac mini is still relevant – in the right specs. If I were going into a store today to buy a Mac similar to the way I spec’d out my Mac mini, I’d err towards the Mac Studio, but when I bought mine, that wasn’t an option.

But I love the size of the Mac mini and the fact that it’s given me the best desk setup I’ve ever had – and it’s portable as well! Earlier on, before I got into my external SSD workflow, I would often take the Mac mini home with me – try doing that with a Mac Studio!

The main thing is, this Mac is getting my work done and I love coming in every day to work on it. It’s the best Mac I’ve ever owned, and just because there’s now another choice of Mac that would do the same job doesn’t take away how good this Mac mini is.

You know what, being a Mac user now is pretty cool!