Benchmarks & Final Cut Pro 11 workout!

When Apple announced the M4 Pro Mac mini I’m pretty certain they knew they had something special tucked up their sleeve.

If that’s so – then they were proven right! The reaction to the Mac mini has been universally glowing – and with good reason. I’ve spent the past week using two of them and they leave you wanting for nothing. They are simply awesome and possibly one of the best Macs that Apple has ever made.

The only problem you’ll face is deciding which model to buy – hopefully, this piece will help you decide. I’d always said that I wouldn’t ever run benchmark tests, but these Macs changed all that. In every way, they’re breaking the rules.

The two Mac mini’s I have here are;

Mac mini cost £999 and the M4 Pro Mac mini £2200

As I was going to be running some tests though I thought it might be interesting to run the tests not just on the two Mac minis but also on various other Apple silicon Macs I have that span the new Apple silicon era.

So the tests will also be run on an M3 iMac with 8GB of memory, an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and my workhorse of the past few years – my M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB of memory. I thought it would help to throw more perspective on the results if we knew what a lowly spec’d 8GB Mac made of the tests.

You can see I ticked quite a few option boxes on my Pro mini – and that was intentional. I wanted to see if the latest Pro chip could compete head-to-head with an earlier Max chip.

Before heading into the tests though – just to clear up on Thunderbolt 5 – the other major headline feature that Apple announced first on the M4 Pro Mac mini and then subsequently on the M4 MacBook Pros as well.

Thunderbolt 5 explained

Apple splashed this massive 120GB speed headline up on screen as they told us about Thunderbolt 5 coming to the Pro Mac mini – dazzling as it is, a little further explanation is needed to work out what it is and if it’s for you.

Thunderbolt 5 will double the standard data transfer speed to 80 Gbps in both directions, by using some kind of bandwidth boost mode which will reach up to 120 Gbps for video-intensive tasks.

Simply put – the top-end speed will really help if you have multiple 5K or 6K displays and if you game on them. The data transfer speeds will be quicker but of course, you’ll need SSDs that are compatible with Thunderbolt 5 and the correct cable. A 1-metre Thunderbolt 5 cable costs £69 from Apple.

Speed comes at a price then!

It was a given that once Apple announced these new ports for the M4 Pro Mac mini third-party manufacturers would soon catch up – and they are. OWC seems to be leading the charge with their Envoy Ultra SSD. They are quoting speeds of 6000MB/s and I’ve seen some tests showing that claim to be pretty accurate.

Although not as convenient as the built-in SSD from Apple – geez, you can make a tidy saving. A 2TB SSD from OWC will cost $399 whereas from Apple it would cost $600. The 4TB model version costs $599 from OWC or $1200 from Apple! As the Mac mini will spend most of its life as a desktop computer – these OWC external drives look pretty tempting.

OWC also make a Thunderbolt 5 hub as well that will give you an extra 4 ports. As good as the I/O is on the M4 Mac minis you do max them out pretty quickly. Over the past week, I’ve run out of ports on more than one occasion as I’ve been treating it as my main working set-up. And for video editors, yes, the lack of an SD card slot sucks!

The tests

I’ll be running a Geekbench CPU test, an SSD write/read test and then I’ll test the GPU with two tests – a Geekbench test and a Cinebench test. All the Macs were restarted before I ran the tests and no other apps were open.

Then for a bit of real-world testing, I’ll export a heavy Final Cut Pro session which was loaded with tons of plugins, ProRes footage and transitions – more of that later.

Geekbench 6 CPU test.

This test includes file compression, rendering web pages and PDFs, running developer scripts and doing machine-learning tasks like object detection and background blur.

The single-core score helps give a sense of how fast the Mac performs under certain situations when only a single processing core is handling everything. Many applications as you know have their performance limited by a single main thread, so single-core CPU performance will determine how fast they run.

Other applications though are designed to be multi-threaded so that lots of processes can run at the same time. The multi-core results show you how well these Macs can perform when pushed to their absolute limits, as they’ll use multiple processing cores at once to handle the strain. Think of it as your Mac’s top-end performance.

The results make for some interesting reading;

M4 iPad Pro score was impressive.

Blackmagicdesign SSD test

This test placed a virtual 4GB folder on the desktop and measured how fast it could be duplicated to the Mac’s SSD. It will also give you an idea of how fast things will be written to the drive and how fast apps and files will open & load.

I ran the 5GB stress test via the desktop;

Cinebench R23 test

On to two tests that will check the graphical performance of the Macs. Firstly the Cinebench test which was a 10-minute multi-core test that stressed the 3D graphics rendering performance by looking at an image with light, reflections & shadows;

the mini out did the M1 Max here

Geekbench CPU test

Lastly, the Geekbench GPU test will see how these Macs handle computational tasks like edge detection on images, applying a Gaussian blur to a 24-megapixel photo, or detecting faces in photos;

We thought that the M4 chip was going to be impressive – and so it is proving to be. No matter how hard I pushed all 5 Macs none of them spun up the fans. I was concerned that the small footprint of the M4 Mac mini may have thermal throttling issues – but so far, so good.

Final Cut Pro 11 export

I exported a 12-minute .mp4 file that was almost 5GB from Final Cut Pro 11 on three Macs – the two Mac minis and the MacBook Pro.

As I mentioned earlier the timeline was choc-full of Canon a-roll and b-roll footage, ProRes log iPhone 16 Pro Max video, new native FCP AI-powered transitions and Motion VFX plugins including some of their 3D graphics.

Through all of this testing, I only had one spinning beachball moment that forced me to re-start Final Cut Pro. That was on the M4 Mac mini when I was adding a heavy 3D graphic to the timeline.

Other than that the minis behaved impeccably throughout. I could barely tell the difference between the two minis but even more interestingly was that I didn’t miss my MacBook Pro at all.

Two things struck me – firstly how well the original M1 Max chip has lasted and how well it compared but also the times were all so close. To only witness a difference of 46 seconds from my £3500 M1 Max MacBook Pro to the £1000 Mac mini is insane!

More for less

There is no such thing as a true bargain. While it’s easy to say these M4 Mac minis are ‘cheap’ that all depends if you have the right peripherals lying about. When you buy a MacBook Pro you are getting an amazing display, keyboard and trackpad as part of the deal.

With the mini of course all you get is the Mac. If I take my M4 Pro Mac mini which costs £2200 and throw in the Studio Display which costs £1500 – well then you’re suddenly in MacBook Pro territory. In my case, I already had the display so the mini does look like stunning value for money. Although I have a spare Magic keyboard and mouse that I’m using I’m tempted to get a black USB-C full keyboard…

What is clear to me though is that from here on in we will have to spend less to achieve more. And don’t forget – this thing is portable as well. If you have a spare display wherever you’re heading or even a TV then this thing is super movable.

Apple has once again performed a miracle with these M4 Mac minis. Proof it were needed that size doesn’t matter!