M4 Mac mini Buyer's Guide: Don't Waste Your Money!

Don’t spend a DIME on the M4 Mac Mini before watching this video!

I'll guide you through everything you need to know about the M4 and M4 Pro models, from their performance differences to whether the $800 upgrade is really worth it.

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We’ll cover:
- The pros and cons of the M4 base model vs. the M4 Pro.
- Real-world performance tests, including photo editing, video rendering, and productivity tasks.
- Key specs like RAM, storage, and those all-important Thunderbolt ports.
- Why upgrading to 10-Gigabit Ethernet might just be the best $100 you spend.

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#M4 #macmini

[matthias]

1:45 (and throughout the rest of the video): You got the CPU cores wrong for the base M4: It's 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores.

[janplexy]

I wasted my money on M4PRO, but I don’t think I wasted my money at all. 😀 24gb ram/512gb ssd/Thunderbolt 5, more and faster cpu/gpu cores.. This is a serious working machine for the price of my iPhone! So happy with the purchase! 😊

[bennym]

I buy and spec-up Macs for longevity. Definitely Mac Mini Pro with extra RAM, never short yourself on RAM, especially since you now CANNOT upgrade RAM after the fact ! Still running great, my 2017 27" 5K iMac w/1 TB HD 48 GB RAM....real good deal on RAM for $6 more. And I'll be able to use the iMac 27" screen using Luna display with USB-C w/o lag.

[southbaycommuter]

I like how Caputo explained how synthetic benchmarks don't tell the whole story, they're just a snapshot regarding performance.

[yannkitson]

Over time I have learned always to buy the most I can afford because I tend to use my machines for a very long time e.g. I still use a PowerBook G4 and several Minis from the very first models and they all still work even though my M1 MacBook Air is my preferred machine for daily use.

[shucklefan]

Ill be getting the Mac Mini m4 base. This is the mac i was waiting for. Im a heavy windows and linux user and work in IT - But everyone has to have a taste of mac products now and then. I am a fan and have a iphone and ipad - but never the computers. Its a good start and im going to just test the complete ecosystem- while still having my gaming rig and dual boot OS. Thanks for the review !

Also- right now best buy is pricing the m2-m3 mac mini models with 8b of ram for 800-999$ and sell this one in full stock for 599 lol. Apple beat their own MSRPs with this one and best buy should just heavily discount any mac mini before this

[dawnrazor]

Ok how about developers using vms and large docker containers. So many videos I’ve seen about performance of M4 talk about video editing. What about other use cases? We’re not not all YouTubers or photographers

[Games_and_Tech]

1:50 Are you sure it is 6 performance and 4 efficiency cores and non the other way?

[danirichard]

I too got a M4 Mac Mini Pro with Thunderbolt 5. It is paired with the 27" studio display. The Mac Mini Pro is same configure as my 2017 27" iMac 18, 3. 64 GB of RAM and 2TB of mass storage. Only the 18, 3 iMac had 8GB of video RAM, the Fusion Drive SSD, and Thunderbolt 3. On a single core benchmark the Mac Mini is about twice the performance as the Intel iMac. I still have more benchmarks to do. I am very pleased.

[core]

Where did you find the retro Apple logo sticker that fits your Mini!? 🙂

[johnz]

As a professional photographer, going with the Pro makes the additional cost acceptable. Since we're committed after purchase, I prefer to eliminate the possibility of regrets during daily use.

[DJSNAV]

I do photography as a hobby. I don't think I've ever exported a hundred photos. But even doing 500, you're telling me it'll export everything in the time I takes me to use the bathroom and get some coffee? Yeah that's plenty enough performance for me 🤷‍♂️

[windfisch]

Depends. The M4 Pro base model is just right for me. It has more power than my i7/RTX2080/32GB Linux box, runs 14B LLMs and Windows 11 with Visual Studio 2022 in a VM well. However I am going to set up a local LLM Exo cluster soon and I will be using the small base models for this, as two of them with an external SSD each are about the same price as one M4 Pro and should achieve a bit more performance for this task together.

[fredrikhall]

M4 with 512gb SSD and 32gb RAM is better for music production in Logic Pro and it’s cheaper than M4pro with 24 gb RAM. Comparing 256gb SSD is slower than 512 go SSD. M4pro is slightly better than M4 when it comes to rendering specifically but almost no difference when it comes to editing video. More RAM is more important when it comes to handling heavy plugins in Logic Pro and it’s good to have when editing i Davinci Resolve!which probably is more RAM-hungry than Final Cut Pro that is optimized for Apple.

I would love to see a test between these specs

[AdmiralCecil]

All Max CPU's have double encoder/ decoder engines hence why it's faster than any pro cpu. But not all video editing software takes full advantage.

[robertong]

I am just a light user and I intend to keep the mini for maybe 5 years. Should I buy the base model, with upgraded memory to 24MB and SSD to 512GB?

[greccoox]

"m4 MM performance better than MB M3 Pro Max" .... than creator conclusion "yeah, is great, to do daily tasks, browse web, light video editing, is the computer that i recommend for most people" ... WHAT? (not you but mostly is this conclusion)... so powerful machine and at the end "handle good basic tasks" ... anyway, amazing video, thank uu!

[nickhu]

What is a waste and what is not merely depends on what you do on your computer and how much time of your life you spend with it.
If I am spending less than 5% of my weekly hours in my $60k car (when a base model could cost one third of that) there is no excuse to leave out a $200-$1000 feature (the cost of one rim on my barely used car) of a workhorse computer if I am spending 80% of your working hours using it even if an 'expensive' feature adds just a little bit of better experience. The same is true for a good chair, desk, and of course your bed where you spend most of your 700k hours we spend on Earth in average.
But I am actually looking out for the base model mini M4, I need it to occasionally run XCode only to build the apps for IOS, those I program on my PC. No video editing, maybe some grapics occasionally as some asset for a software (ie. not high resolution) but I'll do that on my PC as well, as I used to, no reason to buy my software twice. Maybe my wife will use the Mac Mini for browsing.
...but there is that thing we call 'future proofing', maybe I'll like it that much it will be my main computer, who knows, then I need the Pro. ...so I am still undecided. ...my wife then gets the base, and I buy myself a Pro later ? the longer I think, the more uncertain I am 😀

[GurmukhSinghBahra]

I purchased the base M4, but upgraded the RAM to 24GB and SSD to 1TB - with student discount I got it for the price of 512GB

[BJMolette]

Instead of upgrading the ethernet I'm just going to wait a couple of years until I need that speed and just buy an adapter used for probably 20 bucks lol. I'm not getting over 800gbps at home anyways. Upgrading the ram is definetly a good idea though