The M4 Mac Mini is dead to me - Minisforum at CES 2025

Jake loves three things, two of which are Mini PCs and NASs, which is convenient because Minisforum had both in their booth here at CES. With beefy specs, tons of upgradability, and very aggressive pricing, is the base model M4 Mac Mini already dead in the water?

CHAPTERS
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0:00 MS-A2 walkthrough
5:28 Sponsor - dbrand
6:24 MS-A2 performance and pricing
9:40 N5 Pro NAS
17:36 Outro

[weirdg]

I can’t believe they put the power button on the front 😂

[perkulant]

20% more power draw for almost twice the performance is pretty impressive.

[stevew]

As a canadian I would advise against buying minisforum on their website. They charged me hst. 15% and you know full well they didn't submit that to the canadian government, they're in china! When my v3 tablet that I paid hst on shipped with dhl, I had to pay an additional $70. Customs and hst on the declared value of around $200. I have the declaration form in my email clearing showing they never paid hst despite me giving them around $250 in hst. Shady. To make matters worse, my v3 was deffective. The screen failed after a few days, and I had to pay shipping from east coast to west coast of canada, then wait nearly 2 months for a replacement, that I had to pay more customs and tax on.

[FatCandyProduction]

"It probably overheats, but still pretty cool" - Jake 2025

[TheOnceAndFutureDoug]

That last bit, Synology needs to get real nervous.

[jsvn]

Wdym AMD = no USB4? AMD doesnt have thunderbolt, not usb4

[Chaosghoul]

3:30 To be honest: I love the fact that it is specifically *not* liquid metal. For a device that I am going to use and maybe lug around a couple times for years to come, it is just an additional high risk point of failure that is frankly unnecessary

[lukeh]

I literally just saw the subreddit post with Jake sitting at the Minisforum booth. lol

[druxpack]

wait til he finds out that minisforum never releases any firmware/bios updates past the first few months...enjoy your abandoned product riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities.

[rainbowkeykaraoke]

I notice you didn't show the power brick. The Mac Minis is built in!

[explosev]

Can’t believe they made a video about this company, they have absolutely terrible customer service and reliability issues.

[remainsmemories]

Yes please, double u.2 interface would be awesome!
Or, if possible, give us the option to connect EDSFF drives!

[ThatGuy-fiqh]

One month from now: This thing I just told you is great is dead to me

[combat.wombat]

Minipc has sfp+ ports but the nas doesn't? lolwtf

[lethalmonk]

12:58 I think text slipped through QA a few times on this video. No one refers to USB4 as Type-C Gen 4 (and kind of compounds the silly USB naming if we start making new ways to refer to USB). Remember what you were taught at school: Gen # comes AFTER a USB 3.x only:p

[skipbreakfast]

Btw, the use cases between the Mac Mini and a SFF PC rarely overlap. I don't understand the reason to compare them other than for clicks.

[brettbuterbaugh]

Let's be real, someone is going to use the N5 as a Steam box with Steam OS for their bedroom, bathroom, or some other space due to the storage space for all of their library.

[DmitriWeissman]

2 points from an ms-01 owner.
Intel sfp might be stable, but it is either 1g or 10g. So in order to connect a 2.5g gpon, I have to go through a switch that accepts 1, 2.5, 5 and 10g sfp modules.
Another point is that if like me, you have this box within the same room with you, you don't want it to be more power hungry. It is already too loud.
As a side note, on ms-01 the type c ports are audio/video out. Not so sure about amd version.
For me it is almost perfect proxmox box to run a router, nas, some controller and Kodi virtual machines sitting just below the TV.

[DAVISION-YT]

Show me just one with the Single Core Performance, Memory Bandwidth, Power Consumption and Noise of the M4 Mac Mini.

[cfdfirefighter]

But without a GPU and that would make it cost more than the Mac mini.