The new Mac mini with M4 Pro chip offers incredible power at an unbelievable price. The diminutive desktop computer reaps the rewards of Apple silicon’s trickle-down performance: It delivers capabilities similar to a Mac Studio (or Mac Pro) with an M2 Ultra, at just a third (or a fifth) of the price of those high-end computers.
We haven’t yet seen what the new M4-series chips will do for the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, but the remarkable Mac mini makes me question how much of a pro user you’d have to be to truly need them. And on top of all that, it’s super-tiny. What’s not to love?
Keep reading or watch our video review.
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M4 Pro Mac mini review
The new Mac mini is smaller, lighter and 50× more adorable. It's super-powerful and by far the best deal in computing right now.
- Powerful M4 Pro chip
- 512GB storage
- 24GB unified memory
- Compact desktop design
- Headphone jack on front
- BYODKM (bring your own display, keyboard and mouse)
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The Mac mini has been around a long time, almost 20 years. Incredibly, with the addition of the all-new M4 Mac mini, it has only ever had three case designs. Apple introduced the Mac mini, with a white plastic top, in the PowerPC and iPod era. The first Intel versions shared the same industrial design. It was a good value.
Apple redesigned the Mac mini in 2010 with a sleek aluminum unibody that would last for the next 14 years. This Mac mini struggled for most of its life. To be honest, the Intel models sold between 2014 and 2018 were sluggish and not great. The first Apple silicon models, in what is now something of a tradition, shared the same case as the older models. But with the incredible efficiency of Apple’s new SoC, a third of the Mac mini’s case sat completely empty.
With its Apple silicon makeover, the new M4 Mac mini looks like a baby Mac Studio. It’s just so darn cute.
Table of contents: M4 Pro Mac mini review
What I ordered
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
I ordered the high-end Mac mini with the M4 Pro chip, which starts at $1,399 ($1,503.93 after taxes in Ohio). Apple offers three other cheaper Mac mini models with the standard M4 chip.
The M4 Pro Mac mini offers the following specs:
- 512 GB storage
- 24 GB unified memory
- M4 Pro chip with a 12-core CPU (8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) and 16-core GPU.
- Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, two USB-C ports
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Wi-Fi 6e, Bluetooth 5.3
And for reference, the peripherals I’m using are:
- Asus ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV. If you haven’t heard the good news, it’s comparable in specs to the Apple Studio Display at nearly half the cost.
- The new Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. The keys are nice, and Touch ID is a real joy — but I don’t like how the black color is only available on the full-size layout. Aside from the Mac mini itself, this is the only other change from my daily keyboard. A full review of this is coming soon.
- The new Magic Trackpad with USB-C. This is basically the perfect input device. A full review is coming as well.
- The OWC ThunderBay 4. This hosts my Time Machine backups, Apple archive, backup photo library and Plex library.
- The Røde XDM-100 microphone and PSA 1+ boom arm with Røde NTH-100 headphones. For podcasting, this is a wonderfully simple setup that still has professional quality sound.
- The Kuxiu X36 Boom Mic Arm and the Moment Filmmaker cage sit behind my display for me to mount my iPhone for recording videos and live-streaming The CultCast.
Design
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The new Mac mini is smaller, lighter, a little taller and 50× more adorable than its predecessors. Not that the Mac mini has ever been big compared to a standard PC tower, but the smaller footprint has a big impact on your desk space. It’s only 5 inches by 5 inches. It’s actually too small for the Timex clock I normally keep sitting on top of it, which I had to move on top of the ThunderBay.
But more surprising than that is the weight. The Mac mini used to be surprisingly heavy. The new Mac mini is the lightest Mac ever. Yes, even lighter than the 12-inch MacBook — 2 pounds versus 1.6 pounds.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
It wears the same aluminum dressing, but it now wraps all the way around to the back — there’s no big plastic backplate. The ports look really nice like this. I can’t get over that gorgeous perfectly rectangular Ethernet jack.
What about the controversial power button?
The hubbub around this design is the power button on the bottom. Although the Mac mini doesn’t sit flat on the desk, the lip is just too short to be able to squeeze your finger under there — you have to lift it a little bit. It’s really not that big of a deal — I can’t remember the last time I had to manually press the button. (Go to System Settings > Energy and enable Start up automatically after power failure and that’ll solve 90% of it.)
Even if you’re old-fashioned and turn off your computer every day, I still don’t think it’ll bother you much. Because it’s so light, so it’s easy to lift it and press. In fact, this power button is much more concave than the old one, which sat flat against the back. So although it’s in a slightly less convenient spot, it’s actually easier to find without looking.
Connectivity
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
If you have an older entry-level Mac mini, you’re in for a big upgrade. You go from two Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-A ports to three Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-C ports, a net gain of one.
If you have an M2 Pro Mac mini, you previously had four Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-A ports; now you have three Thunderbolt 5 ports and two USB-C ports. It’s a net loss of one, but the capabilities are much greater. Thunderbolt 5 offers twice the data bandwidth for external storage, up to 80 Gb/s. It has an asymmetrical mode for driving super high-resolution displays at high refresh rates:
- One 8K display at 60 Hz and one 6K display at 60 Hz
- One 4K display at 240 Hz and one 6K display at 60 Hz
- Three 6K displays at 60 Hz
I haven’t been able to push Thunderbolt 5 to the limits, because this is one area where Apple is broadly ahead of the curve. There aren’t a lot of Thunderbolt 5 peripherals yet. But if you need more ports, including a USB-A port, OWC’s first Thunderbolt 5 dock has you covered.
One thing I don’t like: The headphone jack
My biggest quibble is the headphone jack moving to the front. It makes perfect sense because I can imagine most people plug in headphones or use Studio Display speakers. However, my sound system is a Roland Cube 30X amplifier that sits underneath my desk (and makes for an excellent footrest). I had a headphone cable run up from behind the desk and plug into the headphone jack.
Now, I would have to either run the cable up and around to the front of the Mac — an ugly sight, even if the cable were long enough — or run it through the headphone jack on my display, which is what I settled on. But that presents its own issues. Lots of people have cheap displays that don’t have passthrough audio, like me, until just a few weeks ago. And if you use your display over HDMI, because you want to reserve the Thunderbolt ports for peripherals, you might lose the ability to adjust the volume from your Mac.
But I have to concede that I’m in the minority. Most people use headphones instead of desktop speakers, much less guitar amplifiers. The ability to see the headphone jack rather than dig around in the back through your mess of cables is a big step up.
I suppose I should mention here that the built-in speaker still sounds like absolute trash, but hopefully, no one is actually using it.
Performance
Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Apple silicon’s M3 generation of chips was the first to use a new 3-nanometer process in semiconductor manufacturing. According to reports, 3 nanometer was hard to manufacture. Performance tests showed that it wasn’t a significant leap from the previous 5nm process. It was about a similar jump as M1 to M2 was. The M3 Pro chip was also nerfed, with six performance cores and six efficiency cores, bringing its performance closer to the entry-level M3.
The M4 family is made with a next-generation enhanced 3-nanometer process. Apple bumped up the M4 Pro to eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. And for an extra $200, you can get two more performance cores.
Trickle-down performance is real. In most situations, an entry-level M4 chip outperforms my M2 Pro Mac mini. The M4 Pro is noticeably zippier; benchmarks show it outperforms the M2 Ultra, which was previously the best money could buy. That means, for the time being, this $1,400 mini can outperform, in some areas, the $7,000 Mac Pro.
Real-world performance tests
In my tests for this review, I timed the M4 Mac mini executing some of the tasks I do on a regular basis. Apple usually cherry-picks its stats from the best possible theoretical improvement. Benchmarks don’t tell the whole story, either. Even in these real-world tests, the M4 Pro was noticeably faster.
Rendering a video was 22% faster. Exporting an episode of The CultCast was a huge 49% faster. Upscaling a 48 MP RAW image in Pixelmator was 35% faster — that’s all in the Neural Engine, so you can expect a lot of Apple Intelligence features to run about that much better, too. Compiling some apps in Xcode and running some Python scripts came in 6% and 22% faster respectively.
Those are big improvements for two short years.
Mac mini value
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
I’m proud to report that the Mac mini retains the bang-for-buck crown. It was an incredible value before — now it’s a steal.
The new M4 Mac mini is making a lot of Mac Studio owners realize they can downsize. An optioned-out Mac mini approaches a Mac Studio in pricing, but if you’d rather splurge on more internal storage rather than a Max chip, you’ll be better off with a mini.
In the Apple silicon age, desktops and laptops perform identically when they have identical specs, due to how Apple handles a process called binning.Not every processor is made the same coming out of the fabrication lab; some chips come out a little bit slow. Intel would sell those slow chips at slightly lower prices or put them in laptops. Apple takes the opposite approach, putting their slower chips in a desktop computer, because you can juice them up with more power to get the expected performance back. Laptops need to be energy efficient; wattage doesn’t matter as much on the desktop.
| Mac mini | MacBook Pro 14-inch | |
|---|---|---|
| 10-core M4 16 GB memory 512 GB SSD |
$799 | $1,599 |
| 12-core M4 Pro 24 GB memory 512 GB SSD |
$1,399 | $1,999 |
| 12-core M4 Pro 48 GB memory 1 TB SSD |
$1,999 | $2,999 |
M4 Pro Mac mini review: Conclusion
Buying a base-model Mac mini is half the cost of a base-model MacBook Pro ($799 versus $1,599). If you bump it up to the M4 Pro Mac mini, the price gap lowers to $600, but if you option it out with more memory and storage (which I recommend for power users), you save a whopping $1,000.
The best value computer for creative professionals just got even better.
★★★★★
Buy from: Amazon
The new Mac mini is smaller, lighter and 50× more adorable. It's super-powerful and by far the best deal in computing right now.
- Powerful M4 Pro chip
- 512GB storage
- 24GB unified memory
- Compact desktop design
- Headphone jack on front
- BYODKM (bring your own display, keyboard and mouse)
Apple did not provide Cult of Mac with a review unit for this article. See our reviews policy, and check out other in-depth reviews of Apple-related items.
