It might be just 5 inches square, but you can still fill it full of performance to meet your needs.
The surprising thing about the M4 Mac Mini isn’t that Apple made it smaller; it’s how much smaller it is than its M2-powered predecessor and how it can still have a more powerful M4 Pro chip in it and stay cool. The Mini can fit in your hand and be everything from an everyday home office computer to a full-on professional content-creation machine — and an easily portable one at that — with support for up to three 6K-resolution displays. True, there’s a sizable price difference between the M4 and M4 Pro Mac Mini, but even the $799 M4 model I tested is strong enough for media creation as well as Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of AI features.
Mac Mini M4 benchmark comparison
| System | iMac M4 10C / 10 C / 24GB / 1 TB / nano | MacBook Pro 14-inch M4 / 10C / 10C / 16GB / 1TB / Nano-Texture | Mac Mini M4 10C / 10C / 16GB / 512GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tested on | November 2024 | November 2024 | November 2024 |
| Price as configured | $2,299 | $1,949 | $799 |
| Premiere Pro 4K Export | 3 minutes, 4 seconds | 3 minutes, 14 seconds | 3 minutes, 9 seconds |
| Cinebench 2024 Multi | 856 | 1003 | 945 |
| Cinebench 2024 Single | 171 | 172 | 176 |
| Cinebench 2024 GPU | 4386 | 3988 | 4107 |
| Cinebench 2024 Multi 30-min loop | 865 | 1010 | 925 |
| Geekbench 6 CPU Single | 3777 | 3826 | 3889 |
| Geekbench 6 CPU Multi | 14756 | 14990 | 14915 |
| Geekbench 6 GPU (OpenCL) | 35958 | 38098 | 37256 |
| Geekbench 6 GPU (Metal) | 55160 | 58059 | 57416 |
MacOS Sequoia, Apple Intelligence and the Mini
The M4 Mac Mini arrived at the same time as the latest version of its operating system, MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, and Apple Intelligence, the company’s personal, private AI designed to help you with everyday tasks (and part of the reason all new Macs now have at least 16GB of unified memory).
Sequoia has some interesting new tools that are worth exploring, and they all worked well on the Mini. For most people, iPhone Mirroring is likely to be the most interesting. As the name implies, it puts your iPhone on your display, giving you access to anything on it. You can, for example, open up a social app and post something or check notifications. My iPhone is for work, so I used mirroring to read and reply to email and Slack messages while I worked on this review on the Mac Mini. It worked fluidly, but navigating a touchscreen device without a touchscreen is not the best experience.
For Apple Intelligence on the Mac Mini, it appears to be an ideal integration, particularly if you are considering it for home office utilization. The majority of the tools are designed to assist you in completing work tasks or managing an extensive to-do list more efficiently. For instance, it offers email summarization and automated reply generation (similar to Messages), device setting discovery via natural language prompts with Siri, and audio recording and transcription using the Notes app, all of which are subsequently summarized by Apple Intelligence.
Two standout features in the Photos app are particularly noteworthy. The first is “Cleanup,” which enables swift removal of individuals or objects from photographs. This functionality is comparable to AI tools offered by Google, Adobe, and other entities. While Apple’s implementation is commendable, it may not always achieve perfection, a characteristic shared by its competitors.
The second feature is the natural language search capability. Simply input your desired search term, and the search engine will progressively refine its results to locate the desired information. For instance, I frequently capture photographs of recipes, including cocktails. I conducted a search for “cocktails” and retrieved images of beverages and individuals consuming them. However, by incorporating “recipe” and subsequently “whiskey” into the search terms, I was able to locate the specific image I sought. Notably, this was achieved without any explicit tagging of individual photographs. If you possess a more organized approach and assign names to individuals, you can further refine the search results.
With the Mini now being so charmingly small, it’s easy to dream up all sorts of hardware and software possibilities. Why not give people a choice of colors like the iMac? As for software, this thing looks more like an Apple TV than ever before, so what if it sometimes behaved like one too? Imagine a TV-optimized entertainment interface — yes, like a modern Front Row — that would kick in whenever a TV screen is connected over HDMI. The M4 is more than capable enough to juggle both macOS and a tvOS-like experience.
Apple Mac Mini M4 specs
- Processor: Apple M4 (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores)
- RAM: 16GB unified memory
- Storage: 512GB SSD
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
- Ports: Front: 2x USB-C (10Gbps), headphone Back: 3x Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1, ethernet
- Weight: 1.5 pounds
- Dimensions: 5 x 5 x 2 inches
- Price: $799
As I said earlier, the $599 Mini is the best value around if you haven’t yet joined the Mac side of Apple’s ecosystem. Even the $799 configuration I tested, with 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD, seems reasonable. But once you go beyond that in RAM or storage, Apple’s pricing smacks of greed and padding the company’s bottom line. That’s true across the line, but it’s felt more acutely on a machine that starts at only $599. Stepping up to 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM brings the price to $1,399. Yikes.
The Mini is mostly stationary, so the three Thunderbolt ports allow you to attach a fast external SSD at a reasonable rate. The $799 config with 24GB RAM and 256GB storage might be more worthwhile. Neither can be upgraded later, so it’s crucial to choose the right specs.
The new Mac Mini looks like it’s been designed with the perfect form factor in mind. The redesigned enclosure makes the most of Apple Silicon’s small footprint, and with Apple’s M4 chip and an ample selection of ports, the 2024 Mini should be a speedy and reliable computer for years to come. It’s never been more powerful, except for the much pricier M4 Pro version. Stay tuned for more on that soon.
