M4 Mac mini Review: Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty form factor
Meet the new Mac mini—for the first time in the last fourteen years, not the same as the old Mac mini.
The latest iteration of Apple’s most diminutive Mac really earns that superlative in its newest incarnation, only the third in its history. The form factor really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: it’s basically a smaller version of the Mac Studio, which was itself a taller version of the Mac mini. Time, as they say, is a flat squircle.
As the most versatile Mac, the Mac mini finds itself into all sorts of niches that no other Mac can easily (or cost-effectively) fill. Whether it’s rack-mounted as a server, hooked up to a TV, or even tucked somewhere in a car, the mini is the Mac of all trades.1
Since the Apple silicon revolution, it’s also become more powerful than ever, and the new M4-powered models are no exception. The mini holds its own against consumer models like the iMac and MacBook Air, and can be upgraded into the mid-range with an M4 Pro chip, positioning it comfortably alongside some MacBook Pro models.
When it comes to desktop Macs, it’s quite possibly the best one Apple offers.
Design of the times
The Mac mini’s appearance has only changed a handful of times in its almost two decades of existence. (It turns 20 in just two months, hard as that is to believe.)2 Fun fact: the new model, at two inches tall, is the same height as the original G4 model back in 2005. That version, however, measured in at 6.5 inches square, an inch and a half larger than the new Mac mini’s small 5-inch-by-5-inch footprint. While that original design survived into the Intel era, it ultimately didn’t last that long: just five years after its introduction, it was replaced by the familiar unibody aluminum model, which went on an incredible fourteen year run.3
So now here’s the Mac mini’s long-awaited third act. There’s been clamor for a smaller version for some time, ever since the Intel NUC form factor gained popularity. While some hoped that it might come in the form of an Apple TV-sized computer, the new mini is larger and taller than the set-top box—but comes with commensurately more power and expandability than a smaller chassis would allow.
That the new design is small is great: with more than 40 percent less volume compared to the previous Mac mini, it fits in more places, takes up less room on your desk, and is less obtrusive than ever before. It ought to, for example, sit fairly well atop the foot of an Apple Studio Display (though the cables coming out the back might make that harder). Apple also hasn’t cheated by moving the power supply into an external brick: it’s the same standard two-prong power connector cord.
Like the Mac Studio, the whole mini case is now one piece of aluminum, with machined openings for ports on rear—that’s a departure from the unibody model, which had a plastic backplate. The corner radius has changed too—it’s slightly tighter than the old model—and there’s a new, larger power light.
The new mini is also—and this isn’t insignificant, as I’ll get to in a moment—lighter than ever, weighing in at 40 percent less than the previous model. At a pound and half (slightly heavier for the M4 Pro model), it’s—and this is fun!—the lightest Mac ever made. That makes it easy to move around if you need to; if you wanted to throw one in a bag to carry around with you, you could do that too. (Granted, you’d still need a keyboard, pointing device, and display.) The reductions in weight and volume also contribute to the Mac mini’s status as Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac, in that Apple has used 85 percent less aluminum in the construction than in the previous model.
There is one somewhat puzzling decision on the design front: the power button has migrated from the back of the mini, and not to the front but to underneath. If I had to speculate, I’d guess that space on the back of the machine was at a premium and putting the button there would have necessitated the use of a curved aluminum button à la the Mac Studio’s, if it could have been fit in there at all. This feels like a change made for cost and expediency.
But it also speaks, to some degree, of Apple’s vision of the Mac mini: this is not a computer that you’re turning on and off with regularity. If anything, you’re probably restarting it. From a power perspective, the mini sips electricity—though Apple hasn’t specified the power consumption of the M4 versions, the M2 models used just 7 watts at idle, and I’d imagine these are around the same. The Mac mini is more of an appliance than ever, one that you turn on and keep on—not unlike an iPhone, iPad, or even Mac laptop.
That said, the power button being underneath is awkward at times—none more so than when I first set up the machine and was asked to pair with the Touch ID keyboard, requiring me to double-click the power button. But, as I said above, the mini is also incredibly light, so if you do need to lift it up and hit the button, it’s not an insurmountable problem—you can even do it with one hand pretty easily. Moreover, this is hardly a computer of yesteryear where you’re worried about spinning discs getting knocked out of whack—just pick it up and turn it over if you need to.4 The biggest annoyance is probably whatever cables you have attached. Frankly, I can never remember which side of my M2 Pro Mac mini the power button was on—I guarantee that’s not going to be an issue here.
Ultimately, is the power button placement a little annoying? Sure. Is it the kind of thing that should keep you from buying this machine? No, it really isn’t.
Apple also says that the Mac mini includes a redesigned thermal system where all air flows through the foot. In my tests, I tried maxing out both CPU cores and, separately, GPU cores and in either case I had to literally hold the mini up to my hear to maybe hear something that could have been a fan. We’re a long way from having a machine nicknamed “Wind Tunnel”.
Make sure you’re connected
There was some concern Apple might skimp on ports for a smaller Mac mini, but I’m happy to say that’s largely not true. The back of all Mac minis sport three Thunderbolt ports (Thunderbolt 4 on the M4, Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro models), as well as Gigabit Ethernet (configurable to 10Gbps if you need it) and HDMI. The two USB-A ports of M2 model have shuffled off this mortal coil, but there are now, for the first time, two USB-C ports on the machine’s front, aping the design of the Mac Studio.
Apple’s kind of split the difference here: technically, yes, the M4 Pro version of the Mac mini has fewer ports than its M2 Pro predecessor, which had four Thunderbolt 4 ports in addition to the pair of USB-A ports; but the base M2 model had just two Thunderbolt 4 ports. In both cases, the ports are on average better than what was previously available, even if there aren’t as many of them. That feels like a net win, though if it means you now need a hub to connect things, well, I can understand the frustration.
Those front-mounted ports, though, are a real win. Gone are the days of having to fumble behind the mini in order to plug in a thumb drive or USB security key. Need to quickly charge something or connect an iPhone or iPad? Easy. It’s a triumph of function over form.
The audio-out jack has also moved to the front, which is a bit more of a mixed bag for me.5 That’s great if you’re the kind of person who plugs in headphones frequently, but if you—like me—keep a pair of speakers connected to your Mac, it ends up being an awkward place to plug them in. Yes, you can use a USB-C-to-audio adapter, like the one Apple conveniently sells for $9, and plug them in on the back, but then you’re using a Thunderbolt port to drive a pair of analog speakers, which is a bit like using a Hemi to power your bicycle. If you’re using a Studio Display or other hub, the adapter will also work there just fine. At that point, though, I wondered if maybe I would be better off just using the Studio Display’s pretty good internal speakers.
The Mac mini does have an internal speaker, for what it’s worth, but what it’s worth isn’t very much: while it gets impressive volume, the quality is tinny with no spatial separation and negligible bass. Better than you might expect, but almost any pair of headphones or speakers will blow it out of the water, much less a HomePod.
There’s the usual complement of wireless tech—Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3—unchanged from its predecessor. Like other recently revised Apple products, the Mac mini also appears to have a stealth Thread radio, as per FCC filings, but it’s not listed on its tech specs page. This radio appears to be dormant, though in theory, I suppose it could be activated with a software update at some future date if needed.
I also tested the Magic Keyboard (extended) and Magic Trackpad with USB-C; Apple provided a Magic Mouse in addition but, well, I’m not a mouse user. Everything that’s been said about those has already been said: they’re functionally equivalent to the previous versions, just with a different port. I’m glad to have everything standardized on USB-C and disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Apple has elected not to otherwise revisit these products, whether it be the Magic Mouse’s awkward charging port or the lack of an inverted-T arrow key layout on the smaller keyboard. But, well, at least you know what you’re getting into.
Performance arts
Apple’s been on a consistent tear with Mac performance since the introduction of Apple Silicon. Every chip generation has seen a 10-20 percent increase in the speed of processor cores over the preceding generation, reflected in single-core benchmarks; that scales with additional cores available in more powerful chips. The Pro, Max, and (if they exist) Ultra variants all also feature better memory bandwidth than the base model chips, as well as many more GPU cores.
The M4 follows the pattern here. In single core benchmarks, its performance is 22 percent faster than the M3 and roughly 45 percent faster than the M2. It’s almost 60 percent faster than an M1. None of that should be a surprise: this is the same chip powering the M4 iPad Pro introduced back in May and the same featured in the new iMac and base-level MacBook Pro. Which means at single-core CPU tasks, all those models basically perform exactly the same.
The review model Apple provided me is the $799 configuration with the base M4 chip (10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores), 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. The mini’s also available with a 12-core CPU/16-core GPU M4 Pro for another $600—the cost of an entry-level Mac mini—which will get you another 8GB of RAM in the bargain. (The M4 models can go up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, while the M4 Pro can support up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage. The costs are…high.)
Lining the M4 model up against my own Mac mini, which sports an M2 Pro, is thus not a straight comparison but still yielded some interesting results. The earlier Pro model still outperforms it when it comes to GPU-intensive tasks (no surprise given the higher GPU core count), but for anything CPU-related, the faster cores are the deciding factor. I bounced a roughly one-hour Logic project with nine tracks in 2 minutes and 51 seconds on the M4; the same project took 3:03 on an M3 Air, 3:48 on an M1 Air, and a surprising 3:48 on my M2 Pro Mac mini (something strange is going on there, so I’m not inclined to view it as representative).
None of this is to say those earlier chips are slouches—it’s just that the newer generations are that much better. For most of the things people are doing day-to-day, those earlier machines are still more than capable. Even using Apple Intelligence to, say, summarize a lengthy Wikipedia article on World War I had a negligible difference in speed between the M2 Pro and M4.
Apple does tout that the M4’s better Neural Engine is more than 3x faster than the M1’s. While it’s tricky to test this exactly, I put the hour-long WAV file I made in Logic through MacWhisper to generate a transcript and the two minis came out very close: 3:01 for the M4, and 2:49 for the M2 Pro. On the M3 Air, it was a minute pokier at 3:49 and my M1 Air was definitely the slowest by far, clocking in at 6:09, perhaps speaking to a combination of slower cores, fewer GPU cores, and the slower Neural Engine.
Unsurprisingly Apple once again is making claims about the M4’s gaming prowess. That’s always difficult to test, since many of the most prominent titles still don’t make it to the Mac, but the M4 GPUs seem to be the same as the M3 version, which added support for high-end features like hardware ray tracing and mesh shading. Great news, but the problem is still more about software than hardware.
Seeing how the M4 compares to the M2 Pro, I find myself wondering whether I even need a Pro level processor for the tasks I do. It’s nice to have some performance headroom, to be sure, but would the money spent on (predominantly) extra GPU cores be better allocated to RAM and storage? It’s certainly a question worth asking when you’re in the market.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to like about the new Mac mini. It still starts at the same $599 price—even if its base 256GB of storage is a bit paltry—but making the jump to the $799 512GB configuration is not unreasonable. External storage is cheap and fast these days, and Apple’s move to 16GB of RAM for starting configuration means that none of these machines feels underpowered out of the box.
The addition of the front USB-C ports and the smaller footprint are good changes that help the mini really live up to its name.6 Might I have kept the audio jack and power button on the back, if I were king of all Apple design? I would have considered it, but neither are dealbreakers.
Honestly, the temptation to swap out my M2 Pro Mac mini for an M4 model is strong—it’s tough to resist the siren song of the new, and those front-mounted USB-C ports are great. The good news is, if the previous Mac mini incarnation is any indication, this design is here to stay for a while. So even if I don’t make the switch to the M4, there’s always the M5, M6…M18, anybody?
- If you think the puns end here, you’re ministaking. Too much? ↩
- Other than the iMac, it’s the only Mac model name that dates back to the PowerPC era. ↩
- That design was tweaked a year after its release to remove the optical drive; but the size remained unchanged. ↩
- Look, ma! No moving parts! ↩
- True story: When I first saw the images of the new Mac mini, I thought for a moment that Apple had brought back the IR receiver from previous models. ↩
- Not to mention harkening back even more strongly to its roots in the Power Mac G4 Cube—yes, it’s the most cubic Mac mini Apple’s ever made! ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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