Apple Mac mini review (M4 Pro, 2024): Shockingly small, incredibly powerful

What’s new with the Mac mini?

Just look at it! The Mac mini’s redesigned case is less than half the size of the previous version, so you won’t have to give it as much desktop space. It also features front-facing connectivity for the first time — two USB-C ports and a headphone jack — something that previously required an upgrade to the $1,999 Mac Studio. Most people will probably be better off with the 3.5mm jack on the front, but if you’re the rare user who needs to plug in speakers, you’re better off relying on the USB-C switch on the back or a high-end device. audio interface.

More than aesthetics, the Mac mini’s biggest upgrade this time around is Apple’s new M4 hardware, as well as its ilk. all new Macs are ahead – now comes with 16GB of RAM as standard. The M4 sports a 10-core CPU (four high-performance cores and six high-efficiency ones), a 10-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. For $1,399, you can get the dramatically more powerful M4 Pro chip (which we have in our review unit) with a 14-core CPU (10 high-performance and four high-efficiency) and a 20-core GPU.

The M4 chip includes Thunderbolt 4 support on the three rear USB-C ports, while the M4 Pro brings Thunderbolt 5 to Macs for the first time, tripling data transfer speeds (120 Gb/s compared to 40 Gb/s). Each Mac mini also includes a full-size HDMI connection (supporting up to 8K 60Hz or 4K 240Hz) as well as an Ethernet port (gigabit standard or upgradeable to 10GbE). Although the Mac Studio lacks an integrated SD card reader, the Mac mini is well equipped to meet the demands of many creative professionals.

There are some interesting design choices though. First, the Mac mini’s power button is located at the bottom of the rear end, which leads to some awkward finger gymnastics when you want to turn it on. (Read what you will.) That means you probably don’t want to hide it in an out-of-reach corner of your desk. The previous Mac mini also hid the power button on the back, but at least it was next to its ports and didn’t require tilting the device.

Apple probably doesn’t expect its users to completely turn off their devices very often, but that’s clearly at odds with its sustainability efforts. (The company loudly claims that the Mac mini is carbon neutral, for example, because it’s built mostly from recycled metals and other materials.)

How fast is the Mac mini?

The Mac mini was the fastest computer I’ve reviewed this year, at least when it comes to CPU benchmarks. I’m used to being impressed by Apple Silicon, but the M4 Pro in our review unit (which also came with 48GB of RAM) was still a bigger leap than I expected. When running in performance-boosting high power mode, the Mac mini’s Geekbench 6 single-thread score of 3,943 was well above the typical 2,500 to 2,800 score range we’ve seen in PCs this year. Its multithreaded Geekbench 6 score was 22,850 — the only systems to score 14.00 this year were the Snapdragon X Elite-powered Surface Laptop 7 and XPS 13.

Of course, other laptops with dedicated, power-hungry video cards outperformed the Mac mini in the Geekbench 6 GPU test, but Apple’s tiny desktop still bested the RTX 4050 in Dell’s XPS 14, as well as the 16-inch Frame Beats the Radeon 7700S. Laptop. That’s still a very impressive result for graphics built into a system-on-a-chip.

Outside of tests, the Mac mini impressed me by running P’s lies At 1440p with max graphics settings at 60fps. It even managed to run the game at 4K with medium graphics settings, but the framerate hovered around 30fps, which was not very playable. That’s not a huge surprise though – more importantly, I know the GPU is powerful enough to handle modern games at more reasonable resolutions. Resident Evil 4 and Man has no Heaven also captured a steady 60 fps at 1440p.

To test the Mac mini’s AI capabilities, I used Whisper Transcription to transcribe an hour and nine minute long episode of the Engadget Podcast. Using the small language model, it took two minutes and nine seconds. By comparison, the M4-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro took three minutes and three seconds, and the M3 14-inch MacBook Pro took three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. These numbers tell us that Apple’s M4 hardware can help students quickly extract notes from lecture notes, even recording lessons in real time without much effort.

When benchmarking, gaming, and coding on the Mac mini, I was constantly impressed by how much it could handle without making any noticeable fan noise. But Apple cannot avoid the heat. The bottom of the Mac mini has a large fan to draw in cool air and distribute it throughout the system. However, when I started running Cinebench’s multi-threaded benchmark, the fan kicked into high gear and the Mac mini sounded like it was about to take off.

It’s not an unpleasant sound—it sounds more like a soothing white noise machine than an old Mac fan—but it’s certainly noticeable. This might not be a problem if you usually wear headphones or play music, but it can make the Mac mini very annoying in a shared office environment. If you plan to constantly throw heavy workloads at it in high power mode, you may be better off with a larger Mac Studio that can handle heat better. Apple still hasn’t updated the Studio with M4 chips – you’ll have to wait until next year for that.

Should you buy a Mac mini?

There’s no doubt that the M4 Pro Mac mini is an absolute beast, but at $1,399 (with 24GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD to start), it’s aimed primarily at creative professionals. I didn’t have the $599 M4 to test (it starts with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD), but I compared that chip in a 14-inch MacBook Pro and still found it impressive. Its Geekbench 6 and Cinebench scores still beat most PCs we’ve tested this year, and its GPU is fast enough for solid 1080p 60 fps gaming.

If you’re just looking for a simple and amazingly small Mac desktop, the $599 Mac mini is just what you need. If you want to do a little more serious work and can’t justify the $1,999 Mac Studio, the $1,399 model is a decent value compared to PC workstations. Just be prepared to stomach Apple’s upgrade prices: You’ll have to spend an extra $400 to get 32GB of RAM on the base Mini, and an extra $400 to get a 1TB SSD. That’s pretty inconsistent with prices outside of the Apple ecosystem, where you can easily find a decent 1TB NVMe SSD for under $100. (That is, connecting a cheap but capacious external drive to a mini is a better option than to a laptop.)

Apple will go to Apple when it comes to upgrade pricing, but you can buy a $599 Mac mini with at least 16GB of RAM. This alone is a reason to celebrate. The fact that it’s cute enough to impress my kid is a nice bonus.