The Apple Mac Mini M4 Sets the Mini Computer Standard

Apple Mac Mini M4 Power Consumption

Something really neat with the M4 version is the power consumption. We saw 4-6W at idle, which was great, but it was also in-line with many mini PCs that we test.

The big difference was the maximum power consumption. Here we were seeing 40-45W as our normal maximum, but Apple says we should be able to hit 65W.

Just for a bit of comparison, we would normally expect a modern mini PC in this class to hit 75-80W, and some will cross 100W. Apple did a great job here.

Key Lessons Learned

Let me preface this by saying that I have travelled over a half million miles with my Macbook Pro 14″ M1 Max. My work desktop, however, is an AMD Threadripper Pro-based system (after having been Xeon W) and at home I use a Windows mini PC plus a Linux mini PC.

For the professional workflows that we use, mostly in Adobe Creative Cloud products, the Apple Silicon versions, for whatever reason, tend to run with fewer issues on the Apple Silicon than on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA platforms. This is so much so that Alex our video editor uses a Windows workstation, but has a Mac Mini as a just in case box if something is not working. I have seen demos of DaVinici Resolve exhibiting the same. On one hand, it is a software issue, and it is not a silicon issue. On the other hand, when you have to produce content stability and speed matters. There are some strange things like AV1 encoding which Apple is behind on. ProRes encode/decode engines are great, but realistically, we run a 750K+ subscriber YouTube channel and we rarely use ProRes or RAW (video) just to save space. We also want to mention that some of the AI use cases are also great on Apple Silicon given their unified memory structure.

The flip side is gaming. Today’s mini PCs, really starting with the AMD Radeon 780M integrated graphics have been great for gaming. For e-sports titles especially, the integrated graphics of modern mini PCs are great. The newer 2024 generation is even better. On Apple, it is just not prioritized. A quick look through my Steam library of games that I have aspirationally purchased, but do not have the time to play, shows a big portion are not available for Mac platforms. Diablo IV requires 3rd party software or some big workarounds to get mostly working, but it takes up more than half of the 256GB model’s storage. Counter-Strike 2 is a no-go.

At the same time, if you want a mini PC that you will run as a server today, or in the future, then a mini PC is a much better option. An 8GB Mac Mini M1 lacks the RAM capacity to be a virtual machne host. A 3-year-old mini PC still has plenty of useful life left even after it is done being something used hands-on every day. A Mac Mini does not. 16GB is not going to change that.

Maybe the biggest takeaway however, is that seeing the M4 Max in the Macbook Pro makes me realize that Apple has a really neat scaling path. Apple adds CPU and GPU cores. The MBP 14″ M4 Max is like having a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 8GB notebook edition, but Apple has much better power consumption. That leads me to perhaps the most important observation: Apple is the company not trying to sell you a GPU. NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel all have PCIe GPUs they want to sell you.

For the future of the mini PC market, and perhaps even the mobile market these companies are going to have to sacrifice dGPU sales and start scaling integrated GPUs.

Final Words

Despite the feeble 256GB storage capacity, and memory and storage upgrades priced at highway robbery levels, the base Mac Mini M4 is really great. At the $550 we got the base model for on Amazon, it is hard to beat with a mini PC. The caveat here, of course, is that you have to be OK with the storage and the fact it is a Mac.

The 24GB and 1TB version was probably the wrong idea. Instead, getting a 512GB version with an external SSD would probably be a better option. The 10Gbase-T is an awesome $100 upgrade at only around 2x what you would pay for a PCIe card upgrade on a PC.

Overall, Apple has some really cool technology here. The big question is how long, or perhaps even if, the mini PC vendors can replicate what Apple is doing in terms of packaging.