Apple Mac Mini M4 Review (2024) – CNET

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. 

Watch this: Apple’s MacOS Sequoia: The New Features You’ll Want to Try

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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. 

As for Apple Intelligence on the Mac Mini, it seems like a perfect pairing, especially if you’re considering it for home office use. A lot of the tools are geared toward helping you get through work or tackle an endless to-do list faster. Things like summarizing emails and then generating replies (it can do the same with Messages), finding a device setting using natural language with Siri or using the Notes app to record and transcribe audio, and then Apple Intelligence will summarize it for you. 

Two of my favorite features, though, are in the Photos app. One is Clean up, which lets you quickly remove things like people or objects from photos. It’s similar to AI tools from Google, Adobe and others, and Apple’s is pretty good with its fixes but not always perfect (which is the case with the competition too). 

The other tool is natural language search. Simply type in what you’re looking for and the search can drill down and find it. For example, I take a lot of photos of recipes, including cocktails. So I searched for “cocktails” and found pictures of drinks and people drinking. But adding “recipe” to the search terms, and finally “whiskey,” brought up the image I was hunting for. And this is all without me ever tagging a single photo with any info. If you’re more organized than me and assign names to people, you can really drill down.

An Apple bargain? 

The base model M4 Mac Mini is $599, which is kind of a deal. It features a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory and a 256GB solid-state drive for storage. The version I tested is $799, and the only difference is the storage capacity: 512GB. Bumping up to $999 increases memory to 24GB and 512GB storage. Essentially, every memory or storage bump adds $200 to the base price, with the M4 configurations maxing out at 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage for $1,799. 

In general, your money is best spent on increasing memory, not storage, especially at $200 a pop. Although the 256GB SSD is a paltry amount, with three high-speed Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports (or even faster Thunderbolt 5 if you get the M4 Pro chip), adding more speedy external storage as needed is a better (and cheaper) option. 

Now, in addition to extra memory and storage, you can also upgrade to two M4 Pro chips. For $1,399, you’ll get a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. An additional $200 gets you an M4 Pro with a 14-core CPU. Memory with the M4 Pro goes up to 64GB, and storage is 8TB. Another $100 puts in a 10-gigabit Ethernet jack for network-attached storage. Fully loaded, it’s $4,699, which is a lot, but you’re getting a lot. This is a long way of saying the M4 Mac Mini can be as powerful as you need it to be as long as you’re willing to pay for it. 

It’s worth noting that this is the first Mac Mini to support connecting to up to three displays. If you get an M4 Pro model with Thunderbolt 5 ports, it allows for transfer speeds of up to 120Gbps and the ability to connect up to three displays up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or its HDMI out. The standard M4 can also do three displays, but only two are up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt. The third can have a resolution of up to 5K at 60Hz via Thunderbolt or 4K at 60Hz over HDMI out. 

Is the Mac Mini good for gaming?

After the M4 Mac Mini was announced, there was much chatter about how it could be a game console. Apple has certainly pushed the Mini for gaming in the past and is doing more so now. It’s only about 1.5 inches larger than the Apple TV 4K streamer — certainly tiny enough to live in or on the smallest of TV stands. 

In my testing, the M4 Mini was fine for casual gaming, especially if you lean toward more mobile-friendly indie games. With more graphically demanding titles, you’ll likely have to dial back to Medium on graphics settings and play at 1440p or 1080p for a more enjoyable experience. On Baldur’s Gate 3, I set it to Ultra and it was not smooth, which is to be expected. No doubt bumping up to the M4 Pro or even going above the 16GB of memory in my Mini would address that. 

The overwhelming issue is if you’re looking for AAA games, you’ll only really find older ones. The game Control, which Apple uses for demos of hardware-accelerated ray-traced reflections, is from 2019. Another, the Myst remake, is from 2021. So yes, if you want to play games, the M4 Mac Mini is up for it. But you just might not find all the games you want to play and you’ll probably need to spend at least $999 for more graphics-intensive titles. 

About the power button

For all of Apple’s design prowess, every once in a while, it makes a choice that leaves us scratching our heads. The M4 Mac Mini is remarkably small and certainly a design feat, especially given its high-performance potential. But for some reason, perhaps because of its compactness or simply to keep it hidden, Apple put the Mini’s power button on the bottom of the computer’s rear-left side. That means to power it on and off, you’ll need to lift it up some.

It’s not a huge hardship to lift the rear, but it’s nonetheless unusual placement and potentially a bit of a pain if it is connected to three displays. It’s also going to make mounting it to the back of a display or TV a little trickier. The thing is, the Mac Mini is so small and the back is so filled with ports, that it doesn’t really leave a good place for a button. 

Is the M4 Mac Mini worth getting? 

If you’re looking for a home office computer, a home entertainment machine or a system for live streaming, podcasting or other content creation, the M4 Mac Mini can do all that. You’ll get the best of what MacOS Sequoia and Apple Intelligence have to offer in a tiny box and at a reasonable starting price. The price ratchets up quickly from there, though. The good news is the M4 seems like it can handle quite a bit (we’re still wrapping up our benchmark testing of it), so definitely consider just upping the amount of memory before rushing to the $1,399 M4 Pro, unless you need extra graphics performance and better display support. Also, for students and families, I would recommend the M4 iMac because the all-in-one design is easier to manage.