Apple Mac mini 2024 (M4) review

01 December 2024

The Mac mini has been an unassuming yet stable member of Apple's desktop lineup of Macs for nearly two decades. It has always been the most accessible computer the company has offered and the bare bones nature was designed primarily to make people using Windows PCs switch over seamlessly by bringing over their existing peripherals.

Despite its age and countless revisions, the Mac mini has only had three designs over its lifetime. The most famous one, the one that preceded the current model, was around for over 14 years. You could argue that being the cheapest computer in the lineup, the Mac mini never quite received the same love and attention as the more popular MacBook models and you'd probably be right.

Well, after 14 years, Apple has finally redesigned the Mac mini. The new design is built from the ground up for the new Apple Silicon chips whereas the previous model was built for a variety of Intel chips. This means it can now be a lot smaller, and the mini has always been a small computer to begin with.

The 2024 Mac mini comes with Apple's latest M4 generation of chips. You get a choice of the base M4 as well as the more premium M4 Pro. There are also updated memory, storage, and connectivity options.

The model we have for review today is the $599 base model, which can also be had for $499 if you are a student. This features the M4 chip, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. This seems to be the best value and most sought-after configuration, so it would be interesting to see how well it performs and if it's worth buying for an existing Mac user or for someone thinking of making the switch from Windows.

Design

The new Mac mini has the same unibody anodized aluminum construction as previous models. The big change this generation is the size, which is incredibly small considering it's packing the same basic hardware as the previous generations.

The new Mac mini measures 5 inches by 5 inches while being just under 2 inches tall. This makes it closer to the current Apple TV 4K than the previous Mac mini in dimensions. The top and sides are perfectly flat with curved corners and sharp edges. The top features a glossy Apple logo.

The bottom houses the cover that provides access to the interiors of the machine but is sealed away as it's not meant to be opened by the user. The base has a ring of vents that provide intake and exhaust for the cooling system inside. There's also a power button on the right, which falls on the left once the machine is flipped right side up.

Now, much has been said about this button placement but in my usage, this wasn't an issue. It's not something you need to access often so it doesn't end up being nearly as much of an inconvenience as you might assume without actually living with the machine. Still, I'm not against a better placement on the front or the back (or even the sides) and perhaps this is something Apple can look into for future revisions. But we all know that's not going to happen.

Part of the redesign is also the rearrangement and reconfiguration of the ports. The Mac mini now has ports on the front for the first time, an area that has been largely left blank since the device dropped support for a disc drive. The back of the unit is no longer removable as it was on the previous models, and the ports are drilled directly into the aluminum shell.

Getting back to the ventilation system, I am not fond of the way the Mac mini cooling system has essentially the same design principle as a Roomba. It sucks air in from the bottom and spits it out the back. The problem with this is that it just pulls in all the dust that will inevitably be present on the surface it is on, even if the vents are placed deeper within the perimeter of the unit. It will also limit the pressure with which air can be pulled in and create a slightly turbulent noise as it goes in and out in such a cramped space.

My solution? Place it on a small pedestal. I just used a small box of a pair of wireless earbuds but you can get creative. It just needs to be smaller than the circular bottom cover so that the unit is raised above the ground and the vents don't have anything immediately below them. This way, the cooling system will directly pull the air around it instead of sweeping it off the surface below, reducing how much dust it pulls in. Secondly, it also solves the issue with the power button, as with the unit raised, it becomes trivially easy to access it, once you memorize which side it's on.

As for getting inside the unit, there are plenty of teardown videos that show how to do it. The Mac mini used to have accessible innards at one point and you could get inside to replace or upgrade the storage and memory. That functionality slowly went away over the years and the last iteration of the previous device had a locked basement, just like it is on this 2024 model. Still, if you are creative enough, you can get inside without too much of an issue. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for storage or memory reasons but it might be a good idea to open it up every year to do some cleaning. The heatsink is small so it will need to be dusted regularly to remain effective.

Overall, the design of the Mac mini is really impressive in some ways and a disappointment in others. It is incredibly small for a fully functional computer and the build quality is impeccable. However, the ventilation design makes it susceptible to getting filled with dust, and access to the insides is barred, even for basic cleaning purposes. You could say it's form over function but that's basically been the Mac design philosophy for a while now.

Hardware

The Mac mini 2024 comes with a choice of two chipsets, the base M4 and the M4 Pro. The M4 has 10 CPU cores with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro has 12 CPU cores with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The M4 gets a 10-core GPU whereas the M4 Pro has a 16-core GPU. You can also further upgrade the M4 Pro model with a 14-core GPU and 20-core GPU. Both chips also have a 16-core Neural Engine NPU.

The M4 model comes with 16GB, 24GB, and 32GB of 128-bit 7500MHz LPDDR5X memory while the M4 Pro model comes with a choice of 24GB, 48GB, and 64GB of 256-bit 8532MHz LPDDR5X memory. This gives the Pro models a memory bandwidth of 273GB/s whereas the base model has 120GB/s.

In terms of storage, the base model gets 256GB while all others get 512GB as standard. This can then be upgraded to 1TB or 2TB on the M4 model and 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, or 8TB on the M4 Pro model. As usual, all these upgrades need to be done while placing the order on Apple's website or through its retail stores as they cannot be upgraded or replaced later.

You may remember that Apple computers came with 8GB memory as standard before. However, thanks to the introduction of Apple Intelligence, the company had to bump up the base memory on all its computers to make it functional, which might be the only useful thing to have come out of the AI revolution so far.

This means the base model Mac mini is now usable in a way the previous 8GB machines simply weren't. You can delude yourself into thinking that 8GB is adequate for a computer but it simply isn't and hasn't been for a while. Even sitting here right now just typing out this text with just a few browser tabs open and music playing in the background, the Mac mini is consuming over 10GB of memory out of its 16. It's also worth noting that being a unified memory architecture, everything from the CPU, the GPU, and the NPU dip into the same pool of memory, which further makes anything less than 16GB unusable.

What's also still not usable is the 256GB base storage. I'm not sure what revolution would be required to make Apple change that to 512GB but for now if you buy the base model, you are getting just enough storage to be able to install your everyday apps and perhaps one or two games. Unlike with the memory, the good thing with the storage situation is that you can just plug in an external SSD to get additional space. You can pretty much use the external drive like internal storage, using it to install apps and even booting from it, if necessary. It won't be as fast as the internal drive but for most use cases a USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive is more than adequate and the Mac mini supports 40Gbps USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4, even on the base model.

Connectivity

Speaking of ports, the connectivity on the 2024 Mac mini has been revised. There are no USB-A ports anymore, and the Apple Silicon models had already lost the SD card slot that used to be present on the Intel-based units. Now, there are three USB-C ports on the back, which support 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 on the M4 models and also 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro model. These ports also support DisplayPort 1.4 when used with a USB-C to DP cable. For HDMI users, there is a full-size HDMI 2.1 port alongside a Gigabit Ethernet, which can be configured to 10Gbps while ordering. Finally, there's a power connector on the back and the power supply is built into the system, which, much to Apple's credit, is a thing it does every generation no matter how small the computer gets.

Moving to the front, there are two USB-C ports supporting 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (no Thunderbolt) along with a 3.5mm powered headphone jack that supports high-impedance headphones. The headphone jack on the front would be convenient to those using headphones but there is no longer an audio port at the back, so anyone using desktop speakers would now have to leave a cable permanently attached to the front port and then clumsily route it to the back or plug in a USB DAC at the back. A second auxiliary port on the back would have been a better solution and unlikely to have put a dent in Apple's trillion-dollar market cap.

For wireless users, there's Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) as well as Bluetooth 5.3.

Overall, the connectivity on the Mac mini is good if you just count the number of ports. However, the lack of USB-A is frustrating, especially for a BYODKM device like the Mac mini, which people are bound to use with their existing USB keyboards and mice. Despite having five USB ports, many people will still have to rely on dongles to use their wired peripherals or purchase wireless alternatives. And what do you know, Apple just happens to have wireless keyboards, mice, and trackpads available for you to purchase.

Software

The 2024 Mac mini comes with macOS 15 Sequoia out of the box, currently at 15.1.1 at the time of writing. Just like iOS updates, macOS updates are available to download as soon as they are released. Apple also supports Mac hardware for years, with the current Sequoia release supporting hardware as old as the 2017 x86 Mac Pro. Apple Silicon Macs should have an even longer update life and you can probably expect close to a decade of support.

If you are an existing Mac user, there isn't anything on this Mac mini that would be new as all Macs essentially get the same version of the operating system. However, if you are coming from Windows then there will be a period of acclimatization before you can operate the system effectively. You will need to get used to the keyboard controls, which are quite different under macOS, and this can be a bit challenging, especially if you just plug in a standard keyboard designed for Windows that doesn't have the macOS modifier keys. The keyboard will work but you won't really know what key you are pressing unless it also has alternate iconography.

None of this is insurmountable and you are mostly looking at 2-3 days of use after which you start getting used to how things work. In a week or so, you will be operating about as well as you would on a Windows PC. The only problem then is if you are someone like me who uses a Mac and a PC daily, in which case there is a lot of fumbling around when switching back and forth. However, if you commit to one then you don't have to worry about that.

Once you get used to it, macOS is very easy and — dare I say — enjoyable to use, something Windows users have probably forgotten what it feels like. Being Unix-based, it's also a robust and powerful OS, and if you are familiar with Unix then you can get anything done on the Mac. Coming from Windows, the quality of the built-in apps, for the most part, is superior. Finder, the macOS equivalent of Explorer, has much more useful features. The combination of the Dock and the menu bar is a lot more powerful than Windows' taskbar. Even the Spotlight search function is vastly superior. You also get Apple's Pages, Numbers, and, Keynote apps built-in for free whereas Microsoft won't give you free Office even on its Surface computers. Add to that GarageBand and iMovie and you have all the basic apps pre-installed and ready to go.

macOS is also not encumbered by the decades of prior versions hiding underneath the carpet. Modern Windows is essentially multiple older versions inside a trench coat and you just need to hit a couple of buttons to unearth UI that is straight out of Windows XP. Current Windows is also burdened by bloatware, ads, tracking features, and whatever flavor-of-the-month gimmick Microsoft is currently experimenting with that will be enabled by default, whether you like it or not. macOS is also a more secure platform as it doesn't attract nearly as much malicious intent as Windows by simply having a smaller user base.

And it goes without saying that the integration with iOS or iPadOS makes macOS a much better platform for current iPhone or iPad owners. You get features like AirDrop, which, to this day, has no good alternative. All of your iCloud files and documents sync across as do your passwords. The new iPhone Mirroring feature puts your entire iPhone screen on your computer so you don't even need to pick up the phone to use it and of course, all calls and messages come through on the Mac. If you wear an Apple Watch, it will even automatically log you into your Mac when you're nearby. And if you have an iPad, you can use it as a second monitor for your Mac with minimal effort. I tried hard not to say it but it really just works.

However, as powerful and functional as macOS can be, it is hampered by Apple's idiosyncrasies that iOS users might be familiar with. You can do an incredible number of things on the OS but many of them are hidden behind obscure keyboard gestures that very few people outside of OS X graybeards would know. It's also flexible in some ways while being weirdly rigid in others; you get full system-level color management and Dolby Vision HDR support but you can't change your monitor's bit-depth or adjust its scaling factor. There's bit-perfect audio output but only if you manually change it yourself from the settings to match the audio being played as it can't do it automatically like on iOS.

Also, while most built-in apps are really good, some aren't. Safari is built on a robust WebKit engine with generally good intentions regarding safeguarding the user against online tracking. However, the browser is appallingly basic otherwise and to this day doesn't even support forward/backward navigation keys and middle click scroll on a standard mouse because Apple just expects everyone to use a Magic Mouse or Trackpad. Even the extensions it supports are basic. If you are coming from Windows, you are better off just installing the Mac version of whatever browser you were using there.

Safari isn't the only exception. The entire OS expects you to use Apple's own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. For example, I plugged the Mac mini into my 27-inch, 1080p display. macOS seemingly doesn't know what to do with this resolution so text just looks a bit blurry; worse than it does on Windows, which is saying something. I've heard the same also happens if you plug in a 1440p display. The solution is to download software like BetterDisplay, which enables HiDPI internal scaling that renders everything internally at 200% (so at 4K for a 1080p display), which then makes everything look how it should.

The thing is, Apple's own displays are not just high resolution but also use HiDPI by default, which is why everything looks fine if you buy a MacBook or one of the Apple monitors. But not everyone who buys a Mac mini, especially the base model, would want to fork out a $1600 minimum for the Studio Display. But unless you have one of those or at least a 4K monitor, expect to rely on third-party software to fix your scaling issues. Then again, not everyone notices stuff like this so you might not even realize there's something wrong, in which case I envy you.

With regards to third-party apps, Macs have always enjoyed a rich community of talented and committed developers. There is some amazing software out there that not only does what you need to do but also looks incredible while doing so. Many of these devs are actually smaller indies who exclusively develop for the Mac or Apple's platforms so they are always up to date with new hardware or OS features. However, if you are coming from Windows or Linux where everything is handed to you for free, you might get a culture shock when you realize a lot of good software for the Mac is paid. It doesn't bother me personally as the quality is usually worth the price but if it does to you then you may have to look for alternatives and usually a lot of free software available for Windows will have a Mac version, too. Alternatively, you can invest in services like Setapp, which is like Game Pass for apps, or Mac-Bundles, which offers discounted prices on app bundles.

Apple's transition to ARM has also gone incredibly well, with a lot of apps you use on a daily basis now having a native ARM version. Some still don't but you can still run x86 apps on the OS, which emulates them seamlessly. The only apps that aren't supported are older 32-bit x86 apps, as the OS now only supports 64-bit software.

Overall, the software experience is mostly pleasant with high quality first and third-party app selection but users switching from Windows will face a learning curve that Apple doesn't help with its quirks and a lack of optimization for third-party peripherals.

Performance

Productivity

As a reminder, our review unit for this test is the base Mac mini 2024 model, which comes with the M4, 16GB unified memory (shared by the CPU, GPU, and NPU), and 256GB internal SSD.

Benchmark	Test	Result
Cinebench R23	Single	2204
	Multi	13868
Cinebench 2024	Single	172
	Multi	962
	GPU	4011
Geekbench 6	Single	3828
	Multi	14953
	GPU (Metal)	58122
Geekbench AI (NPU)	Single-precision	4763
	Half-precision	36563
	Quantized	51637
Corona 10	Rays/s	5261889
Blender (Classroom)	CPU	376 seconds
	GPU	59 seconds
WebXPRT 4	Score	336
JetStream 2	Score	497.731
Speedometer 3.0	Score	45.5

Starting with the synthetic benchmarks, the Mac mini performed remarkably well, as we have come to expect from Apple Silicon devices. The M4's claim to fame this generation is of the fastest single-core performance, and sure enough, the M4's single-core performance in Geekbench and Cinebench is chart-topping, beating out every single consumer CPU on the market, including flagship parts such as the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. When it comes to multi-threaded performance, the M4 still does quite well, matching parts like the Ryzen 5 7600X, which pulls over 100W just by itself.

The Mac mini M4 impresses when it comes to demanding tasks like video editing and 3D rendering. In DaVinci Resolve, timeline performance was good as were export times. 3D rendering performance in Blender was especially incredible; the humble 10-core GPU was able to make mincemeat out of smaller projects, keeping up well even with more powerful dedicated graphics cards.

Ultimately, what holds the machine back from taking on larger projects is the 16GB memory on the base model. While you could easily do even complex photo editing, you can't have too many photos open as they eventually take up all memory and start writing to the swap. Similarly, for video, you can easily work on short-form videos for TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube Shorts but for long-form videos, you need to either keep the project length short or not have too many complex edits and layers. Think of the base model as an electric car; fast and capable but limited by a small battery. As long as you work within its limits, you can get a pretty great computing experience.

Of course, not all productivity tasks require a lot of memory. If you are primarily working on office or school documents, code or do web development, do simpler design or artwork, run a basic home server, or just web and email, all of that can be done with complete ease on a 16GB system. You might not even need to invest in an external SSD, although I strongly recommend you do so. This way, you won't fill up your internal SSD to the brim, which could reduce its performance.

Gaming

There was a time in Mac reviews when this section could just be left blank. There was a period in the early days of the Mac where there was a good selection of games for the time but eventually the industry just moved on to Windows as the primary desktop platform for all game development. Apple obviously didn't make it easier for the developers with its limited and expensive hardware.

Fast forward to 2024 and there's now a decent selection of games to play on the Mac. When I opened my Steam account, I was surprised to see how many games in my library were available for the Mac. Of course, I later learned most of them were for Intel Macs and that Steam itself was still an x86 app. However, in the past year alone many high profile AAA games have launched on the Mac in native ARM versions. We now have titles like Resident Evil 4 remake, Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil Village, 2023 Game of the Year winner Baldur's Gate 3, Death Stranding Director's Cut, GRID Legends, Lies of P, and more on the Mac App Store. Others have also announced support for the platform, with Cyberpunk 2077, Control, and Resident Evil 2 remake coming over the next few months. It's easy enough to see which games are on the Mac on Steam by setting your store to only show macOS-compatible titles or checking the product page for individual games.

To me, this is a positive trend that could potentially see some games released on the Mac alongside the PC in the future. For its part, Apple is still doing the bare minimum to support game development on its platform but with the hardware now being both good and popular, developers don't really have too many reasons to not release on macOS.

As for the gaming experience on the M4 Mac mini, it was better than I expected. I tried a mix of native and x86 titles and was surprised to see that, at least in my library, hardly any game was straight-up unplayable. The only game I tried that didn't run correctly was Inside, and even then it was a visual issue that made it look like you were playing it on drugs.

Unfortunately, measuring and benchmarking gameplay performance remains a challenge on macOS, and not every game has a built-in benchmark like Shadow of the Tomb Raider above. There are no good Afterburner or RTSS alternatives (or any alternatives, for that matter) so I had to rely on Apple's Metal Performance HUD, which, thankfully, can be enabled for any game on the Mac unlike on iOS, where it only works for TestFlight apps. That, along with some good ol' patience and perseverance resulted in the following data. Of course, since there was no way to measure frame time performance outside of the HUD's graph, I had to include a subjective assessment but know that it's coming from someone who regularly plays games on the PC.

Games	Frame rate	Frame time
Resident Evil 4 remake	61fps	Great
Resident Evil 7	95fps	Great
Death Stranding DC	63fps	Good
Lies of P	51fps	Great
Dirt 4	130fps	Great
Stray	66fps	Playable
Alien Isolation (x86)	60fps	Playable
Metro Exodus (x86)	65fps	Good
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (x86)	49fps	Good

The data above is the result of running the games at a native 1920 x 1080 resolution at the medium preset, wherever available. Testing was done in somewhat demanding areas to give a mid to worst-case scenario in terms of frame rates.

Taking that into consideration, I was pleased with the way most of the games performed. What you don't see in those numbers is how much better the performance could be by manually tweaking a few settings and enabling upscaling. A lot of the tested games support MetalFX temporal upscaling, which provides results similar to FSR2 but not quite as good as DLSS or XeSS. You could add a good 20-30fps on top of the results above in the games where MetalFX was available, which made the already decent numbers even better.

What also impressed me was the frame time consistency. Even in titles like Lies of P, where the average performance doesn't quite hit 60fps at all times without upscaling, the frame time performance was good, which meant the overall frame delivery was consistent and stable with no major stutters, hence the Great grade. Games with a Good grade had occasional minor stutters due to things like traversal stutters, which are unavoidable and also found on the PC.

Games with the generally worse grade of 'Playable' had slightly poor frame time performance where there was semi-frequent stutter that didn't make the game unplayable but also not particularly fun, especially if you are sensitive to that kind of stuff like I am. This mostly happened in titles like Alien Isolation and Stray, both of which have real-time shader compilation-related stutter, which once again is unavoidable even on the PC and it only gets worse when emulated as in the case of Alien Isolation. But then there were titles like Metro Exodus, which is a demanding game running under emulation, and still ran quite well.

Of course, I primarily focused on demanding 3D titles for this testing. There were several 2D or simpler 3D titles that ran flawlessly at over 200fps on the Mac mini, including titles like GRIS, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, and The Witness. If those are the sort of games you are interested in then the Mac mini will do a brilliant job.

Having said all that, gaming on a Mac is still quite limited compared to a Windows PC. Don't get me wrong, things are a lot better than they used to be and for the first time, it seems there might just be hope for gaming on a Mac. But it's not quite there yet, which means while it can do some gaming, you still shouldn't be buying a Mac for gaming.

It's worth noting that the M4 chip does support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, none of the games in my library or even ones I know of support it on the Mac as of this writing. That's probably for the best, however, as RT is a very demanding feature, and hardware acceleration or not, will only make the frame rates in these games worse. For now, you are better off using that feature in 3D rendering apps to make your RT renders quicker.

Audio

Like with previous Mac mini computers, the 2024 model has a single loudspeaker inside. In the past, this was just good enough to play the macOS startup sound and not much else but the speaker inside the 2024 model is surprisingly good. Because there's just one of them and it's firing down on your desk, the sound is surprisingly full-bodied and rich. Apple has made major strides in its MacBook speakers in recent years and the Mac mini seems to be benefiting from that.

You should still invest in a good pair of speakers but if all you do is listen to podcasts or people speaking in YouTube videos, then no one is going to blame you for sticking to the Mac mini speaker.

As with Apple's other computers that don't include a display, the Mac mini does not have a built-in microphone. This means features like Siri or Apple Intelligence aren't fully useful out of the box unless you get your own microphone or start typing everything out.

Thermals and power

The Mac mini M4 has a single centrifugal fan pushing air through a relatively small heat sink that houses a single heat pipe cooling the chip. The M4 Pro model has a larger heat sink and heat pipe but the basic design is the same.

Contrary to what I first thought, the fan on the Mac mini is always operating at a minimum of 1000rpm. This is, for all intents and purposes, inaudible even in the quietest home or office environment you can imagine. You can put your ear to the machine and your own breathing will be louder than the Mac mini's fan.

This did make me wonder why the fan simply doesn't switch off when the machine is idling to prevent some dust intake. After all, Apple has been making fanless MacBook Airs for a while now and those seem to get along fine without a fan, even under load. I have to assume there are other warm components inside the system that require cooling even if the chip does not as the Mac mini also has less surface area than even the smallest MacBook Air to passively dissipate its heat (the MacBook Air also does not have an integrated power supply like the Mac mini).

Apple's fan hystereses have always been on the conservative side to prioritize noise over cooling. The system will allow the chip to hit up to 105˚C after which it will gradually start ramping up the fan speed. The fan speed will rise until the system maintains around 100˚C and will remain steady. For an ambient temperature of around 26˚C, this results in a fan speed of around 2400rpm, which is somewhat audible in a quiet room but not if you have other sounds like a fan, AC, or just an open window.

If you like, you can download fan control apps to reach the full 4900rpm top speed. At that speed, there is no mistaking the sound the fan makes. Again, it's not particularly annoying in pitch but due to the comical amount of air the fan pushes out despite its size, it's hard not to hear all that air moving even in a noisy room. Of course, in reality, the machine will likely never hit those speeds on its own.

The thermal throttling results of the machine were satisfactory. Even after a 10-minute Cinebench stress test in a 30°C ambient environment, the M4 Mac mini produced the exact same score as after a single run in a 24°C environment, and the fan didn't even spin up from its base speed for half the run. Most tasks aren't as full-throttled as a Cinebench run, which means you won't really experience any performance loss even in extended work or gameplay situations.

In terms of power consumption, Apple claims the M4 Mac mini consumes 4W at idle and 65W under maximum load. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro model consumes 5W at idle and 140W under max load. Unfortunately, I did not have a power meter at hand to measure the power pulled from the wall but as for individual numbers, I saw the GPU pull around 18W at most under a full gaming load while the CPU could pull around 25W under a full load. I'm not sure how one would even achieve a 65W peak as even with a full CPU and GPU load I couldn't even reach a full 45W combined load (it's not really possible to run the CPU and GPU at full power anyway) so Apple's 65W number is truly worst case scenario max figure.

65W as a worst-case scenario is pretty amazing when you consider the aforementioned Ryzen 5 7600X that the M4 matches in multi-threaded performance pulls over 100W just for the CPU alone. You would also be hard-pressed to find a graphics card on the market that can match the M4 GPU performance and come anywhere close to its power consumption numbers. Even something like the Ryzen 7 8700G offers roughly the same performance and consumes over four times the power.

When it comes to bang for your buck, the Apple Silicon chips are still leading the industry with just how much performance you can get out of the power you feed it. You may not be happy with the performance but there's no arguing with the efficiency on display here.

Pricing

The Mac mini pricing is very interesting this year. The base model with the M4, 16GB memory, and 256GB storage is $599. Usually, Apple's base model Macs are worth ignoring but not this year. This year, all the Macs get 16GB memory as standard, which makes the base Mac mini especially enticing as it's no longer sandbagged by the 8GB memory.

But, this puts even more focus on how ridiculous Apple's upgrade pricing is. Want to double that memory to 32GB? That would be $400. Double the storage to 512GB? That would be another $200. With two clicks of the configurator, you have doubled the price of the base Mac mini to $1199. You can buy an entirely new base Mac mini for that, which would include that 16GB memory and 256GB storage. And also the rest of the damn computer.

The problem this creates is that while the base model is perfectly viable, nothing else is. None of the storage or memory options. Nor the M4 Pro version for that matter because at that point why not just wait for the Mac Studio update, which will have a better chipset, ports, memory, and thermals? Sure, it will be bigger but who cares? Even the Mac Studio is small by regular PC standards.

Comparisons against Windows PCs are also favorable for the base model. I've seen some people argue that you can build a PC for the same price but unless you are buying used parts, it's simply not possible to build a PC with the same level of performance as the base Mac mini for under $600. However, a PC becomes a lot more viable once you compare it against the $1199 upgraded Mac mini, at which point you can actually get a significantly better PC. This once again highlights how bad Apple's upgrade prices are as you go from a trash-tier to a great PC at the same cost it takes the Mac mini to double its memory and storage.

Conclusion

The $599 base model Mac mini is a great computer. It's compact, well-built, powerful, and quiet. It has decent connectivity, a surprisingly decent speaker, consumes very little power, and will be supported for years to come. What lets it down are the prohibitive prices for memory and storage upgrades, which can only be configured from Apple, some annoying quirks with macOS, lack of USB-A ports, and a gaming scene that's getting better but still not close to what you find on Windows.

Still, ignoring all the upgrade options and looking purely at the $599 model (or $499, if you can pretend to be a student), the 2024 Mac mini is worth buying for someone looking for a desktop computer that's not too complicated or too expensive but still packs a punch. It's great for someone buying their first computer, someone looking to migrate from a laptop to a desktop, or someone looking for something to complement their gaming PC and wanting to move away from Windows.

Pros

• Compact design with excellent build quality and finish
• M4 chip is powerful while still consuming very little power
• Silent operation
• Decent number of high-speed USB and Thunderbolt ports
• macOS has a great selection of first and third-party apps along with excellent integration with other Apple products
• Surprisingly usable built-in speaker

Cons

• Memory and storage upgrades can only be configured from Apple and are absurdly expensive
• No USB-A ports or an SD card slot
• No separate audio jack on the back for plugging in speakers
• macOS has some annoying quirks and only optimized for Apple's own displays and peripherals
• Game selection is improving but still limited