Mac mini 2024 is available in a large number of modifications that differ in processor, memory, storage, and more
The M3 line of processors was only a brief episode in Apple’s saga of reimagining and improving Macs, and the compact Mac mini desktop computer skipped the upgrade to the third generation of M chipsets. A year and 10 months later, the M4 Pro processor appeared, which raised the Mac mini to a new height (the price of modifications with the M4 Pro starts at $ 1,399, we have a model for $ 2,199 on review). Even though the Mac mini is Apple’s most affordable computer with a basic M4 chip (only $ 599), its scale can match some of the best desktop computers and even full-size workstations.
Contents
Technical specifications
The same modification as in the review is indicated (in the performance section, the model on the base M4 is also mentioned)
- Processor: M4 Pro (14 CPU cores).
- Memory: 48 GB.
- Storage: 1 TB.
- Front ports: 2× USB-C 3 (up to 10 Gbps), 3.5 mm audio jack.
- Rear ports: Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gbps), HDMI, 3x USB-C Thunderbolt 5 (120 Gbps).
- Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi 6E (802.11 ax), Bluetooth 5.3.
- Dimensions: 12.7×12.7×5 cm.
- Weight: 730 grams.
- Maximum consumption: 155 watts.
Configurations
The best desktop computer in both basic and maximum configurations
We can safely say that this computer is the best among budget desktops at a starting price of $ 599, if only because of the included software and smooth operation. We have a much more “complete” version on review with a 14-core M4 Pro processor, 48 GB of combined memory and a 1 TB solid-state drive at a price of $ 2199 — but in the performance section you will find numbers and a Mac mini on the base M4.
In the box, you only get a Mac mini, without peripherals (considering the price of $ 2200, some accessories for data entry would be very useful!). You can use your favorite keyboard and mouse (the new USB-C Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse start at $ 258 per pair), just make sure they work over USB-C or that you have a USB-A to USB-C adapter.
If you go a little deeper into pricing, you can see that Apple has increased the initial amount of memory in all its computers to 16 GB from the previous 8 GB, without changing the price. This is interesting news, but it also helps highlight the next target for this additional upgrade: storage.
Apple still sells all entry-level Mac models with 256 GB of solid-state storage, which has long been considered quite low volume, especially considering Apple’s pricing. If there’s anywhere that makes sense to use 256 GB, it’s in the $ 599 consumer Mac mini, which starts with this SSD, a slightly more advanced 10-core rather than 8-core M4 processor like the base iMac, and 16 GB of storage. Although everyone wants more memory, this $ 599 model otherwise looks like a benchmark for budget computers.
Each step to increase the amount of memory or storage costs another $ 200, until you start doubling the amount over 1 TB. The new Mac mini supports up to 32 GB of RAM and up to 2 TB of storage. You can also increase your Ethernet connection speed from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps by paying an additional $ 100. The most sophisticated Mac mini without the M4 Pro costs $ 1,899.
You’ll find a few more configuration options in the Apple online store, but to get to our review of the M4 Pro model, you’ll need to start your journey with Apple’s lowest-priced M4 Pro model, which costs $ 1,399. Here’s a 12-core M4 Pro, and for that price, you’ll also get 24GB of storage and a 512GB SSD. Choosing a model with the M4 Pro also opens up Thunderbolt 5 for all the rear USB – C ports of the Mac mini.
Most upgrades here cost the standard $ 200, but for more substantial ones, you need to pay twice as much — for example, if you need to double the memory to 48 GB or increase the SSD capacity from 1 TB to 2 TB. While our $ 2,199 configuration is quite expensive, it doesn’t come close to the $ 4,699 maximum for a 14-core M4 Pro paired with 64GB of storage and an 8TB SSD.
As we take a closer look at the performance presented here, you’ll see why the Mac mini is a valuable asset in every sense of the word. At the same time, none of the internal components of the Mac mini can be updated after purchase, which only adds stress when making a decision.
Design
More appeal in a smaller size
Anyone familiar with Apple computers will notice that the new Mac mini looks like a tiny Mac Studio at first glance. Did Apple take some lessons from the design of its best desktop and apply them to the Mac mini? Well, that’s definitely what it looks like.
And how tiny it is — only 12.7 cm wide/deep and 5 cm high, which is much smaller in area, but thicker than it was before. The new Mac mini weighs just 670 (M4) or 730 grams (M4 Pro) and, as you’ve probably seen in the ad renderings, almost fits in the palm of your hand. It is very close to the size of a CD case.
The Mac mini’s resemblance to Mac Studio is obvious, starting with the highly visible raised base (on the underside of which you can see cutouts for air flow from a large cooling fan) and ending with vertically oriented USB-C ports on the front panel. Of course, the Mac mini is not as fancy as the Studio, because the front ports are “just” USB-C 3.1 connectors with a data transfer rate of 10 Gbps. But still, they help free up the more powerful Thunderbolt 4 or 5 ports located at the back for more important things.
The audio jack on the front panel has also become a useful feature and confirms that analog audio still has a place in Apple’s design philosophy. In addition to the Thunderbolt array on the back, the Mac mini is equipped with an HDMI port and an Ethernet connector.
With M4 Pro and Thunderbolt 5, the Mac mini supports up to three displays simultaneously at 6K resolution and 60 Hz. It can also work with one 6K/60Hz monitor and a second 8K/60Hz monitor, or with a single 4K monitor with a refresh rate of up to 240 Hz. These configurations with 8K/60 and 4K/240 displays require an HDMI port.
You shouldn’t endlessly find fault with performance, but such a small desktop becomes truly amazing when you see what it is capable of. The fact that you can get speeds comparable to a workstation from what you can hide behind a monitor will never cease to amaze.
While it’s common knowledge that technologies, paradoxically, get smaller as their power grows, it’s not often that you see desktop computers do so so quickly — in just one upgrade. This kid can compete with workstations that are several times larger than him.
Real use
Sometimes a loud but commendable desktop computer
The Mac mini works hard to achieve such a competitive power level, and you’ll know it. When the M4 Pro inside this tiny tower gets the most out of it, you’ll hear the cooling system running from across the room. The high-frequency hum of the fan may prompt you to turn up the volume of the TV show you’re watching while rendering a CGI project.
Of course, in most cases, you won’t use your Mac mini like this — the cooling fan quickly slows down after performing heavy tasks. A more common load among Mac mini users will be macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence.
The most interesting change to macOS with the Sequoia update was a new window management feature that has been annoying me for years. In Sequoia, it has improved significantly. Apple calls it a “window tile” that automatically activates when you tap and drag an app over its menu bar to any edge of the screen while holding down the Option key. This creates small resizing bars between application windows, but doesn’t make them flush with each other like in Windows 11. However, even so, it’s much better than it was before.
The iPhone mirroring feature introduced in Sequoia seems less useful to me than most “ecosystem” integrations, but only because I’ve used everything I needed before. Responding to messages on the Mac, adding events to the calendar that will be displayed on the iPhone, and opening browser tabs from the iPad or iPhone to the Mac in Safari-all this was more than enough, not to mention the “Continuity” mode.
The new mirroring feature lets you use a virtual copy of your iPhone while it’s locked. This may help you see iPhone notifications on your Mac, but how often is the iPhone so far away? However, I’ll admit that playing Pokemon TCG Pocket on a Mac in a convenient side window is a lot of fun, although sometimes it comes with delays (in rendering, not in response speed), and the visual effects of applications are blurred.
But of course, Apple Intelligence is the main innovation, which is especially interesting, since Apple (via macOS hints) says that the AI assistant is still in beta testing. The user guide even says that because it uses generative AI models, “the results may be inaccurate, unexpected, or offensive.
I dabbled with some of the most relevant features of Apple Intelligence in my life, such as writing tools. As expected, this option is too limited for me to be useful in my daily work, but I can see that it can help those who have difficulty writing texts. Using the Concise option for the selected text to shorten it takes away its personality, and the Friendly option becomes too verbose and often misses the point of a sentence or paragraph. In addition, Proofread, which edits your text for grammar and spelling, is not as far advanced in its proposed improvements as tools like Grammarly.
Also, Siri doesn’t seem to be fully developed yet. For most of my difficult questions, the assistant provided links to websites, rather than direct answers. Siri will undoubtedly continue to improve as part of Apple Intelligence as this public beta continues, but right now it’s still pretty limited in what it can respond to.
However, I was impressed with Apple Intelligence’s ability to summarize what is written on web pages using the Reader tool in Safari. He, for example, summarizes reviews quite well, highlighting the most important points of each material in brief paragraphs.
Productive
Mac mini (2024) small but powerful
Our review of the Mac mini reflects the potential of the highest modifications, but is not the maximum (at the end of this section we will test the model on a regular M4). Despite this, in some tests, our M4 Pro baby will compete with Windows-based workstations that are several times larger than it is.
Our Mac mini is also capable of handling serious games like such graphics-demanding games as Baldur’s Gate 3, Final Fantasy 14 Online, and Total War: Warhammer 3.In 2025, Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most visually rich AAA games to date, will arrive on the Mac. The new Civilization 7 will also work on Macs when released in early 2025.
Our benchmarking machines are as follows (model tests on the base M4 at the end of the the section:
| Processor | Graphics | Random access memory | Storage | |
| Apple Mac mini (2024, M4 Pro) | M4 Pro (14 cores) | M4 (20 cores) | 48 GB | 1 TB SSD |
| Apple Mac mini (2023, M2 Pro) | M2 Pro (14 cores) | M2 Pro (19 cores) | 16 GB | 1 TB SSD |
| Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024, M4 Pro) | M4 Pro (14 cores) | M4 (20 cores) | 48 GB | 2 TB SSD |
| ASUS ROG NUC 970 | Intel Core Ultra 9 185H | GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (8 GB) | 32 GB | 1 TB SSD |
| Falcon Northwest Talon (2024) | Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | GeForce RTX 4090 (24 GB) | 96 GB | 3 × 2 TB SSD (RAID 0) |
Naturally, we also paid attention to the 2023 Mac mini ($1,799) to see how the M4 Pro will look against the M2 Pro. Then we included the 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro 2024 ($3,649), which performed surprisingly well compared to the Mac mini. Next up is the ASUS ROG NUC 970 gaming mini PC ($1,799) with Intel’s best mobile Meteor Lake processor, which we’re currently reviewing. And finally, the latest model is the Falcon Northwest Talon, a desktop workstation based on the Core Ultra Series 200 that costs more than $ 7,000, which lost out to the M4 Pro Mac mini in several tests.
productivity and content creation
macOS somewhat limits the number of available benchmarks (in particular, the key tests of UL PCMark 10 are not available under macOS). But the rest of the tests are comparable across platforms, which gives us more information about the Mac’s competitiveness than ever. Our main benchmarks are processor-oriented or CPU-intensive: Cinebench 2024 uses the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Geekbench 6.3 Pro models popular applications (from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning), and we also look at how long it takes the HandBrake 1.8 video editing program to convert a 12-bit image to a single image.a one-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, the test utility PugetBench for Creators from the workstation manufacturer Puget Systems evaluates performance when editing images by performing various automatic operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
Before we get down to business, let’s make it clear that the Mac mini on the M4 Pro is a speed monster, challenging more expensive workstations in some tests, and simply ranking high in others. However, in the 16-inch MacBook Pro laptop, the same 14-core M4 Pro chip was slightly faster than in the desktop Mac mini. This contradicts the generally accepted logic that the processor always performs better in a desktop PC than in a laptop. The advantage of the MacBook Pro wasn’t huge and most likely wouldn’t even be noticeable in everyday use, but it’s curious.
In addition, the Mac mini M4 Pro (unsurprisingly) outperformed its predecessor M2 Pro in all tests. So rest assured, the 2024 model can be a decent upgrade, even if you bought a Mac mini in 2023, and will get even better with the accompanying design and connectivity updates.
The Mac mini is available in configurations priced similar to the ASUS ROG NUC 970 we tested, and in this comparison, the M4 Pro was just faster, even without the most high-tech Intel Meteor Lake chip inside. So if you slightly reduce the amount of memory or storage, you will get a competitive alternative from Apple.
The comparison to the Falcon Northwest workstation is mostly academic (the two systems are completely different devices), but it’s still notable that the Mac mini is almost exactly on par with Intel’s most powerful desktop processor, Arrow Lake, which debuted just a few weeks before the M4 line was introduced. Interestingly, in addition to the clear victory in Photoshop, the M4 Pro won the other small victories in tests for single-core performance, which corresponds to Apple’s recent statements about the fastest processor core on the market. However, the Core Ultra 9 285K has 10 more cores than the M4 Pro, and the larger number of cores proves superior in tasks such as video encoding and rendering (HandBrake) and other workstation-level tasks (see below). This suggests a potential need for some users in the 16-core M4 Max chip from Apple, although so far it can only be obtained in the line of laptops MacBook Pro 2024.
Graphics and game tests
Due to the fact that the 3DMark test suite works on macOS through the iOS app compatibility feature, we were unable to conduct graphical benchmarks on new Macs.
But I managed to run the 2022 strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 on this and several other Macs on Ultra and Low settings at 1080p resolution in the Battle benchmark, which gives an FPS score.
On the Mac mini c M4 Pro, Total War: Warhammer 3 showed an acceptable, but not smooth 40-plus frames per second at Ultra settings and more than 120 frames per second at Low. When using the recommended settings feature, I observed a stable 60 frames per second with decent detail.
The 20-core M4 Pro GPU continues to boost the gaming performance of the Mac line for mainstream gaming. This is impressive for its size and price compared to Windows gaming platforms, whether mini PCs or regular PCs. Of course, you still won’t be able to play many great PC games if you opt for a Mac. But few buyers make board games a primary or even secondary reason to buy a Mac.
Of course, much more importantly, the Mac mini on the M4 Pro is a real ace in content creation tasks. This can be seen below in our workstation test suite.
Tests for workstations
Testing the performance of workstations is another area where macOS lacks, because here you can’t run one of our main benchmarks in the form of SPECviewperf. However, otherwise our test suite for workstations is suitable.
To test the DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video editor, we used PugetBench for Creators. The utility performs automatic tasks to load the CPU and GPU, allowing us to estimate the upper limits of performance in real-world media creation conditions. Here, the higher the performance — the better.
Finally, we have the Blender benchmark, which tests on 3D modeling, 3D animation, and 3D compositing. Each system in Blender 4.2 renders three scenes (Monster, Junk Shop, and Classroom) to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance. Here, too, the higher the indicators, the better.
In the DaVinci Resolve Studio benchmark from PugetBench, the new Intel chip is confidently leading, but both Macs on the M4 Pro showed quite acceptable performance. Similarly, in the Blender benchmarks, the processor from Intel and graphics from NVIDIA in the Falcon Northwest Talon confidently outperformed the M4 Pro. This confirms the position of Macs as workstations focused on creative media processes, as opposed to powerful computers for more specialized tasks, such as rendering 3D models, which benefit from running more cores simultaneously. The Mac Studio M2 Ultra (not shown in the chart above) performs better at these tasks, beating Talon by more than 1,000 points in DaVinci Resolve.
Mac mini M4 tests from other reviews
Tests from The Verge of Mac Mini modification with M4 (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD):
- Cinebench 2024 Multi — 945;
- Cinebench 2024 Single — 176;
- Cinebench 2024 GPU — 4 107;
- Cinebench 2024 Multi (30-minute cycle) — 925;
- Geekbench 6 CPU Single — 3 889;
- Geekbench 6 CPU Multi — 14 915;
- Geekbench 6 GPU (OpenCL) — 37 256;
- Geekbench 6 GPU (Metal) — 57 416.
Tests from Tom’s Guide Mac Mini modifications with M4 (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD):
| M4 | M4 Pro | |
| BlackMagic Disk Speed (read) | 3437,8 | 6351,8 |
| BlackMagic Disk Speed (запись) | 3017,3 | 5133,8 |
| HandBrake | 4 m 42 sec | 2 m 47 sec |
| Borderlands 3 | 25,10 FPS | 44,62 FPS |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 40 FPS | 83 FPS |
| Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm | 52,48 FPS | 89,31 FPS |
| Total War: Warhammer III | 24,6 FPS | 46,1 FPS |
Feedback
Best Mini PC Experience
Improved inside and out with the introduction of the M4, the 2024 Mac mini is not only Apple’s best compact Mac to date, but also the best mini computer in principle. Apple is expanding both ends of the market, that is, the segment of both home and professional computers: on the one hand, the Mac mini has an ultra-low starting price, and on the other — a huge potential that is revealed when you increase the modification.
Although the cooling system is running at extreme capacity, and you’ll hear how it works, the Mac mini in the mini PC segment is the same as the MacBook Air in the ultrabook segment. Our testing data shows a marked improvement over the previous Mac mini model with M2 Pro and quite competitive results with some of the best iterations of Intel’s desktop and mobile chips.
Positive
- Excellent performance for working and entertaining in a small enclosure.
- More memory in the base model at the same low price.
- New compact design.
Minuses
- The storage capacity in the base model is still small.
- Fans can make a lot of noise under load.
- The internal memory and storage cannot be updated.
