My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’

Indecision at the intersection of Mac Studio and Mac mini

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2024-11-25 12:30:17

My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’s still great.

I know it’s great because from time to time, I end up using a M2 MacBook Air to encode a video or demux a Zoom recording or transcribe a podcast and find myself wondering exactly what is taking so long. Oh, right. It’s a base M2. The M1 Max blows it away, as it should.

But with the arrival of the M4 Macs, I’m tempted like never before. There’s now a M4 Pro-based Mac mini, and the M4 is just so much faster than the M1 that I could replace my Mac Studio with a tiny Mac mini and actually see a noticeable speed boost. One of my M4 MacBook Pro review units is an M4 Pro, and I can see just how fast it is. What’s more, I can run a bunch of benchmark tests to make myself uneasy:

There it is, in black and white. The same chip in the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini generates a single-core CPU score that’s 73% faster than my Mac Studio and a multi-core score that’s 92% faster! Less than three years on, the pace of Apple silicon has turned my Mac Studio into something that even generates lower CPU scores than the base M4 Mac mini.