Apple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonder

By Chris Welch , a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos.

Why wouldn’t you want the new Mac Mini? Over the last several days of testing Apple’s redesigned desktop Mac, I’ve been impressed by all the power and potential crammed into this very compact machine. For a starting price of $599 and with 16GB of RAM now standard, the M4 Mac Mini has immediately become the best value in Apple’s entire Mac lineup. It’s more than capable for most computing tasks today, and if my M1 MacBook Air is anything to go by, the Mini won’t feel slow (or anything close to it) for at least the next four or five years.

Apple provided me with two very different Mac Mini units. This first review is focused on the standard M4 model, which includes a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and the default 16GB of memory. My machine has 512GB of storage, which bumps its price to $799, but everyday performance should be identical to that of the base 256GB configuration. I’ve also got a kitted-out M4 Pro model, which raises the price to a stratospheric $2,199. For that money, I’d damn well expect the M4 Pro Mini to be a powerhouse.

But most people won’t need to spend anywhere near that amount. The regular M4 edition offers a lot in its own right and would be my recommendation for anyone who wants a dependable desktop Mac — especially if you’ve already settled on a monitor and / or keyboard that you love.

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