Lounge
A modern Mac that proves good things come in small packages
Summary
The Mac mini represents the best value in Apple’s lineup and delivers a great performance in an impressively small design
Ever since it started life alongside the iPod shuffle at Macworld 2005, billed as the “cheapest, most affordable Mac ever", the Mac mini has occupied a special (if very little) space in Apple’s portfolio. It’s been the tip of the company’s arrow, aimed squarely at PC “switchers" looking for the most reasonably priced entry point into the Mac ecosystem, as long as you were willing to BYOKDM—bring your own keyboard, display and mouse. The thing was, that entry level price point that made the mini so attractive, it came with a caveat—8 gigabytes of non-upgradeable memory—which left very little headroom for future growth.
That changes with the M4 mac mini ( ₹59,900 onwards), now with a new form factor and enough memory to handle anything most consumers will want to throw at it for the foreseeable future. This is easily the most capable Mac Apple has sold for the price and is by far the best value Mac in a long while.
The design
You’d never call the 7.75x7.75-inch dimensions of the previous minis as bulky, but the almost-ground-up redesign of the M4 mini, now in a 5x5-inch avatar, looks practically tiny in comparison. Images don’t do the size of the new mini justice. It’s just a bit bigger and taller than an Apple TV box and can now fit in smaller spaces on your desk or your entertainment lounge… or your palm, for that matter.
At a shade under 700 grams, you could be tempted to pick it up and throw it into a backpack for hybrid work setup, as long as your workplace has the monitor and peripherals handy. Impressively, despite its size, there’s no bulky external power adapter as with the iMac, and there’s no shortage of connectivity or ports—you get two USB-C ports on the front along with a headphone jack, and an Ethernet jack, HDMI and three 40GBps Thunderbolt 4 ports around the rear (the M4 Pro mini has the faster 120 GBps Thunderbolt 5 ports).
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There’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 to connect your peripherals, and you can connect up to three displays simultaneously, up from two on previous generations It’s available in the longstanding aluminum finish, no colour options like the iMac sadly, and the one element that has caused controversy—the placement of the power button on one of the bottom corners—isn’t as much of an issue if you’re the sort who barely powers the mini off, but it’s an unintuitive and odd design choice however you look at it.
Power-packed
With the mini now being so diminutively small, it’s easy to forget just how much power it packs, with the new M4 chip (that’s powering the new iMacs and the base MacBook Pro) and the active fan-cooled system allowing the system to run at full tilt over sustained periods of time. Looking at the benchmarks, there’s a solid 20% jump in CPU performance and around 10% on graphics over the M3 Mac mini and even beats the current M2 Ultra Mac Studio in some benchmarks as well—for something this miniaturized and relatively cheaper, that is shockingly good performance.
Go back a few years and compare it to a M1 Mac and the M4 mac mini averages anywhere between 60-70% faster in benchmarks, a massive leap in just four years. There’s a 16-core Neural Engine dedicated to machine learning and AI tasks where you’ll likely see the bigger gains, as much as 30%, as more consumer applications start offloading AI tasks, both artificial engine and Apple Intelligence, for faster on-device results. For all intents and purposes, the M4 chip will be plenty sufficient for most average users, with quick app launches and solid multitasking between a borderline comical number of Safari tabs, productivity apps and streaming music services. The long overdue change is the 16 gigabytes of memory that now comes as standard in the base configuration, ostensibly to support Apple Intelligence features but a welcome bonus for just about anyone buying the mini with a 3-5 year timeframe. For now, macOS Sequoia expectedly runs swimmingly on the mini, and I’m already such a big fan of iPhone Mirroring that I often wonder how I managed without it.
Beyond the everyday tasks
What happens if you want to push the Mac mini beyond everyday tasks? From 3D rendering in Blender to some amateurish audio production in Logic Pro and even running an open-source, lightweight 3B parameter AI model (Llama 3.2) on Ollama, the mini responded with smooth performance and a constant reminder that the best things do indeed come in incredibly tiny packages. And, hear me out here—this may well be Apple’s Trojan Horse in the gaming console business, if the number of AAA titles see an uptick on the App Store.
I tried Resident Evil 4 on the mini and impeccable 1080p, 60fps performance and excellent reproduced shadows, lighting and details made one believe one was gaming on something far bigger. The M4 Mac Mini gets hardware-accelerated ray tracing for the first time, which will translate to damn near photo realistic reproduction of in-game lights, shadows and reflections. And while you know there’s a fan in there to keep things cool, you hardly ever hear it, which makes it perfect for a mini PC in the entertainment room. The speakers, on the other hand, are passable at best, so you’d best plug in a dedicated pair of speakers/headphones.
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The verdict
Apple’s hit a home run with this one, and the Mac mini is quite simply the best small factor computer you can buy from any mainstream brand—most small PCs shipping with either Windows 11 or Linux just cannot match the build quality, performance, and pricing of the mini, and with the M4 chip, the gap just gets wider. At ₹59,999, it is stupendous value in and of itself, but should you want to bump up the storage or the memory (or even upgrade to faster 10 Gigabit Ethernet), it gets significantly pricey very fast. Most folks can forgo the upgrades, though—the base mini is the best performing and best value Mac in years!
