The Ghetto Review of the new Mac Mini M4
Written on 12 November 2024 by Andrijan Apostoloski
The Mac becomes a computer for all, this time truly a champion. Affordable and a great value, the new M4 chip Minis are not only Apple’s first carbon neutral machines ever produced, they squash lots of other machines with milliwatts of silence.
Just at the end of October, Apple announced their new Mac Minis with the new M4 chip. As a person who’s been in the Hackintosh community since my early elementary school years, I’ve learnt to coexist with the Apple ecosystem without ever owning an authentic Apple computer – iPhones and several temporary old MacBooks excluded. I always ran a ghetto-hack where I made music, developed websites and basically did some casual gaming on the side.
What caused me interest in this machine was its affordability and value for performance. Apple has done it again. With around 300% faster processing power than my Hackintosh which has an i5-10400F for comparison, I was thrilled to get my hands on one of these little babies. Weighing just under 700 grams, and being a 13cm by 13cm box are numbers that cannot be illustrated on how much this thing is indeed Mini.
My work ethics range from casual browsing and emailing to intensive audio work, web development and graphic design. I still haven’t had a chance to run Logic Pro projects and compare it to my old hack, however the speed is evident since I first booted it up. So far, on the second day of owning this machine I still haven’t had the privilege to have the fans speeding up, indeed it’s amazing that there are fans considering how much this thing is simply silent. It’s a great addition for everyone working with music, and especially with sound recording.
The first thing it did after booting was update to the latest MacOS 15.1, and the first thing I did was disable System Integrity Protection and GateKeeper completely so I can have a more advanced experience and be unleashed on the Terminal. After my installation of Retroactive, as I can’t process the new Music app from Apple, it makes me want to vomit. Having my library on the latest and greatest iTunes is a must-have for me. Running it on 100% volume without any equalizer gives you a bit-perfect listening experience, although my whole library is 320kbps – something that surprises lots of people because I’m a music producer and engineer on the side as well.
My Mini comes with 24GBs of RAM and 512GB of storage. I would go for 32GB of RAM personally, if it was available in my region, however 24GBs are plenty enough. Having tested my workflow and everything with a 64GB hack, I rarely go around or exceed those numbers but reach near them. The storage is user-replaceable, however the RAM is located on the M4 chip itself. Despite being able to upgrade the storage, 512GB of space for the main OS disk is plenty enough, as I have around 4TB hack that will serve the purpose of being solely a server – first and mainly a file server, after that a web and media server or something that I’m going to be running experiments on. Connecting both machines was easy and the file speed through my router via the gigabit ethernet ports is seemingly plenty.
Geekbench 6 comparison with my hack with i5-10400F. Mac16,10 is the M4 Mini and iMac20,1 is the Intel hack.
On processing grounds the Mini goes around 250-300% faster than my prior i5-10400F, however when comparing it to now mid-range but still beefy graphics card it was showing similar numbers which is still insane considering the RX580 itself is the size of two of these itself and the power drain numbers are insane. Running a native game, Metro 2033: Exodus produced excellent results with high settings on 1080p, and it was slightly faster than the RX580 as I remember having more stutters and glitches with it. Keep in mind that these things aren’t made for gaming, but are completely gaming capable. Since such a small chip throws a full-sized DUAL RX580 with 8GB of VRAM, we can only expect for things to get much better when it comes to gaming and Macs in the future. Not bad.
Geekbench 6 comparison with the RX580 running on Apple Metal API. Must be noted that the RX580 outputs a slightly faster result when running on OpenCL.
How does it compare to Windows machines though?
Geekbench 6 results show 200% higher single-core speeds and up-to around 300% more speed in multi-core tests when comparing to a relatively modern mid-range Windows gaming laptop with an eleventh generation six-core i5-11400H processor.
Although once again, when running it on a low-access hardware API such as Metal or Windows version Vulkan, the M4 still excels with higher performance. The RX3050 laptop edition that’s on the laptop scores around 54000, while the Mac mini M4 reaches 57000, or 56982 to be more precise in my case. For software issues I couldn’t run this benchmark on the Windows machine as it refused to render it with the NVIDIA and always preferred the integrated Intel one which only outputs 4121 and I know that Vulkan and Metal on MacOS aren’t the same, but they are indeed running the same algorithms and they’re basically the same type of APIs. This is where real hardware acceleration and optimisation shines, and it’s good to see the M4 chip go there and be shoulder to shoulder and beat many dedicated GPUs, even newer ones like in this case.
Web Browsing
A score of 46 on Safari 18.1 versus score of 40 on Chrome 130.0.6 on the Mac mini M4. The Hackintosh i5-10400F reached 18 on Safari and a score of 16 on Chrome. The TUF gaming laptop running the latest version of Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge 130.0.2 reached a score of 16.6. These scores are theoretical, but they show the processing speed of the machine when running heavy tasked websites and such. The M4 scores perfectly and I can feel a really smoother Chrome experience, especially as a power user having it configured and weighted with tons of plug-ins and settings.
Even though numbers are just numbers and benchmarks are just tools for comparison and showing results on a theoretical level, in practice the difference in speed really shows. Despite the Mac Mini being the most basic Mac that you can buy, this one rocks and bangs a lot for the money. If I bought a similar performing machine, it would both cost me more and it wouldn’t be in such a low-form factor. I’d still have to convert it to a Hackintosh, and with the introduction of the Apple Silicon chips the end of support for Intel chips is on the corner. Truly though, what amazes me is the progress Apple have achieved with these new chips. When they first announced them they were unbelievable on paper, but as soon as customers had them in hand, the whole tech internet exploded with how brilliant the new chips are.
The Mac definitely isn’t lacking any ports, however it’s moving into the future with all Thunderbolt and Type-C connectors, an ethernet gigabit port and HDMI alongside the power connector. It has two USB Type-C ports on the front and three Thunderbolt 4 (Type-C) ports on the back that can run three displays reaching 6K of resolution without any issues. This little nuclear power plant called the M4 drained around 7mw of power when doing some very basic organising, and at the same time my Intel server was peaking at 7 to 10 watts for virtually doing nothing. Despite the power efficiency, this machine has a maximum continuous power of 155 watts, which considering what you’re getting is very power efficient and a very great value for the speed. In comparison, the RX580 graphics card has a TDP of 185W. Despite me comparing it to an older high-end 2017 GPU, the M4 chip is smaller in size, has greater performance and much lesser power consumption, let’s not forget that this thing also needs a processor in hand.
The aluminium finish feels pretty sharp on touch and it has a premium feel. It does feel lightweight but it doesn’t have that cheap weightless feeling to it, you can see and grasp that what is inside is truly quality material.
The Mac mini pricing starts at $599 for the base model with 16GBs of RAM and a 256GB SSD. You can go that route, but I highly suggest you don’t cut on the RAM and get a 24 or 32GB version instead.
Because I run a very diverse workload that needs a lot of storage, I considered (and still consider for a future investment) a NAS server, but for now I’m using my old Intel based Hackintosh as a server, mostly to store over 6TB worth of disks: from fast NVMe SSDs to 2TB spinning disks. Sharing it with my mini was a hassle-free experience and everything runs smoothly as it should. Running games via ethernet server such as Metro Exodus didn’t show any lags in performance at all and its plenty enough for whatever you throw at it, as long as you’re not running some 4K video editing rig that needs more than a gigabit speed for read and write combined.
This is what’s beneath the future of computing. Apple, this is truly a work of art. Great idea, great execution and this time absolutely amazing value for what you’re getting. A highly recommended thumbs up from me.
