Mac mini with M4 Pro review: whoosh

The smallest Apple Silicon computer is also the best

So this new Mac mini is a ridiculous computer.

The M4 Pro model is by far the most powerful Mac I’ve ever owned, and by some metrics — well, one — it’s the most powerful Mac anyone has ever owned. It’s even a solid machine for games, despite being smaller than the average gaming PC’s power supply alone.

If you need a new Mac and you’re someone who sits at a desk with a monitor, you should probably think about getting one.

Let’s start with the design. The previous Mac mini was certainly overdue a change. While it was a credible computer for its size — I used an M1 model for a few years — its chassis dated back to 2010, when it was clearly built around the presence of a DVD drive. The first Mac mini design lasted about five years, and that second one lasted for more than 14. It was by some distance the oldest-looking product in Apple’s lineup.

Apple’s initial strategy when introducing Apple Silicon was to stick the M1 into a bunch of existing computers. That worked fine for laptops, since you were getting huge upgrades in heat and battery life, but the Mac mini didn’t really have much going for it. Was it a dealbreaker for anyone who wanted a small desktop Mac? No. But the point of the Mac mini is to be mini, and even Intel was outpacing Apple on that front with its niche-but-cool NUC line.

Thankfully, the M4 model is truly tiny. At 5 x 12.7 x 12.7cm, it has a much smaller footprint than its predecessor and looks much less obtrusive on a desk. It is somewhat taller, on the other hand, so it might not be as good a fit for pre-existing rack-mount setups. But for the average user, this is a much friendlier size.

Aesthetically, it isn’t particularly groundbreaking — it’s a chunky silver aluminium rounded cuboid, with an overall form that’s obviously reminiscent of the Mac Studio. But while that computer felt like a bloated upscaling of the prior Mac mini, sharing the same footprint, the new model is much more comfortable in its diminutive dimensions.

This is the first Mac mini to have ports on the front, although unlike the Studio there’s no SD card slot. The extra pair of USB-C ports is a really welcome addition; reaching around the back of my old M1 mini to plug in peripherals is the whole reason I ended up buying a Thunderbolt dock, which I’m not sure I really need any more. That said, these two new ports are regular USB-C versus the much faster Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back.

The 3.5mm audio port is also on the front, which is kind of an odd choice. I would imagine most buyers of this computer would be looking to use external speakers, but maybe the thinking here is that people buy a Studio Display for general use and have easy access to wired headphones for professional audio/video work.

As an aside, the built-in speaker on the new Mac mini is actually not terrible. I mean, okay, it is, but compared to the last model it’s still a huge improvement. It’s at least in the ballpark of an iPhone. You could use it in a pinch.

Finally, the big design controversy about this Mac mini is that the power button is on the bottom. It’s a little odd, but honestly I doubt most people will have to press it more than a few times a year, and the computer is small and light enough that you can just lift it up when you need to. I actually think it’s more accessible than the pokey, flush button on the rear of the prior Mac mini.

I recently moved to a 13” M3 Air as my work laptop, which left my 15” M2 MacBook Air redundant and myself in need of a new personal desktop setup. The new M4 Mac mini felt like the perfect opportunity. At first I thought I’d just trade my M2 Air in for the base model, which would essentially have been a straight swap, but I decided to go for the M4 Pro for a few reasons.

The M4 Pro is a 3nm chip with eight performance cores and four efficiency cores in the base configuration. The GPU on the same model is 16 cores. The performance CPU core is easily the most powerful core that Apple has ever put into a Mac, which means it’ll outstrip any previous Mac on single-core tasks.

By comparison, the base M4 has a 10-core GPU and a 10-core CPU with only four performance cores. That should make it more power-efficient, but multicore CPU performance will take a big hit relative to the base M4 Pro, which also has a 60% faster GPU.

Apple clearly designed this new mini chassis around the Pro hardware, so if it’s going to sit on my desk I figured I might as well make the most of the space. This is an all-new design that probably won’t get updated for many years, so I felt it made sense to optimise for longevity. And since I’m overdue a desktop PC upgrade, I was curious to see if it could work as a gaming machine.

Gaming and Apple? Yeah, not the most iconic crossover in history. Mac compatibility was never great even when Apple used Intel chips, while the culling of 32-bit apps and the switch to Apple Silicon hasn’t helped matters. Valve, for example, doesn’t even ship a native version of Steam, and the previously heralded Mac versions of its own games like Half-Life 2 don’t run on modern machines.

Still, Apple Silicon hardware is good enough to have spurred Apple into renewed gaming efforts, convincing (and/or paying) companies like Capcom and Ubisoft to port AAA games to the iPhone and Mac. Steam and the Epic Games Store do still work on macOS, and while most games are Windows-only, there are more than enough compatible titles from my backlog to keep me busy for a while. I’ve already nearly filled a terabyte on an external SSD.

The jacked-up M4 Pro has a 20-core GPU, four more than the base model

So, what does this mean in practice? My daily workflow is not all that demanding outside of processing RAW images in Lightroom, so gaming is my biggest stress test for this machine. I’m not going to bore you with benchmarks, but here is the bottom line based on a week of testing reasonably high-end Mac-native games like Death Stranding, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Metro Exodus.

Basically, you can expect that sort of thing to run at 60fps with high settings at around 1440p. My Huawei MateView monitor has a 3:2 aspect ratio, so it’s more like 2560 x 1707 if the game supports it, but 4K is pushing it for anything recent. You do hear the Mac mini’s fan spin up under a load like this, but it’s much quieter than, say, an Intel-powered MacBook Pro with a few Chrome tabs open.

That’s a great result. It puts this M4 Pro Mac mini in roughly Xbox Series S territory, although of course there are far fewer AAA games available for macOS. The situation is better on the indie side, however, with tons of recent titles like Curse of the Golden Idol, Inscryption, and the early-access Hades II offering native compatibility. Performance isn’t a concern for those, of course.

What I wanted out of this Mac was to have a competent computer for when I actually do feel like sitting at a desk and playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse. I’ll always prefer to play PC-ass games like Disco Elysium or Cities: Skylines that way. And on that level, when games are compatible, the M4 Pro Mac mini completely delivers.

You can’t build a comparable Windows PC at this size or price. I can’t recommend this as your only gaming platform, of course. But between this and the Steam Deck, I have most of what I’d want to play on a PC covered. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy a game for this Mac if I thought I’d prefer to play it at my desk.

I’m also cautiously optimistic about Apple’s efforts to boost the Mac as a gaming platform. Its Game Porting Toolkit has enabled some hacky but surprisingly effective tools to get Windows games running on Macs, and it’s not hard to imagine a SteamOS Proton-style layer coming into play at some point. For now, though, Apple continues to focus on official releases of credible but years-old hits like Control and Cyberpunk 2077, both of which are set to hit the Mac next year.

Apple completely knocked it out of the park with the M4 Pro Mac mini. I think it’s their best mainstream computer in many years, and it’s something no other company could come close to producing.

In this line of writing, I always need to allow for the possibility that something else will come along soon enough. But for now, let’s just say that I expect to be using this Mac mini as my primary computer for many years to come. It is performant, cute, and unobtrusive — everything I could have hoped for from a redesign.