“If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom.”
While I think Apple was off the rocker on this particular decision, I do respect their org structure that allows this type of decision to occur. Believe me, there are companies where a dozen people or more would weigh in and prevent an unpopular choice. Consensus sometimes hinders a desired result (both good and bad).
The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7).
Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps.
The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt.
It's becoming a dedicated video rendering machine for me where all the SMB auto mounting issues with macOS seem solvable. Pretty happy so far with the base model price even in the EU. The power button placement is an annoyance for me, though.
M4 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM is doing a "good enough" job of editing 6k raw footage in Premiere for my team. I'm surprised to say I'm content with the 16GB of ram so far.
Edit: This is in contrast to my M1 Macbook Air with 16GB of ram which would stutter a lot during color grading. So definitely feeling the improvement.
I wish the same could be said of the Studio Display, which is quite power hungry. If the Mac is running then the display is using minimum 10 Watts of continuous power usage at all times, fan running, with the screen off.
I guess it takes 10 Watts to maintain the Thunderbolt controller, USB hub, A13 processor, and run the fan.
Power usage does drop to <1 Watt when the Mac is actually sleeping, unless anything is plugged into the USB hub. Even an empty iPhone cable will cause the display to draw 5 Watts. It's disappointing.
Also interesting, the M4 Mini has the flash storage on a replaceable module, instead of being soldered to the motherboard, although the NVMe controller is still integrated into the SoC.
iFixIt and others have already posted videos showing that the flash storage is now upgradable.
> M4 Mac mini Teardown - UPGRADABLE SSD, Powerful, and TINY
Kinda unrelated, but with all this amazing efficiency, I wish Apple would re-introduce the one feature that made me truely love my old MacBook.
On my ~2010 Macbook Pro they had a series of small green lights on the chassis that acted as a battery indicator. When the laptop went to sleep, it would take on a slow breathing like animation effect. It was beautifully done. I was sad when it was removed.
The m4 has 6 efficiency cores and 4 performance cores. This is 2 efficiency cores more than the previous generations, and the same number of p-cores, thus higher e to p core ratio, which can explain a large part of the increase in power efficiency. Not to say that otherwise there is nothing remarkable here, of course there is, but if the author found a 30% increase in efficiency compared to m2 while they claim they expected 4-10% after 2 generations of chips, it could be because of that.
The m4 pro has 4 e-cores and 6-8 p-cores, hence I would not expect similar increase.
While it may not be the literal fastest CPU ever, it still seems very, very fast, and the efficiency is pretty compelling. I'm not sure how much of those efficiency gains are a product of the design constraints that Apple is not beholden to (external memory, x86 backwards compatibility, other aspects of the AMD64 architecture, etc.), the slightly better process nodes, or superior design. I'm honestly dying to know, but I guess we won't find out, and as far as the products go, it doesn't really matter that much. The end result is a pretty good deal.
As a mainly non-Apple user I see the following caveats for my own uses:
- I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)
- I'm worried about the SSD situation still. It seems like it hasn't amounted to much (yet), but some use cases might be more impacted than others, and once the SSD does finally fail, the machine's dead. This is not how things work in most PCs, even mini PCs, and it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
- The pricing is great at the baseline, but it gets progressively worse as you go up. The Apple M4 Pro Mac Mini has a baseline price of $1,399.00, which I think is pretty decent for a high-end computer with 24 GiB of RAM. But, it maxes out at 64 GiB of RAM, which is less than half of what I have in my current main machine, and believe me, I use it. That 64 GiB of RAM upgrade costs $600. For comparison, the most expensive 64 GiB DDR5 RAM kit on PCPartPicker is $328.99. Don't get me wrong either, I understand that Apple's unified RAM is part of the secret sauce of how these things are as efficient and small as they are, but at least for my main computer I really don't need things to be this compact, so it's another tradeoff that's really hard to swallow.
But on the other hand, for people happy to use macOS as their primary operating system, the M4 line of Macs really does look the best computer Apple has ever produced. (For me, it is rare that I feel compelled to even consider an Apple computer; the last time was with the original M1 Mac Mini, which I did buy, although after some experimentation I mainly just use it for testing things on macOS rather than as a daily driver machine.) There really aren't many caveats especially since the base memory configurations this time around are actually reasonable.
I suspect these things could be great on homelab racks if the longevity issues don't wind up being a huge problem.
Is there any benchmarks for these chips doing like regular 'data-sciency' CPU grunt work? Dataframe-wrangling, inverting matrices, doing large matrix, factorisations, fitting decision tree's, etc?
I'm very keen on one of these, but I simply have no idea how good they are at my day to day tasks in R or Python.
> If only they didn't put the power button on the bottom.
I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...
Stupid question but why can't it (non Pro particularly) be powered over USB C like a MBP, if it's so power efficient?
Does it have extra performance that makes full use of the 155W input?
What would have it taken Apple to have given us the option to be powered by 100W USB C (eg the tech to downgrade power usage to match the power input)?
I just bought an ASRock Deskmini x600 with a Ryzen 7700 to run as low-power Linux server / workstation. Given the trouble I had with this thing due to (I believe) buggy amdgpu drivers and/or buggy firmware, I'm inclined to throw it out and just buy this Mac Mini.
What i am thinking right now is, what we can push the M4 Chip to the Maximum of its power? i've seen a lot of people using it for LLM, making cluster with ExoLab. It's amazing how its perform with such an efficiency.
I've been lurking here for more updates on the Mac Mini M4 since I haven't bought mine yet. I also shared some thoughts in previous comments [1][2], as I'm not only impressed by the technical achievements and form factor but also interested in seeing how Apple's business evolves over the next few quarters. I'm curious whether Apple will increase its market share on the desktop side while continuing to dominate in mobile.
I’m contemplating whether this can handle editing 8K video. Does anyone have any idea?
My goal is to venture into 180-degree VR production. With the Canon R5C and the RF 5.2mm f/2.8 Dual Fisheye Lens, I want to produce stereoscopic video at 8K. However, rendering such high-resolution footage demands substantial processing power, and my current setup definitely isn't enough.
I just sold an M1 Mini and grabbed a Beelink. It's wonderful being able to run whatever OS/distro I want on the Beelink, and it's plenty strong enough for whatever. I love this adoration for Apple, primarily for my investment accounts, but in a cloud world I have no idea why there's such a demand for the M4.
Any feedback on how it comes along for regular Software Development (backend stuff) activity and as a common home PC? Looking at the benchmarks looks like there shouldn't be any issue but any first hand experience would be greatly appreciated.
> In 1.25U of rack space, you could run three Mac minis
I mean, 1.25U at 5" deep. Lots of cabinets are 35+" deep, if memory serves. So technically it would be 21 Mac Minis in 1.25U of space, so it's more like almost 6 teraflops. Again, button-on-the-bottom and wiring and thermals aside.
Very very cool, but only makes it more disappointing that you can't actually use this for anything innovative, except in the Apple-approved format & use cases.
Can't upgrade any of the internals, doesn't run Linux easily, no way to use any of the internal components separately, or rebuild them into a different form factor. Imagine being able to directly mount these to VESA behind a dashboard. I have an old M1 Mac Mini I'd love to use as a NAS, but the disk is slightly too small and you can't upgrade it, so it's just useless to me instead.
Impressive to see Apple match the Pi for idle power & efficiency, but deeply frustrating to see them takes the exact opposite design philosophy.
I use Linux, but I think the cheapest M4 Mini offers an incredible value and efficiency per €. With education discount, it's around €650, including VAT. It's pretty hard to find such a silent and powerful machine for that little. Any comparable options?
A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore performance, but these are also more expensive and much less energy efficient. Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly.
One can potentially use Nix on a Mac Mini to keep similar development environments to those used in Linux, but AFAIK some packages are not supported on ARM. Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver?
I bought a no brand mini PC really small with older Intel CPU. It runs Debian quite well. But noisy and slows down a lot, perceivable once it gets hot. But it's cheap around $100,-150 on Chinese e-commerce websites with memory, disk.
Apple does amazing stuff. But it's very pricey in most markets and unaffordable to those on budget.
How does one “idling” like this? “ In 1.25U of rack space, you could run three Mac minis, idling around 10W, giving almost a teraflop of CPU performance. ”
I see a lot of reviews that say things like this but seem to be written by people who aren't testing against commonly available mini PCs that are built on efficiency architectures.
How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink?
I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading but at the same time it seems like I see a lot of people impressed that a mini PC can idle under 10 watts. That's been common for a long time now.
M4 Mac mini's efficiency
(jeffgeerling.com)558 points by marinesebastian 12 November 2024 | 593 comments
Comments
While I think Apple was off the rocker on this particular decision, I do respect their org structure that allows this type of decision to occur. Believe me, there are companies where a dozen people or more would weigh in and prevent an unpopular choice. Consensus sometimes hinders a desired result (both good and bad).
Rendering HDR video was around 12fps there on the i5 - the same project in the Mac mini gets 60fps.
The M4 10 core GPU seems on par or better with a mobile RTX3060(65W) for video tests (NR / Deflicker) so I'm also impressed about the M4's efficiency. A lot of power per Watt.
It's becoming a dedicated video rendering machine for me where all the SMB auto mounting issues with macOS seem solvable. Pretty happy so far with the base model price even in the EU. The power button placement is an annoyance for me, though.
Edit: This is in contrast to my M1 Macbook Air with 16GB of ram which would stutter a lot during color grading. So definitely feeling the improvement.
I guess it takes 10 Watts to maintain the Thunderbolt controller, USB hub, A13 processor, and run the fan.
Power usage does drop to <1 Watt when the Mac is actually sleeping, unless anything is plugged into the USB hub. Even an empty iPhone cable will cause the display to draw 5 Watts. It's disappointing.
iFixIt and others have already posted videos showing that the flash storage is now upgradable.
> M4 Mac mini Teardown - UPGRADABLE SSD, Powerful, and TINY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdGxBeSkz8
My m3 air draws around 3W on avarage and that's with a 14 inch screen running at around 40% brightness.. impressive stuff. Passive cooling too!
On my ~2010 Macbook Pro they had a series of small green lights on the chassis that acted as a battery indicator. When the laptop went to sleep, it would take on a slow breathing like animation effect. It was beautifully done. I was sad when it was removed.
Please bring this back.
The m4 pro has 4 e-cores and 6-8 p-cores, hence I would not expect similar increase.
32 W for the PowerPC to 5w to Apple Arm ones (Current).
[1] https://kamal-deploy.org/
[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
As a mainly non-Apple user I see the following caveats for my own uses:
- I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)
- I'm worried about the SSD situation still. It seems like it hasn't amounted to much (yet), but some use cases might be more impacted than others, and once the SSD does finally fail, the machine's dead. This is not how things work in most PCs, even mini PCs, and it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
- The pricing is great at the baseline, but it gets progressively worse as you go up. The Apple M4 Pro Mac Mini has a baseline price of $1,399.00, which I think is pretty decent for a high-end computer with 24 GiB of RAM. But, it maxes out at 64 GiB of RAM, which is less than half of what I have in my current main machine, and believe me, I use it. That 64 GiB of RAM upgrade costs $600. For comparison, the most expensive 64 GiB DDR5 RAM kit on PCPartPicker is $328.99. Don't get me wrong either, I understand that Apple's unified RAM is part of the secret sauce of how these things are as efficient and small as they are, but at least for my main computer I really don't need things to be this compact, so it's another tradeoff that's really hard to swallow.
But on the other hand, for people happy to use macOS as their primary operating system, the M4 line of Macs really does look the best computer Apple has ever produced. (For me, it is rare that I feel compelled to even consider an Apple computer; the last time was with the original M1 Mac Mini, which I did buy, although after some experimentation I mainly just use it for testing things on macOS rather than as a daily driver machine.) There really aren't many caveats especially since the base memory configurations this time around are actually reasonable.
I suspect these things could be great on homelab racks if the longevity issues don't wind up being a huge problem.
I'm very keen on one of these, but I simply have no idea how good they are at my day to day tasks in R or Python.
I can't tell if anyone is being serious about the "Powergate" issue. The thing is 5" wide and weighs 1.5 lbs, it's not exactly a burden to lift it a little. And there are highly practical workarounds: https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1gncek7/nailed_the...
I have a 2015 iMac and I've been holding off (and haven't really been using my Apple Silicon MacBook as intended) so it may be time to do the upgrade.
Does it have extra performance that makes full use of the 155W input?
What would have it taken Apple to have given us the option to be powered by 100W USB C (eg the tech to downgrade power usage to match the power input)?
> Mac mini is:
> Designed with more than 50% recycled content. Made with electricity sourced from 100% renewables. Shipped 50% or more with low-carbon methods.
https://www.apple.com/environment/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42025411
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42099883
My goal is to venture into 180-degree VR production. With the Canon R5C and the RF 5.2mm f/2.8 Dual Fisheye Lens, I want to produce stereoscopic video at 8K. However, rendering such high-resolution footage demands substantial processing power, and my current setup definitely isn't enough.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-analysis-Extremel...
Question for HN: How would you redesign the power button, assuming you work at Apple and the final design should align with Apple's design ethos?
I suspect Apple tracks/measure the usage of the button and took the decision to design it hidden.
I mean, 1.25U at 5" deep. Lots of cabinets are 35+" deep, if memory serves. So technically it would be 21 Mac Minis in 1.25U of space, so it's more like almost 6 teraflops. Again, button-on-the-bottom and wiring and thermals aside.
Can't upgrade any of the internals, doesn't run Linux easily, no way to use any of the internal components separately, or rebuild them into a different form factor. Imagine being able to directly mount these to VESA behind a dashboard. I have an old M1 Mac Mini I'd love to use as a NAS, but the disk is slightly too small and you can't upgrade it, so it's just useless to me instead.
Impressive to see Apple match the Pi for idle power & efficiency, but deeply frustrating to see them takes the exact opposite design philosophy.
A good fanless build with a i3-14100T is more expensive and 40-50% slower on Geekbench. An i5 is a bit closer. Some 2024 Ryzen CPUs can match or exceed its multicore performance, but these are also more expensive and much less energy efficient. Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly.
One can potentially use Nix on a Mac Mini to keep similar development environments to those used in Linux, but AFAIK some packages are not supported on ARM. Any experiences using Nix and nix-darwin as a daily driver?
Apple does amazing stuff. But it's very pricey in most markets and unaffordable to those on budget.
How different is the efficiency of this compared to something like an Intel N100/200/300 or a Ryzen 7 7735HS that you can get in cheap mini PCs from manufacturers like Beelink?
I am not doubting that Apple's processors are class-leading but at the same time it seems like I see a lot of people impressed that a mini PC can idle under 10 watts. That's been common for a long time now.