Apple Mac Mini M4 Review: The ULTIMATE Productivity Machine?

Apple’s New Mac Mini M4 is hands down the best value for money desktop in its segment, as we found out by buying one for ourselves after diving deep into this world.

By Manav Sinha

30 Jan, 2025

3 min read

Let me start off with telling you that I never intended to write this review. The Apple Mac Mini M4 that you see here isn’t even a review unit as it was purchased by autoX. Secondly, I believe there are hundreds of extremely in-depth reviews out there already so we won’t go into that direction either. So, the question is, why are featuring this anyway?

'The answer to that is rather straightforward - the Apple Mac Mini M4 is simply incredible. So much so, that I had to rush to our Editor-in-Chief, Dhruv Behl’s office making a case for it to be printed here. Thankfully for me, the M4 performed so well for us that I got the green light. It all started after our annual Mega Test where we bring every car or motorcycle launched in the past one year in India to test, score and award after spending time with them on the Buddh International Circuit. Naturally, we want to be able to shoot all of that action in as high a resolution as possible. And after putting in all that effort, we want to be able to edit it well and publish the video in time.

This brings us - finally - to the editing machines. After years of service, our 2018 Mac Minis were showing their age and it was time for an upgrade. After scanning through all possibilities, even with a budget of about quadruple than what a new M4 Mac Mini would cost, we simply couldn’t find better value and performance than the M4 Mac Mini.

It put our other windows PCs to shame which costed multiple times more, and it did all of that while being able to fit in my palm. For reference, when we tried to render a Premiere Pro project, the Windows machine completed the task in about 41 minutes while the Mac Mini did the same in about 26 minutes. It was small, fast and powerful. The only limiting factor was storage as in a professional environment as ours, you need a lot of it. Our unit had a 512GB SSD built into it and we had to employ the help of an external drive. But other than that, there’s really nothing bad to say about this new Mini.

We also realised that this has been the case with almost all our professional as well as personal equipment over the past few years. Ever since the first M1 came out, we’ve always invested in Apple products because it’s always given the best value. As a result, almost all our presenters, writers and video editors today are using Apple products. Our reels and walkaround videos? They are shot on an iPhone as well. And the M4 Mac Mini, with its ever-so-handy AirDrop feature, has fit into our ecosystem flawlessly. So without a doubt, we highly recommend you check it out if you are buying a new desktop because there’s simply nothing quite like out there right now.

Apple Mac Mini M4 Review: The ULTIMATE Productivity Machine?

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