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Apple Announces Redesigned Mac Mini With M4 and M4 Pro Chips, Two Front USB-C Ports, and More

mode11 said:
Great use for a Thunderbolt 4 port, though admittedly a rear 3.5mm output would have kept it free for high speed SSDs and 5K monitors.
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Work with what you've got, not what you hoped it would have. I'd probably go with an base mounted dock with built in SSD anyhow (whenever they come out).

All 5k monitors that I know of have additional USB-C ports anyhow, so you can always plug speakers in there instead. There is plenty of I/O options once you take that into consideration.

Front mounted 3.5mm jack makes more sense for most people working with headphones/headsets.
 
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Ordered the base model with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. It's replacing my M1 Mini, which I'll be giving to my son to replace his older Intel Mini.
 
flexwithmarius said:
I don’t know why I’m but it’s good to see Apple pushing Mac mini in corporate environments as a thin client. I’m betting this would blow away a Dell box.
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I approve this message. Except, I can probably upgrade my RAM and SSD much easier and at less than half of what Apple is asking out the door.
 
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It's quite surreal to see how much of a price jump it is from base spec Mac Mini M4 to a 10GB Ethernet-capable Mac Mini M4 Pro (14/20) with 64GB of Unified Memory. 😳

My problem is that I had much more disposable income in 1989 when I paid $4k+ for my 486 Gateway 2000 PC. 😁
 
deevey said:
Work with what you've got, not what you hoped it would have. I'd probably go with an base mounted dock with built in SSD anyhow (whenever they come out).

All 5k monitors that I know of have additional USB-C ports anyhow, so you can always plug speakers in there instead. There is plenty of I/O options once you take that into consideration.

Front mounted 3.5mm jack makes more sense for most people working with headphones/headsets.
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All of the two 5k screens available on the market? 5120x2160 is not 5k, technically speaking, it's either a wider 4k or castrated 5k.
 
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The new MM looks great, going to upgrade my M1/8GB MBA that spends most of its life in clamshell. Looking forward to having multiple screens again and it struggles with heavy webapps (looking at you Stripe Dashboard!).

Will go 512gb/24gb either M4 or base M4 Pro.

£400 for the M4 Pro over the M4 worthwhile? It's nearly an additional 50% of the 512/24gb/M4s entire price, but over 3-4 years it's not so bad. I almost exclusively code and would like to try local LLMs for assist, which fall flat on the 8gb M1.
 
MAlbi said:
Anyone please has recommendation for durable/reliable dock ?
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Depending upon how you might be using it, I'd personally recommend waiting for the third party ecosystem to come up with some new options that are catering to this new form factor a bit
 
2TB? It's limited to 2TB storage!!!!! ARGH!!!!!!

That's a problem. Not for most desktops, but it means some servers I set up are going to have to be Mac Studios even though they don't need the processing power, just the storage.

And it's going to mean new VESA mounts for wall mounted workstations. Annoying.

(Oh, and it's fugly. Doesn't matter for servers, matters for desktops.)
 
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Victor Mortimer said:
2TB? It's limited to 2TB storage!!!!! ARGH!!!!!!

That's a problem. Not for most desktops, but it means some servers I set up are going to have to be Mac Studios even though they don't need the processing power, just the storage.
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I hadn't even thought about this (since I'd never pay their storage markups anyhow), but you're right

This is really weird

There is absolutely no technical reason to have a limit on storage choices like this

Again -- if they'd just design in an NVMe slot (separate from the main SSD), none of this would be an issue.

It's absolutely maddening how we have all the "just buy a TB external drive" stuff .. when that should not be a thing you have to do on a desktop computer

What a device this could be if you could buy the CPU/RAM level you want and slap in a 2/4/8TB NVMe stick and be off and running ... without having to sell off your firstborn to pay Tim's storage extortion fee
 
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turbineseaplane said:
I hadn't even thought about this (since I'd never pay their storage markups anyhow), but you're right

This is really weird

There is absolutely no technical reason to have a limit on storage choices like this

Again -- if they'd just design in an NVMe slot (separate from the main SSD), none of this would be an issue.

It's absolutely maddening how we have all the "just buy a TB external drive" stuff .. when that should not be a thing you have to do on a desktop computer

What a device this could be if you could buy the CPU/RAM level you want and slap in a 2/4/8TB NVMe stick and be off and running ... without having to sell off your firstborn to pay Tim's storage extortion fee
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Yeah, it's clearly a ploy to force Mac Studio sales. Most use cases don't require it, but medical practices need quite a bit of space for their server, and MacPractice is a pretty good medical office management system, I've got several installs of it out there where 2TB isn't enough but 4TB is, and a mini makes a pretty good server for it. I can make it headless and keep the docs from deciding to use it for general purpose stuff.

And the "Why not an external drive?" question can be answered pretty easily. MacPractice HATES running on external drives. It's hard to move the database, and MP support gets VERY confused by it when you do.
 
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For those who have preordered I will keep a close eye on what OWC and Satechi are doing.

We should see a few hubs that will fit nicely underneath this new mac mini that adds additional usb ports, sd card slot and more importantly an NVME slot for additional storage capacity.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
It's funny to me how we have people upset about the mere existence of a headphone jack and/or USB ports on the front...

But at the same time suggesting folks should just "go buy an external drive, dock, dongle, etc" and then have cable spaghetti all over the place

So close to getting it
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The OWC/Satechi docks are pretty clean and connect via 1 cable. Have worked well for me for many years.

Can’t wait for them to announce something soon.
 
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0423MAC said:
The OWC/Satechi docks are pretty clean and connect via 1 cable. Have worked well for me for many years.

Can’t wait for them to announce something soon.
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Agree they are "clean", but you're plugging in a dock and then plugging stuff into that!

Just build the ports into the Mac
It's a desktop computer

I have no clue why we celebrate making it all "minimal" and "small" and then all have endless threads about which dongles, docks, connectors, external drives, on and on, are the "best"..

...to get back functionality that should be built in

Doesn't everyone see the real story here?
By externalizing so many things, Apple is just cutting their own costs and offloading them onto us
 
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Nice, I'm tempted to get one, since iMac was a disappointment. But man, they are not cheap for a beefy pro. But the main issue I have, is the price of their monitor. It is crazy expensive. Add that to the mini and boom - too much for an average user. But no one else comes close to that display quality and design :(( So instead of Apple getting 2/3 of the total price, they get 0 from me.
 
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MacFarmer said:
Nice, I'm tempted to get one, since iMac was a disappointment. But man, they are not cheap for a beefy pro. But the main issue I have, is the price of their monitor. It is crazy expensive. Add that to the mini and boom - too much for an average user. But no one else comes close to that display quality and design :(( So instead of Apple getting 2/3 of the total price, they get 0 from me.
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You know you don't NEED the studio display in order for the Mini to work just fine?
 
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turbineseaplane said:
Agree they are "clean", but you're plugging a dock and then plugging stuff into that!

Just build the ports into the Mac
It's a desktop computer

I have no clue why we celebrate making it all "minimal" and "small" and then all have endless threads about which dongles, docks, connectors, external drives, on and on, are the "best"..

...to get back functionality that should be built in

Doesn't everyone see the real story here?
By externalizing so many things, Apple is just cutting their own costs and offloading them onto us
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Apple didn’t get to be the most valuable company in the world by playing nice all the time. We’ve long had debates about their practices and they only go back on their stances years after they acknowledge they’ve made an error.

Keeping it at $599 with the increased performance is worth the “headache” of attaching what is essentially a riser for extra functionality IMO.
 
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deevey said:
You know you don't NEED the studio display in order for the Mini to work just fine?
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Honestly, I can't even think of a use case where I'd NEED 5k. 1080p is good enough for everything I do, I'm using my 2019 16" MBP right now, but I still use my still great (and in many ways better - upgradeable storage, anyone?) 2012 15" MBP (with 4TB SSD) sometimes (with 10.14 so I can still use 32-bit software because Apple engineers are stupid), and it's absolutely fine. Sure, I can tell it's not quite as sharp, but it's not enough to bother me. I've also got a 2019 27" iMac sitting right beside a 2010 Cinema Display, and the only annoying thing about the older lower resolution screen is that it's dimmer.
 
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