4 Thunderbolt Ports and USB A x 2 ports
was $1900 in 2023
Now with M2 Pro, Mac mini packs the speed you need to get more done faster. From rich presentations to immersive gaming, M2 flies through work and play. And M2 Pro crushes compute‑intensive tasks like editing massive images and 8K ProRes video. With a wide array of ports to connect all your favourite peripherals, Mac mini is up for anything.
Also on sale at DigiDirect
will. if noone buys…. they clearing it.
was hoping for $800-$900 for clearance price. Otherwise M4 is better.
more ports and more HD space
Both sure easily solvable on desktop machine where portability isn’t an issue.
Or a thunderbolt dock and external storage if you have your heart set on this
Unless I missed something, the m4 base model which comes with 16gb of ram standard now is a better buy.
The m4 standard likely outpaces the older m2 pro due to generational improvements.
The m4 Mac mini is available for around $900 from AOC, and it’s much smaller
Yep
Agreed.
This guy Mac!
Everything’s computer!
I love Tesler!
Yes, M4 16/512 is $1,149.00 from AOC
$1103.30 on my end
How did you get $1103?
What's AOC?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Can't remember what it stands for but it's Apple's education portal. There's like a 10-20% discount on normal retail price. You can use discounted gift cards and they don't check your student eligibility.
@Caped Baldy: Apple On Campus.
Wrong link. That's the regular (worse) education store.
This is the correct link https://www.apple.com/au_edu_5000447/store
@PainToad: Thanks for the correction. I did check for a discount but there's extra savings in your link.
The M2 pro would have better GPU performance. Even the M1 Pro has better GPU performance than the base m4. Obviously this is not important to lots of users.
The GPU performance is very much "it depends". On some basic benchmarking tests the M2 Pro does ok but on things like video encoding, raytracing and mesh shading (the first HVEC encoding was improved and AV1 support added, the latter two are new features the M2 series doesn't have) the M4 is better.
On paper the M2 Pro pushes more pixels and has more power, the problem is Apple still sucks as a gaming platform. There's a good chance some kind of emulation layer will be there (because the list of games that support Metal is a short one) which means comparisons are all over the place depending on what test you run.
Some users aren't using the gpu for games and lots of things are faster with more flops. gpu accelerated compute for one.
No need to speculate - it's all right here
I should say, if I upgraded I would get an M4 pro or higher so none of this matters to me.
@lunchbox99: That's a different chip, the 19 core GPU is in the macbook pro, not the mini.
But using that logic you might as well buy a 3060 instead of an M4 Pro. OpenCL is a terrible benchmark for macs because you'd use MPS instead. As I said, winning benchmark tests doesn't reflect reality.
Flops are meaningless without context and use case. The majority of use cases the M4 looks very good in, things like Blender (thanks to raytracing support), encoding, gaming. I'm sure there are use cases where the M2 Pro wins, but you'll find they're often cases where you shouldn't be buying a mac at all, but a standard M4 mini as your desktop and a linux rig with a 5070 for GPU accelerated work.
I have M4 Pro, 24GB/512GB 12CPU/16GPU
Bought with student discount - around $2.05k
Came from a Macbook Pro 15 2017, and I can say that this little box is so superior of any pc that I used to have.
M4 mini should be a good PC for the money, but if you are like me, and wanna be a little bit future safe, get a M4 Pro and enjoy you next 10 years.
Then you can buy the next mini M15 Pro haha
I would get this M2 Pro too. But I prefer to get the new design "small mini" from M4
get a M4 Pro and enjoy you next 10 years.
useful lifetime of Apple stuff isn’t their capability but duration of OS support, i.e. planned obsolescence.
You can always force a newer OS install - there are ways around it.
But also, just because a machine isn't getting new OS updates, doesn't mean it won't work. You can still get years of useful life out of it past that point before 3rd party software stops supporting older OS's.
No. Once security updates stop, anything not air-gapped is not fit for purpose. Windows 10 users are facing that cliff that’ll end in tears for many.
@AlexF: But it is much easier to bypass the requirements for win 11, only gen 8 and high Intel CPUs are eligible but many prior gens have tpm and secure boot anyway.
Meh OCLP has been around for years. I'm using it to run the latest macOS on my late 2013 MBP. it's relegated to a VPN download box mostly but it works just fine (which I discovered only last week when my new MBP died and was away for 1 week being repaired by Apple).
Isn't the student price for the M4 Pro $1960 and bought with 10% off Apple Giftcards making it ~$1765? Then claiming 2% cashback from TopCashback making it $1730? Then claiming GST if you can for work making it $1535? Then reselling it in 3 years for $800 and buying the new M6 Pro for only $735 outlay. Which in turns makes it like leasing an M Mac Mini Pro only $0.68 a day which in turn makes it only $245 a year, which from power savings alone compared to a normal big box monster PC makes your Mac Mini M Pro $80 less to run a year in electricity costs which makes the M Mini Pro only $165 per year to own which in turn only costs 45 cents a day?
Reminds me of that famous chorus from that band that’s was part of Apple Records:
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Worse performance than a Mac Mini M4 at a worse price.
I feel like this is the third time that this has been posted.
Thread consensus was that M2 Pro has more GPU and memory bandwidth.
M4 has better single thread and may be cheaper if you stack discounted eGC and cashback.
If you really care about performance you'd probably spend a couple hundred extra to get the m4 pro rather than get something older. The m4 pro runs circles around the m2 pro.
This is good if you're trying to run Asahi Linux on it. Otherwise, the M4 base model is way better value.
This is a bad deal, unless you have a specific need for the M2 architecture, or the larger form factor.
M4 has significantly better single core performance (two generations newer, and the M3 to M4 leap was large), and as a result, has better multi-core performance as well despite losing 2 P-cores.
Given the M4 version is cheaper, I wouldn't get this.
10-core GPU (M4) vs 16-core GPU (M2 Pro). And the M4 with 512GB is more expensive, not cheaper.
Memory is important. Love my M1 max 32gb. The mem is usually full, so would be paged or swapped on 16gb. video is so smooth processing pics, big pdfs displayed instantly, 4k videos instant searching, playing etc.
Any m1-4 processor is fine for most people i'd guess. Once you have one, don't bother upgrading unless specific reason I'd say.
I bought a used Mac Mini M4 Pro for $1400 on Gumtree (12C/24GB/512GB). Around 3 months old. Found no difference in speed from my Wife's 4 year old M1 Mac Mini.
That says something about your (and her’s) use case.
Yea, I do get more frames per second playing iPhone games like Real Racing and Truck Simulator Pro on my Mac Mini M4 Pro vs her older M1 Mac Mini. So that's the only upgrade difference you can tell.
Found no difference in speed from my Wife's 4 year old M1 Mac Mini.
What do you mean by "speed", if you're referring to day-to-day responsiveness, then yes you're likely right, if you're referring to the speed of getting certain demanding tasks done, then absolutely wrong.
You're right, subjectively for most things you don't notice a difference. In my case (M4 mini vs M1 Air), it's things that take tens of seconds where you might notice, like a build/run in Visual Studio for example. Still if I actually time it it's about 30% faster, not by itself enough reason to upgrade.
Nice buy btw :)
That's because the M1 still does pretty much everything instantly except video rendering.
I upgraded from M1 to M4 :))) much much different
much much different
so, you wasted money?
You can get a base M4 Mac Mini from the Education Apple Store for $849 for 256GB and $1,149 for 512GB. You also don't need to prove you are a student
Anyone know if you can use multiple gift cards at Officeworks on a single transaction? And if so how many?
I was looking to get m4 pro with upgrade but just got mac studio 32 gpu for 2900. Pro with upgrade that i wanted was also similar price so it was a no brainer.
Isn't the M3 Ultra Studio 96/1tb $7k?
I was talkind abt the base mac studio with 32 gpu.
M4 Max 36/512 $3,199 from the edu store?
Good deal getting 300 bucks off. Gift cards?
@kogi: There was a listing in ebay for 2999 and then 100 discount for ebay plus. Was about to post the deal but oos.
Will this go lower? Everyone is excited for the new M4 mini but this has more ports and more HD space.