Mac Mini M4 review
Day 323 / 366
2 days ago I wrote about how I was thinking of buying the M4 Mac Mini —
Well, I got it today and I started using it for my daily work tasks right away. And I can safely say that I don’t regret the purchase at all.
First things first, it is really small, just 5x5 inch. Setting it up was seamless, I just needed to connect the power cable, and one USB-C hub which I was already using to connect my MacBook to my peripherals. Within 10 minutes of unboxing it, I had 2 of my current projects running on it.
A tip for any devs upgrading to a new machine, just zip the ssh folder from your original machine and transfer it to the new one. That way you instantly have access to all your servers and repositories. You don’t have to create new keys and update them one by one.
I had connected it to my huge 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9 monitor. The monitor has a max refresh rate of 240 hz, but the max I was able to get up until now with my PC or my MacBook pro was 120 hz. I thought it was an issue with the Display Port cable that I was using. But the Mac Mini with that same cable gave a 240 Hz refresh rate straightaway!
My MacBook Pro fans go up to 5000 RPM as soon as I do Android app development on it. On the Mac mini, I had 2 Django apps, 10+ Chrome tabs, Docker, and a React app running on an Android emulator, and the fans were not even audible. The app that I used to get the fan speed showed it to be 45 RPM on the Mac mini, but I doubt that that is accurate.
I am not a tech reviewer, but so far I would say that the Mac Mini has performed amazingly well. The only regret I have is not choosing the higher SSD version, I feel like 256 GB is going to fill up very quickly if I am not careful. So if you have the budget, definitely go for the 512 GB option.