I'm a comic artist and in the last 5 or 6 years I became working 100% digital. After being a windows user for 30 years, a month ago I received my first Mac, the mini base model and it's totally awesome.
I have the exact same monitor with the base model M4 Mac Mini. Refreshing to know that a huge TH-cam tech channel is validating this purchase. This computer runs circles around what I was using previously.
I’m running on 256 GB SSD. My photo data runs on RAIDs and I’ve got a 2GB SSD and a 1TB. I’m considering moving my photo data to an SSD and using those spinning drives for a RAID 10 drive. And I have a couple ports left over. I did upgrade the unified RAM to 24GB. The base is a great deal, adding one add on is ok, adding a second, well not as much.
I did a poor man version of what you went through, I finally bought an m1 macbook air with 256gb of storage. The storage limitation was driving me crazy however so instead of going with m4 mac mini I went with m1 macbook pro 2020 1tb +16gb of ram which costed me £600 so the same as m4 mac mini. No regrets, I just couldn't deal with dongles everywhere I went.
The 256GB storage limit on my M1 macbook air is what actually got me to upgrade less than a year after buying it. It was so bad. I could install like 3 programs before I was constantly running out of space. And on a laptop it's much more annoying to have to bring along an SSD everywhere you go, especially since it means you probably need a USB C hub as well thanks to the pitiful 2 USB C ports on the whole damn laptop, one of which you might need for the charger...
@@PawelLeszczynskipav just get the M4 Pro Mac Mini and you get 512GB and if your smart you would just get another SSD Hard drive and use it as the systems main memory instead so your computer will always stay loaded up with memory
@@jdarg4163 for work I need a macbook with 512gb plus storage. That's the bottom line. I'm a music lecturer and use logic and ableton which together take up 120gb+ to match the classrooms imac installations.
It seems everyone is trying to implement "work arounds," for the limited 256 GB HD that comes with the new Mac Mini 4. They all involve removing data from the Mac Mini 4 HD and putting that data on an external SSD drive. I was talking to an Apple Support person yesterday, and he suggested that if you are going to buy an SSD drive anyway, why not just get a 1 or 2 TB SSD and install you OS and everything onto it? He sent me an Apple document on how to install your operating system on an external drive. Since most people are going to either purchase or use a pre-existing SSD to use, it would seem that using a larger external drive as your main drive would be a lot easier and less hazel than dancing around the limitations of the 256 GB as the main drive. Was the Apple tech wrong?
Ja, in gewisser Hinsicht liegt der Apple Mitarbeiter falsch. Er beschneidet die Funktionen, die eigentlich in Zukunft wichtig sein könnten. Apple Ai wird nicht funktionieren, auch Apple Pay ist nicht aktivierbar. Wenn man damit leben kann, dann ist da OK.
External NVMe SSD 2TB drive can be had for about $200. (you can of course pay more to get more storage) It actually runs faster (and consistently cooler) than the internal drive, according to the tests I saw. I haven't seen anyone try to totally run off the external, as in install the OS on it. So IDK about that. It's been three days since you commented here, maybe you have? I have seen people run their Home folder on the externals, meaning all your third party apps and data runs off it, and Apple's OS/applications run on the internal. I've also seen a guy run two external SSDs and RAID them. So basically a 4TB Home with almost 6k R/W speeds on that config. About $400. The trick with the Home folder technique is not to log into iCloud/Apple until after you've done the config, and everything will work fine, according to the videos I've watched. Yes, that includes the AI because you're still using the internal for your OS.
@@EnervatedSociety Right now I am running Big Sur on an external 1 T SSD on an old mid 2015 27" iMac. It seems to be working fine, and a little zippier than the internal HD. I'm on the fence between getting the New Mac Mini 4 or trying to upgrade my old iMac with Open Core Legacy Patcher. The fence is getting pretty wobbly because, so far, the OCLP approach is not working.
@@tomdonovan2832 That sucks to hear, about OCLP I mean. I'm considering going that rout with my old 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, that is still running 10.13 on mechanical drives, but maybe it's just time to retire this old beast and jump on the Mac Mini M4 train. The base model with an external will be fine for my current needs, and I have a beastly Windows machine for gaming and my music stuff. 🤔
I went for 2TB internal storage . Don't like the mess of multiple SSSs around . It's my main personal machine which also runs my Plex sever , my work machine through windows 11 VM. It replaced my work laptop and my 14 yo Mac mini server
With gaming, I see my mac mini m4 going as high as almost 90c while playing Resident Evil 2, and it also gets uncomfortably hot to the touch. I understand the chip can reach over 100c without suffering from throtling, but I still don't like it. The problem is, the fan for some reason doesn't feel like it needs to run faster. So I had to instal TG Pro and now it gets noisy as heck when gaming, but the machine remains cool.
That storage limitation is still pretty crappy. If it was a standard M.2 drive, it would at least be forgivable, but a proprietary form factor with insane markups is just asinine.
How many users are probably doing 4k video editing with this computer configuration? 2 or 5 or even 10 percent? The device is unbeatable as a workhorse for normal use. With a 512 SSD, the computer would also be very suitable for professional users with video editing plus an additional external SSD
Currently a windows 10 user with hardware unable to accept windows 11 so kind of left on a floating ice berg floating off to the unknown. I know what I want and need from a computer. My hesitation of jumping to camp apple is the blatant knowledge of how little apple think and care about its customers. What is really sad and pathetic is apple could clean up but they chose to use and abuse current and any potential customers and that’s what stops me going for camp apple. In a world that’s all digital, apple still haven’t opened that email that says digital needs storage. The cost for useful storage is an offensive ransom. That ransom says a hell of a lot about a company to me. A dirty one.
I got the base and my external speeds are faster than the built in.just get a 40gbps external m.2 enclosure and a gen 4 nvme drive. Cost me around $190 for 2tb with everything else. Then of course make your home folder your external drive. And boom move your larger applications to the external drive. I think eventually we will get aftermarket internal storage that’ll cost much less. Anyhow not a problem I guarantee you wont notice much of a speed difference unless you’re just importing and exporting tons of data all day.
For a vast majority of people, 16GB is perfectly fine; if you need storage just buy an external SSD. You can find a SanDisk, Samsung, or other brand one for less than $200 easy for 1-2TB. This is literally the best bang for buck computer you can buy right now.
I beg people to buy a $799 512 Gb M4 Mac Mini and not the £599 256 Gb M4 Mac Mini. The reason is that software is always getting larger. For example most PC and Console games are at least 100 Gb in size and Apple has said that they intend to use PC texture files in iPhone and Mac games and so Mac games will be that size. Users would therefore be lucky to be able to install more than one game on a base 256 Gb M4 Mac Mini. There are complications in using external storage and so for none tech savvy users a buying 512 Gb Mac is the obvious solution.
The tech is great. The OS on the other hand...not so much. MacOS is still a nightmare if you have to do ACTUAL work that requires, y'know, programs and tools, not "apps" in the app store. It took me 15 minutes just to figure out how to enable a freaking driver for an audio interface last week, which inexplicably involved booting into a recovery mode and making changes from an obscure option buried in a menu with no real indicator of what it does until you know exactly where to look. WHY are we making it so hard to plug a thing in and use it???
But that comes down to the manufacture of the audio card, not to the macOS. They should provide you an apk, dmg file to install all you need to get the card working, or even the kext itself.
Good video mate , I have been contemplating getting an apple computer of some description since the M series chips became a thing to complete my apple eco system ( long time android/PC boy here) , originally the iMac was the thought of the day , however the iMac 23.9 screen despite it's decent quality seemed like a down grade coming from a 27 inch monitor . The earlier M1 mini looked alright , but the value case the instant you started doing apple upgrades ( as usual)seemed to evaporate very quickly . In my neck of the woods ( Australia)the base M4 Mac mini is a thousand bucks ($999) , our dollar is worth dirt so everything is more expensive here as usual. Jumping up to the next tier , base 512 GB jumps to $1277.00 , that's a decent jump for a tiny extra bit of storage . Jumping up to the M4 Pro 12 core CPU / 16 core GPU , 512 GB /24 GB ram more than doubles the base model price with $2177.00 😮 , it's kinda funny how apple goes from one extreme to the other with good value for the base model , to eye watering for base premium model😊. I admit I don't even need the high end model and don't do anything that would probably stress the base model , except maybe a bit of gaming if I felt the urge , but that's rare as hell for me these days in my old age. That being said I like to get the premium stuff for future proofing and keep my gear for years to come , call it a character flaw 😊. Decisions, decisions 😂😂😂. Anyway we'll see what happens down the track . Have a good Xmas and new year mate .
I'm a comic artist and in the last 5 or 6 years I became working 100% digital. After being a windows user for 30 years, a month ago I received my first Mac, the mini base model and it's totally awesome.
I have the exact same monitor with the base model M4 Mac Mini. Refreshing to know that a huge TH-cam tech channel is validating this purchase. This computer runs circles around what I was using previously.
Alex "The GOAT" Dobie
damnit forgot to log out of my alt
@@XDAVideo ? I'm confused
I feel like storage is really not that much of an issue for a desktop. SSD in an enclosure is a rather nice solution.
I’m running on 256 GB SSD. My photo data runs on RAIDs and I’ve got a 2GB SSD and a 1TB. I’m considering moving my photo data to an SSD and using those spinning drives for a RAID 10 drive. And I have a couple ports left over. I did upgrade the unified RAM to 24GB. The base is a great deal, adding one add on is ok, adding a second, well not as much.
Short answer: Yes. I have one, and it's awesome.
I did a poor man version of what you went through, I finally bought an m1 macbook air with 256gb of storage. The storage limitation was driving me crazy however so instead of going with m4 mac mini I went with m1 macbook pro 2020 1tb +16gb of ram which costed me £600 so the same as m4 mac mini. No regrets, I just couldn't deal with dongles everywhere I went.
Yeah definitely easier to live the dongle life with a desktop vs laptop
@@XDAVideo yeah I suppose. I was going to keep the Air and get the m4 Mini for home use but decided that storage anxiety would just eat me up...
The 256GB storage limit on my M1 macbook air is what actually got me to upgrade less than a year after buying it. It was so bad. I could install like 3 programs before I was constantly running out of space. And on a laptop it's much more annoying to have to bring along an SSD everywhere you go, especially since it means you probably need a USB C hub as well thanks to the pitiful 2 USB C ports on the whole damn laptop, one of which you might need for the charger...
@@PawelLeszczynskipav just get the M4 Pro Mac Mini and you get 512GB and if your smart you would just get another SSD Hard drive and use it as the systems main memory instead so your computer will always stay loaded up with memory
@@jdarg4163 for work I need a macbook with 512gb plus storage. That's the bottom line. I'm a music lecturer and use logic and ableton which together take up 120gb+ to match the classrooms imac installations.
I got the new m4 mini base model and so far I'm in love with it I use it for music
It seems everyone is trying to implement "work arounds," for the limited 256 GB HD that comes with the new Mac Mini 4. They all involve removing data from the Mac Mini 4 HD and putting that data on an external SSD drive. I was talking to an Apple Support person yesterday, and he suggested that if you are going to buy an SSD drive anyway, why not just get a 1 or 2 TB SSD and install you OS and everything onto it? He sent me an Apple document on how to install your operating system on an external drive. Since most people are going to either purchase or use a pre-existing SSD to use, it would seem that using a larger external drive as your main drive would be a lot easier and less hazel than dancing around the limitations of the 256 GB as the main drive. Was the Apple tech wrong?
Ja, in gewisser Hinsicht liegt der Apple Mitarbeiter falsch. Er beschneidet die Funktionen, die eigentlich in Zukunft wichtig sein könnten. Apple Ai wird nicht funktionieren, auch Apple Pay ist nicht aktivierbar. Wenn man damit leben kann, dann ist da OK.
External NVMe SSD 2TB drive can be had for about $200. (you can of course pay more to get more storage) It actually runs faster (and consistently cooler) than the internal drive, according to the tests I saw. I haven't seen anyone try to totally run off the external, as in install the OS on it. So IDK about that. It's been three days since you commented here, maybe you have? I have seen people run their Home folder on the externals, meaning all your third party apps and data runs off it, and Apple's OS/applications run on the internal. I've also seen a guy run two external SSDs and RAID them. So basically a 4TB Home with almost 6k R/W speeds on that config. About $400.
The trick with the Home folder technique is not to log into iCloud/Apple until after you've done the config, and everything will work fine, according to the videos I've watched. Yes, that includes the AI because you're still using the internal for your OS.
@@EnervatedSociety Right now I am running Big Sur on an external 1 T SSD on an old mid 2015 27" iMac. It seems to be working fine, and a little zippier than the internal HD. I'm on the fence between getting the New Mac Mini 4 or trying to upgrade my old iMac with Open Core Legacy Patcher. The fence is getting pretty wobbly because, so far, the OCLP approach is not working.
@@tomdonovan2832 That sucks to hear, about OCLP I mean. I'm considering going that rout with my old 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, that is still running 10.13 on mechanical drives, but maybe it's just time to retire this old beast and jump on the Mac Mini M4 train. The base model with an external will be fine for my current needs, and I have a beastly Windows machine for gaming and my music stuff. 🤔
I’m using my base model M4 Mac Mini with a Crucial 4TB X9 Pro drive.
I went for 2TB internal storage . Don't like the mess of multiple SSSs around . It's my main personal machine which also runs my Plex sever , my work machine through windows 11 VM. It replaced my work laptop and my 14 yo Mac mini server
With gaming, I see my mac mini m4 going as high as almost 90c while playing Resident Evil 2, and it also gets uncomfortably hot to the touch. I understand the chip can reach over 100c without suffering from throtling, but I still don't like it. The problem is, the fan for some reason doesn't feel like it needs to run faster. So I had to instal TG Pro and now it gets noisy as heck when gaming, but the machine remains cool.
That storage limitation is still pretty crappy. If it was a standard M.2 drive, it would at least be forgivable, but a proprietary form factor with insane markups is just asinine.
It is a machine that counts. Storage is a forced but not a necessary upgrade.
How many users are probably doing 4k video editing with this computer configuration? 2 or 5 or even 10 percent? The device is unbeatable as a workhorse for normal use. With a 512 SSD, the computer would also be very suitable for professional users with video editing plus an additional external SSD
If they render off and on a system drive, they are idiots of epic proportion.
Hey im stock trader and doing hevy web browsing like 20 to 40 tab in browser , so base veriant sufficiant for me???
Currently a windows 10 user with hardware unable to accept windows 11 so kind of left on a floating ice berg floating off to the unknown. I know what I want and need from a computer. My hesitation of jumping to camp apple is the blatant knowledge of how little apple think and care about its customers.
What is really sad and pathetic is apple could clean up but they chose to use and abuse current and any potential customers and that’s what stops me going for camp apple.
In a world that’s all digital, apple still haven’t opened that email that says digital needs storage. The cost for useful storage is an offensive ransom. That ransom says a hell of a lot about a company to me.
A dirty one.
when I bought my M1 mac mini, I opted for the 512 GB storage option. you're making it hard for me to resist upgrading.
An extra $200 to go 512 isn't horrible until you think about it as a proportion of the overall price 😬
Wonderful review
They tuned for audio and video fast detection , every other stuff they midrange soc .... come down kewl 😂😂
I got the base and my external speeds are faster than the built in.just get a 40gbps external m.2 enclosure and a gen 4 nvme drive. Cost me around $190 for 2tb with everything else. Then of course make your home folder your external drive. And boom move your larger applications to the external drive. I think eventually we will get aftermarket internal storage that’ll cost much less. Anyhow not a problem I guarantee you wont notice much of a speed difference unless you’re just importing and exporting tons of data all day.
Would you mind share the name/brand of the enclosure end the gen 4 nvme drive. Thanks
For a vast majority of people, 16GB is perfectly fine; if you need storage just buy an external SSD. You can find a SanDisk, Samsung, or other brand one for less than $200 easy for 1-2TB. This is literally the best bang for buck computer you can buy right now.
I got it for my mom for Christmas
Just buy 1 or 2TB external SSD and you’re good, way cheaper then Apple prices for additional storage.
First a 8GB RAM machine and now a blazing computer with tiny storage. Genius!
I beg people to buy a $799 512 Gb M4 Mac Mini and not the £599 256 Gb M4 Mac Mini. The reason is that software is always getting larger. For example most PC and Console games are at least 100 Gb in size and Apple has said that they intend to use PC texture files in iPhone and Mac games and so Mac games will be that size. Users would therefore be lucky to be able to install more than one game on a base 256 Gb M4 Mac Mini. There are complications in using external storage and so for none tech savvy users a buying 512 Gb Mac is the obvious solution.
oh how did i survive for so long without it?
Humanity too, like how history happened.
The tech is great. The OS on the other hand...not so much.
MacOS is still a nightmare if you have to do ACTUAL work that requires, y'know, programs and tools, not "apps" in the app store. It took me 15 minutes just to figure out how to enable a freaking driver for an audio interface last week, which inexplicably involved booting into a recovery mode and making changes from an obscure option buried in a menu with no real indicator of what it does until you know exactly where to look. WHY are we making it so hard to plug a thing in and use it???
But that comes down to the manufacture of the audio card, not to the macOS. They should provide you an apk, dmg file to install all you need to get the card working, or even the kext itself.
You blame a closed os for not being open?
Well I don’t have one and I’m still surviving, so I guess the answer must be yes
Me personally the base model is useless so i recently bought the Mac Mini M4 Pro 12 core as logic pro 11 only uses the performance cores
Good video mate , I have been contemplating getting an apple computer of some description since the M series chips became a thing to complete my apple eco system ( long time android/PC boy here) , originally the iMac was the thought of the day , however the iMac 23.9 screen despite it's decent quality seemed like a down grade coming from a 27 inch monitor .
The earlier M1 mini looked alright , but the value case the instant you started doing apple upgrades ( as usual)seemed to evaporate very quickly .
In my neck of the woods ( Australia)the base M4 Mac mini is a thousand bucks ($999) , our dollar is worth dirt so everything is more expensive here as usual.
Jumping up to the next tier , base 512 GB jumps to $1277.00 , that's a decent jump for a tiny extra bit of storage .
Jumping up to the M4 Pro 12 core CPU / 16 core GPU , 512 GB /24 GB ram more than doubles the base model price with $2177.00 😮 , it's kinda funny how apple goes from one extreme to the other with good value for the base model , to eye watering for base premium model😊.
I admit I don't even need the high end model and don't do anything that would probably stress the base model , except maybe a bit of gaming if I felt the urge , but that's rare as hell for me these days in my old age.
That being said I like to get the premium stuff for future proofing and keep my gear for years to come , call it a character flaw 😊.
Decisions, decisions 😂😂😂.
Anyway we'll see what happens down the track .
Have a good Xmas and new year mate .
"survive", o the drama.
“Survive”? Wtf
People like this never experienced life.
Can you survive in the woods with a mac m4?? Yes, yes you can and you can game a little
Useless at keeping you warm though
There is a performance setting on a pro model that can keep you warm.
watching this on my M4 mac mini :D
Best for some, and worth for others.
Depends on what you are using it for.
In Brazil, the trifle is coming out 1199,46 $
Of course you can. No need for this video.
He is the one that renders from and on a system drive, no help there.
when you are asking "can you survive xxx", you already know that thing should be avoided
Try a restricted diet plan.
"Survive" don't be stupid grow a pair.
cheapest M4 mini the worst deal in town
No its garbage. Next
You are wrong, but you're entitled to it.