The New M4 Mac Mini

When the M1 iMac came out back in 2021, I bought one with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. It was fast, especially after moving up from an old Intel-Mac iMac. More than 3 years later the iMac was still great, I never felt it was slow and really didn’t have any issues with it except for two things:

• The color no longer suited my apartment. I went through a major redesign last year and the green iMac wasn’t working in my space.

• The second issue I had was with the hard drive, 1TB wasn’t enough anymore and I kept running out of space. I couldn’t solve it with an external drive since majority of the space was taken up with my Photos library. I thought about moving it to an external drive but I read I would end up with issues which I didn’t want to risk or deal with.

I was also honestly looking for an excuse to pick up the Mac Studio, I loved the way it looked and just wanted to have one. I kept building a Mac Studio hoping I’d eventually pull the trigger but I kept hesitating and eventually knew I was too late to buy one since it was due for an M3 or M4 upgrade. I stayed patient and then the M4 Mac mini was announced.

It looked like the Mac Studio, but was a lot more smaller and much more cheaper. So I pulled the trigger and bought one.

Initially I wanted to get the Mac mini with the M4 Pro chip, but after realizing how much upgrading to 2TB was going to cost me, I decided not to go with the Pro. I never had a speed issue with my M1, and from what I read about the M4 Pro, I wouldn’t really benefit much from it anyway so to save some money I decided to stick to the “regular” M4. I ended up upgrading the RAM from 16GB to 24GB, and the hard drive to 2TB. The hard drive upgrade cost me $800! That’s more than the cost of the Mac mini by quite a bit. It’s crazy, but I guess that’s how Apple manages to set the entry price of the Mac mini so low, they make up for it with the upgrades. $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB RAM, and $800 to go from a 256GB hard drive to a 2TB one. $1,000 worth of upgrades on a $600 computer!

But, overall it was still a lot cheaper than the Mac Studio I had been building on the Apple website for months now which is why I still pulled the trigger.

I ended up buying the Apple Display from Xcite since they were selling it for KD499, similar price to apple.com not including tax or shipping. Once you include tax and shipping the price shoots up much higher than Xcite. You can find the display cheaper on Amazon but even then, once you add tax and shipping the price ends up being similar to Xcite.

Now that I have everything installed and running I really love my new setup. The Mac mini is really small and doesn’t take up much space on my desk. The Apple display is big and beautiful as well, it’s not much bigger than the iMac screen (24″ vs 27″), but it does give me much more room to have two windows open side by side comfortably. It also expands my USB-C ports by an additional 4 ports, and has a Mic built in which is great since the Mac mini doesn’t have a mic.

Having 2TB is probably the biggest relief since I don’t have anxiety about running out of space and this should last a pretty long time with me since I don’t really store any large video files or anything of the sort on my iMac, just my photos which are around 600GB, and work and blog related files which are less than 300GB.

The only negative I have with the Mac mini is that the headphone jack is on the front which means if I want to physically connect them to my speakers I need to have a wire running out the front. I have KEF LSX speakers next to my display and with my previous iMac I ran them over Bluetooth. But it isn’t very reliable as in every few days the speakers lose sync with the video on my Mac and I need to disconnect and reconnect to get them to sync again. With the Mac mini I was hoping to connect them with an optical out or audio out but from the back. I have a USB-C to headphone jack adapter but decided to get a USB-C to optical out and ordered one from Amazon. But I now have another issue, the adapter I got doesn’t support volume control from the Mac so that’s around 15KD wasted and I either need to find another optical out that supports volume control, or just give in and use my USB-C to headphone jack and connect the speakers that way.

But other than that I don’t have any complaints, and no regrets with my purchase either!