Mac Mini

Holy shit, this thing is fast.

That’s pretty much my thoughts on this Mac Mini. It’s just so fucking quick at everything. I got the highest CPU on offer (M4 Pro 14 core) and I was worried that the cooling wouldn’t keep up. Instead it just flies through whatever I throw at it and I’m not sure I’ve heard the fan yet (outside of manually turning it up via iStat Menus).

I know it’s been said over and over that Apple Silicon Macs are amazing. They’re fast and yet run cool and quiet. Well, it’s all very true. The CPU temp rarely goes over 60°C, and even then only for moments and not long enough for the fan to ramp up. It mostly hangs out around 40°C and draws under 5W. Even when trying to push it (running VMs, building iOS apps, etc), it only briefly hits ~60W and the temps barely move.

Here’s a quick and very telling example. Opening a work project in Xcode and building the app (cleaning first, so a full build): on my Intel MacBook Pro, it takes about 1 min 15 sec. On the Mac Mini, it takes ~10 seconds. Incredible.

Windows 11 on ARM is also quite amazing. I run Windows in a Parallels VM for whatever work projects require full Visual Studio. It works fine on my MacBook Pro but is just unreal on the Mac Mini. Everything feels faster and more responsive, and the fan doesn’t budge from it’s base speed when opening or running projects.

Compatibility

If you’re worried about x86 compatibility with anything under macOS, don’t worry about it. Rosetta is seamless and I have yet to hit anything that doesn’t work on macOS.

Windows is a little less perfect. Visual Studio 2022 is ARM-native, but extensions are spotty. SQL Server Management Studio works but is a bit sluggish since it runs under emulation. Within Windows, Rosetta does not apply and Window’s x86 emulation isn’t quite as good. SSMS is still very usable and honestly still runs faster than on my Intel MacBook Pro.

The only thing that I could not get working in the same way as on the MacBook Pro is SQL Server. Management Studio works, but I normally run a development version of SQL Server to host local databases. It just won’t work on ARM. It’s not supported and I’m not going to rely on hacky workarounds for anything that important. My alternative is to run SQL Server for Linux in Docker on macOS. It’s a little clunky since I have to remember to start the container sometimes, and since I have to connect via an IP address instead of localhost, but it does work^[1].

To wrap up, this Mac Mini is amazing. It’s stunningly fast and makes no noise. I’m not really writing this to review it, since I’m really not someone who should be writing reviews, but if this were a review it would be a glowing one. Can recommend, for sure.

One last thing, Apple’s pricing is terrible. The base M4 Mac Mini is a stellar value if you can live with the tiny SSD. Upgrading from 256GB to 512GB is painful but necessary. I went (probably) too far with the upgrades and got the M4 Pro (14 core) SoC, 48GB RAM, and 1TB SSD. I could have bought 3 base models for the price of mine. I wonder if that would have been a better value?