The new Mac mini has a fresh design and better performance, making it among the best values in all of desktop computers for photographers.
The latest-generation Mac mini sports a fresh and improved design and Apple’s newest M4-series processors. The facelift and performance bump close the gap between the Mac mini and Apple’s fantastic Mac Studio desktop in multiple ways, making the new Mac mini an extremely compelling choice for photographers and video editors alike., predictably called the M4 series. With each new generation, Apple makes iterative CPU and GPU performance improvements.
The Mac mini is really compact. Here it is compared to some common items, including, from left to right, the iPhone 16 Pro, an Apple TV, and an OM System OM-5 camera. The Mac mini’s front also has a 3.5mm audio jack, which is a much more useful placement when using headphones than the prior generation’s rear audio jack.
At this point, one might reasonably wonder where the power button is. If it’s not on the front , and it’s not on the back , then where is it? Well, in what I can only describe as baffling, the power button is located on the bottom of the computer and is not reachable without lifting the computer off a desk or sliding it so that its butt hangs over the edge.
Besides the power button complaint, I love everything else about the Mac mini’s redesign. The smaller footprint, front ports, front audio jack, and Thunderbolt 5 inclusion are home runs across the board. Overall, and by a large margin, Apple’s design changes are improvements.As mentioned, our Mac mini test unit has the top-end M4 Pro chip and 48GB of unified memory.
The M4 Pro Mac mini handles import tasks with aplomb, showing a slight but meaningful improvement for both cameras compared to the M2 Pro. We never saw an M3 Pro device here, but the M4 Pro isn’tfar off the pace compared to the top-end M3 Max we tested. The M2 Ultra still reigns supreme, which is no surprise given Lightroom’s ability to utilize GPU acceleration.
As a quick note, you may have noticed in our M4 Max MacBook Pro Review that Jaron ran into consistency issues with Lightroom Classic. After speaking to the parties involved, we are confident this bug will be squashed quickly and doesn’t reflect expected performance. During my M4 Pro testing, I never experienced the bug or any other odd results during any benchmarks.only
While the M4 Pro may not look that impressive on these charts, keep in mind that two of the included computers, the Asus ProArt PD5 and MG-1 Ultimate, are tower PCs, not tiny desktop Macs. Further, the MG-1 Ultimate has an RTX 4090, a graphics card that by itself is bigger than the new Mac mini . There’s plenty of performance on offer here for video editors, even those working in RAW and high-resolution workflows.
While some improvements are best described as incremental, others are easily noticed during use. The Lightroom performance is especially good, as it’s easy to see when everyday tasks take less time by multiple minutes. As someone whose daily driver is an M1 Max MacBook Pro, I find everything about using Lightroom and Photoshop on the new Mac mini to be snappier, sometimes by a lot.
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