full image - Repost: Mac Mini Pro 2024 - Good and Bad Overview (from Reddit.com, Mac Mini Pro 2024 - Good and Bad Overview)
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So, I had a very old i5 Mac mini which was great. I have a powerful PC and I've been in Windows world for a while now. The m4 sounded exciting and although I didn't reeeeeeally need it, I'd always preferred MacOS over Windows and thought maybe now was the time to try the Mac mini again.I got the Mac mini M4 pro (originally I ordered the base but I had second thoughts and changed the order), 24GB.In no particular order, my thoughts.MacOS is great. To be honest it took a while to adjust back from Windows, and there are a few things I miss (I like the Windows 11 screen snap - makes windows arrangement very quick), but overall I prefer the MacOS UI. Clean, obvious, responsive.Integration with other devices and services is fantastic. This is probably the single biggest thing for me - being able to access my iPhone, Calendar, Contacts, Mail, messaging from the Mac, has been hugely convenient. In terms of day to day productivity, it's been a tangible change.'It just works' is still more or less true. Windows, to be fair, is much more stable and sane than it used to be; but with a Mac I really worry much less about trashing things accidentally or random weirdness. I spend a lot more time tinkering and fine tuning the PC than I do or feel I need to with the Mac.It's really quiet in daily use; which I didn't think I'd care about like at all, but actually now my PC sounds really really loud. So warning, the Mac mini will spoil you.In terms of aesthetics, while the Mac mini looks really cute in photos, back in the real world, it's going to be a nest of cabling. I've resigned myself to that. Currently I have an audio out to proper speakers, a USB-C out to a C/A/etc hub, an ethernet cable, a thunderbolt out to monitor, an HDMI out to monitor, and the power. If you just want to use it for a monitor, I guess you could get away with just HDMI and power? But most of us are running more than just that.I have the trackpad, which I like a lot. It's not really essential for the sort of things I do, but for some purposes it's more convenient, and switching up from the mouse is better for the muscles in your wrist and hand.I have the Mac mini on one monitor, the PC on another monitor, and then one monitor they are both plugged into and I just switch between as I need to using the input control on the monitor. This works well enough. I did have real problems with the Mac not recognising its own monitor (and MSI 4k something) when waking from sleep; although this mostly seemed to fix itself once I turned on 'CEC' on the monitor itself . Worth trying if you have this issue.I have a USB keyboard for the PC, and the small version of the bluetooth keyboard for the iMac - small enough to move out of the way so the two keyboards it's a problem. As regards mouse, I have a Logitech which will pair with up to three devices, so I have paired it to the PC and the Mac mini and just switch between as I need to (or, use the trackpad, when that's simpler).This probably sounds overly complex, but actually it works really well. I could get some sort of KBM switcher but in the end it didn't seem necessary.Regarding monitors, there is a lot of chatter about resolution and blurry fonts and so on with the MacOS. I read a lot about it and just got more and more confused; so in the end I just bought this MSI 4k monitor (which was about the cheapest descent 4k monitor I could find - I already have a 'serious' monitor attached to the PC for when I need to be Serious) and it looks perfectly fine. Probably a proper Apple display would look better but I can't see them side by side so I will never know. I would suggest not getting too paranoid about the monitor thing unless you work in graphic design or something.As regards pro versus base. I ended up getting the pro because (i) I was genuinely curious what an m4 could do and wanted a full-fledged version for that reason and (ii) I do some AI work and some video work and thought maybe I'd regret the base after a few years. The pro is powerful, but two things to bear in mind. First, it's a powerful chip, -in a mini form factor-. Meaning, yes, for anything taxing, you will get heat, you will get fan noise. Second, it's amazing as a CPU but it's still a Mac mini; if you actually want to do work with AI or video vs mess around, well, an expensive PC with an expensive GPU is still going to be better. This is sort of obvious but it's still worth stating explicitly. When I really want to do something and time is a factor, the PC with the 4090 is still what I go to.That said though, I installed Pinokio on the mini and it can do all the things, stable diffusion/flux, LLMs, voice cloning and so on. Good fun and definitely a cheap(er) way to get to play with these things if you aren't interested in the billions of dollars a 4090 etc cost. I also did some work on Topaz AI on the mini and it worked fine. Again it wasn't as fast as the PC with the 4090 but on the other hand it wasn't slow either, and my general takeaway was it was a lot faster at video processing than a machine that size/cost had any right to be. If you are into video work or AI or something more complex, it's definitely worth considering the Pro version I think.I will say the case got hot while doing AI work. I ended up installing MacFanControl which works well at keeping the temps to where you'd like (at the expense of fan noise). I have no doubt that the design is a miracle of thermal management engineering but I don't think it was designed to do 24/7 heavy lifting - if I was going to use it as a production machine, I would absolutely have MacFanControl or similar installed and be using it as appropriate.Some weird things that I haven't been able to resolve. First, I did have a reliable Samsung external SSD plugged in for extra storage; but it was constantly hot. I have no idea why. I had it plugged in for a while so it wasn't anything like initial indexing or anything. It wasn't fry-an-egg hot but hot enough that I wasn't disposed to leave it plugged in permanently. No idea if that was a Mac thing or a Samsung thing.Second, I have a Synology NAS and one of the reasons a Mac mini works well for me and I don't care about the external drive is that mostly I'm using the NAS anyway. However, file operations to/from the network drives got weird. Sometimes speeds would be extremely slow, or file transfers would fail suddenly. I ended up doing any large file operations from within the Synology OS/desktop instead via a browser window (which was as normal). At some point I discovered at least part of the problem. It seems that the MacOS will try to use the wifi connection even when there is an ethernet cable plugged in, for some operations. No idea why and have tried all the obvious things. When I turn off wifi, suddenly I get ethernet speeds again. This used to irritate me because I liked the watch Auto Unlock thing (which needs wifi to work) - but now I don't care, I just leave wifi off to ensure it uses the cable connection all the time.Lastly, gaming. For serious gaming I'd use the PC obviously; but I have noticed that now starting up the PC (meaning, even just waking it from sleep) seems like too much work. The Mac feels more like an iPad or something - I can just 'pick it up' and play right away. I guess it's just psychological, but for simple things that run perfectly fine on the Mac I'd much rather play them there.Some people here worry a lot about RAM - I got 24GB as a sort of a compromise and it's been perfectly fine for everything I've tried. No issues at all. I guess it depends what you are trying to do but it seems like MacOS memory management is pretty clever.Even though I didn't really need it, I'm happy I got it. No buyer's remorse.Happy to answer questions! (Or hear of solutions for the wifi thing!)
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