Apple Mac mini M4

I'm a little surprised that people would rather rent a Mac than buy one. Less so now that Apple raised the prices but for a long time a M4 Mac Mini was $599 which only works out to about 6 months at these prices. Especially since they're not like a regular server, loud and power hungry. They're the definition of quiet and power sipping. I have one do all my background coding work when I want to keep my laptop clear (being headless helps with me moving around too).

Paul Graham in his keynote speech at PyCon[1] bolted an iMac to the wall as TV. I use a Mac Mini M4 and a huge 300 euro 4K screen as my TV. much better than an Apple TV and no spying or ads at all. Best TV in my life, a user friendly computer. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI

I think you've fixed it! I just tested it, now it works. (In both Chrome on Windows with NVidia 1060 gpu w/ 6 GB vram, which is what it wasn't working on yesterday, and on Safari on 2026 Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB of RAM. The former is pretty slow, around 1 tok/sec, the latter is fast at 18 tok/sec.)

You seem to just be extrapolating based on old information and bad comparisons. Click through the $269 link. The M2 listing redirects to an Intel Mac mini model. Apple trade-in value is currently $565 for the base 16GB/256GB M4 mini. (up from $480 a couple weeks ago) https://i.imgur.com/9qgKSZd.png I paid $500 for it. Why would I sell it to you for $300?

I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station. It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.

I develop using a Macbook primarily. Having a Mac Mini keeps the environment the same when I'm on the go. Plus, any home server would not be as efficient or fast as a Mini with an M4.

I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. I'm not. I have an M4 Mac Mini running 24/7 so I can use it as my Claude Code machine when I'm on the go. Why would they do a guerilla marketing campaign now if their Macs are generally sold out despite nearly doubling the Mac Mini price in the last few months?

I run Qwen 3.8 27B just fine on my Mac mini M4 24GB. I use Unsloth's Q3 XXS with 128k context. It successfully completes long horizon tasks with OpenCode.

I used to game on my 2014 MBP. That was a bad idea - took about 5 years, but eventually my batteries became spicy pillows. Turns out that even with the fans at full blast, the batteries didn’t like being so hot over prolonged periods. I’m happy with my M4 mini now, with a separate windows pc for gaming.

More validated by the day that my $450 M4 Mac Mini (16GB) was the best deal in computing for a long, long time.

Out of all of my home servers, the M4 Mac Mini is probably my favorite and runs many workloads even though it sits on a 96 core Epyc server now (needed the massive amounts of PCIe for something else). I was able to upgrade my SSD with a 3rd party one, not that sticking an NVMe drive on one of the thunderbolt ports would have been a bad pick. About the only place it didn't make sense is if you wanted a ton of RAM.

Upgraded my work machine from an M1 MBP to an M4 Mac Mini a couple of years ago. I do a lot of work in Excel with large sheets. The performance improvement was very noticeable and appreciated!

Happy with M4 Mini, although I recommend using a well ventilated M.2 enclosure instead of the integrated docks as I just had a 2TB Kingston die which I'm pretty sure was caused by "zero thermal forks given (chopsticks only)" UGreen hub design. Also can use as a laptop and replace screen/keyboard/whatever when failed/unsuitable. Higher resulting device longevity, especially with Asahi Linux making such great progress. https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini

I use both the base M4 Mac mini and an M4 MacBook Air for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and Fusion, and while they're not as almost-always-perfectly-smooth as my Mac Studio, they're about 100x better than the experience I used to have on my old Intel MacBook Pros in the 2010s. I edit 4K ProRes and H.265 footage, sometimes with multicam (up to 4 streams) and color adjustments, titles, etc. It's only after stacking 3-5 effects before things can stutter, really. Or if you try doing something CPU-intense in the background _while_ running some heavy creative software. I just don't do that.

I can still feel performance increases, most recently was when I got an M4 Mac Mini. Compared to my M2 Air, which is no slouch by any means, there was a very perceptible improvement in latency, app opening, general task completion, and so on. But very slight, and some coming from placebo effect/marketing. These days, I feel the most performance uplift when I switch from Windows/macOS over to a Linux or BSD installation, if only because there is so little wasted effort in running a bajillion little background tasks for crap I didn't ask for. Windows 10 on my PC is highly debloated and optimized, very little in my startup services and so on, but CachyOS on the same hardware feels leagues better.

> I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini. Do some tests pre and post upgrade. It’s ridiculous how efficient the mini is. My power usage is about 1/12 what it was with a Nuc.

In mice. I mean Mac Mini M4 not an iPhone. Also I love AI sites. Fancy font, plain serious style, we "introduce" rather than "release". It's an AI not an animal after all.