Mac Mini M4 or Mini PC?
Is the answer obvious?
I understand the sentiment about comparing a Mini PC with the Mac Mini M4, which is currently the best deal in technology. It’s surprisingly funny that a company like Apple killed a whole Mini PC market with a $599 device.
Even if the Mac Mini M4 great for its price, it doesn’t mean it comes without some compromises. In my Mac Mini buying guide, I made emphasis on their lackluster storage and pricey upgrades. I even made another one about the best of external storage to tackle just that.
Off course, you don’t need to spend $600 for a PC when you only need it for productivity tasks. You can perfectly do some web browsing, read email, work with documents and do homework with a cheaper $200~ Mini PC.
If you don’t know what machine you should pick, I offer this simple article to point you in the right direction instead of asking on Reddit so company chills from both sides decide to wrong you like a moral cruzade.
Why pick a Mac Mini M4?
For the vast majority of people, the Mac Mini M4 is a killer deal. Price to performance wise it will wipe the floor with any Mini PC below $1,000 whatever the specifications they have.
The last iteration of Apple Silicon is one of the most efficient chips on the world, so people who are wary of their electricity will put this machine as their primary target.
From there, there are very simple conditions on why you should buy a Mac Mini M4:
You have less than $1,000 to purchase a desktop PC
I guess this budget will be true for most people looking for a desktop PC. The Mac Mini M4 rules in performance over all the PC market below $1,000. There is little reason to spend a little more than its listing price.
You can get a 24GB of RAM model for $799, or a 32GB model for $999, but these should be the limit and with very compelling arguments. In terms of storage, $100 will give you a 1TB SSD at decent speeds, which adds to the total cost in case you need more storage.
Over $1,000 your options become noticeably wider, especially considering that at this price you can find yourself building a great desktop PC with a decent RTX card. You can even build a desktop PC with some second-hand pieces like GPU, CPU and RAM, so there is a compelling case of flexibility.
You don’t play games that require Windows 11
It’s known that Windows 11 is the preferred platform for games, and most competitive titles will require to take over the system to work — you can blame their kernel-level anti-cheat required to function.
Publishers are slowly pushing high production games thanks to Apple’s porting toolkits. Even if the list of macOS-compatible games gets bigger each month, and Crossover ($64) helps with those not native, some other online games like Call of Duty Black Ops 6, Apex Legends or Counter-Strike Global Offensive 2 are unplayable. Also, no Xbox Game Pass.
Performance is at least on-par with other Mini PC due to translation overhead. You’re only left with cloud services like GeForce Now or XCloud.
Overall, gaming in macOS is archivable but inconvenient.
Your workflow doesn’t depend too much RAM
Workflows that require a lot of RAM will easily receive an “Out of memory” warning out of the blue. The 16GB of RAM in the base model are more than appropriate for all tasks, but professional applications will eat it instantly.
People who are starting to work with light professional workloads may get away with 16GB, but a Mac Mini M4 with 24GB ($799) should be preferred if the budget is there so your projects can stretch their legs.
Otherwise, projects that require A LOT of RAM on a budget will be better on a Mini PC, since these will give you a lot of memory for a fraction of the price, as long you don’t mind having a slightly weaker CPU.
You work with AI, Machine Learning or Language Models
The Mac Mini M4 is a great case for AI on the cheap, which is great considering similarly priced Mini PC suck at AI performance.
Language Models can work with 16GB of RAM, but large ones with billions of tokens will take larger chunks or may not even load. If that’s your target, you may consider putting that money into ChatGPT or other AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS).
The rest of AI workloads will depend on how they work, because some may not need gigabytes of data on memory, but other will do. In any case, the NPU included in the Apple M4 chip is the fastest on AI workloads and that means missing out unless you can get your own RTX.
You are comfortable with having an always-attached external SSD
For the price Apple charges for upgrading the SSD of your Mac Mini, you can have up to eight times the amount storage with an external drive.
Some people won’t be comfortable by having an always-attached SSD to their Mac Mini, but that’s the trade-off if you get your drive filled in a matter of months or weeks.
There are people who can live with 256GB but consider that this is the only upgrade path along the way. The other upgrade path is a new machine.
Why pick a Mini PC?
Now that the case has been settled for the Mac Mini M4, it’s very easy to pick a Mini PC if at least one of these conditions are met.
Linux or Windows 11 are non-negotiable
Asahi Linux can work on Apple Silicon but is still green in terms of compatibility and reliability, so don’t count on it… yet. Windows 11 on ARM is still years away of being installable on Apple Silicon hardware.
Both Linux and Windows 11 can be perfectly emulated through free utilities like UTM, VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion Pro, but some apps may require GPU acceleration that you will only get running them on bare metal.
You require a lot of RAM and storage
Apple will charge you $200 for additional 8GB of RAM (up to a total of 32GB), and $200 for each 256GB of additional storage size.
That’s ludicrously expensive.
For the same amount of money, you can buy 96GB of RAM or 4TB of NVMe storage on a desktop computer. Most Mini PC will also offer upgradeable SODIMM RAM and storage. There is no contest.
You want an Oculink-enabled device for your graphic card
If you have lying around a powerful RTX or Radeon card, and an appropriate power supply, you will be happy knowing that graphically it will beat the Apple M4 and even the Apple M4 Pro any time of the day.
Apple Silicon no longer supports graphic card, so your only alternative is a Mini PC with a powerful CPU that includes an Oculink port.
Even if that sounds great for gaming, performance can vary. There is some performance left in the table thanks to the Oculink connection, the SoC, the PSU and the enclosure responsable of holding the card.
So, what I should get?
It’s very difficult to say “buy a Mini PC” when the Mac Mini M4 exists, but you cannot deny cheaper Mini PC around $200 that can offer a basic but good experience for productivity tasks without ripping the wallet in half.
If your apps can’t run in a Windows 11 or Linux virtual machine, you want to connect an RTX card, or you need more large amounts of RAM, then you would be better with a desktop PC.
Otherwise, most people will be fine with the base Mac Mini M4 with either 16GB or 24GB of RAM. Beyond that, the value of the Mac Mini M4 plumets and you will find tempting offers in the form of laptops and desktops PC.
