There is a scene in the Harry Potter books where Harry is choosing his wand. As he tries out one wand after another, Ollivander, the wand maker, tells him, “I think we should expect great things from you.” I felt a bit like Ollivander in May this year when I used the new iPad Pro and ran some benchmarks on it. This was the first time we saw the M4 chipset and it was immediately clear, at least I was clear on it, that we were dealing with a special chipset. I had anticipated that it would create some magic whenever it moved to larger devices, like a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro.

This is creating that magic now. About a week ago, Apple launched the new iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini powered by the M4 chipset. There are three flavors of M4 – M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max. I believe the M4 Ultra will come to the new Mac Studio sometime soon. As expected, the M4 – in all three of its flavors – is very fast. So fast that Apple felt confident enough to highlight its demonstration with a fun skit where a weightlifter named M4 starts off by lifting a barbell with some heavy and heavy plates. But then he soon switches gears and becomes a gymnast, dancing and acrobatic with weighted barbells effortlessly.

Entitled “No Sweat” it’s a neat and funny clip. But we are not talking about entertaining dramas today. Instead, we’re talking about the M4 and what it actually means for users. And this is where the real magic of the M4 comes into play.

M1 to M4

Since the M1 in 2020, Apple has rewritten the rules for chipsets and what kind of performance they can deliver without spending bucketloads of power. The M1 was a revelation. It was so good that four years later you can buy a MacBook Air M1 today and still get an experience that’s better than what you’ll get from the latest Windows laptops around the same price range. Since then Apple has continuously improved the performance of the M chip. If we go by Apple’s figures alone – and they are quite reliable – the M4 is based on this. The original M4 – with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores – is 1.8X faster than the M1. Plus it has a 10-core GPU that is 2x faster than the GPU in the M1, and of course it also has a faster 16-core Neural Engine for faster AI and machine learning performance.

Now, as good as the M1 has been, we’ve also seen a lot of improvements recently from Intel and AMD as well. This is where the M4 comes into the picture. It once again surpasses the latest Intel and AMD processors. And needless to say, it’s even faster and more efficient than the Qualcomm X8 Elite. More importantly, when you take into account the price point of the equipment, the M4 is miles ahead of the competition. It is so fast and performs so well that the Mac Mini at a price of Rs 59,900 – Rs 49,900 for students and parents of students – makes almost every computer priced under Rs 1 lakh irrelevant.

Now, I haven’t tried the new Mac mini yet. However I am in the process of trying out the M4 inside a MacBook Pro and will have more to say about it in the coming days. But still, I want to give India Today Tech readers an idea of ​​how fast the M4 is inside the base Mac mini. To do this, I’m relying on some numbers from PugetBench. Puget sells high-performance custom computers in the US. They sell mostly to content manufacturers and, to help their consumers, they have developed four standards that are based on actual, real-world usage. These are:

1- PugetBench for Photoshop
2- PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve
3- PugetBench for Premiere Pro
4- PagetBench for After Effects

The data I’m going to show is kind of apples to oranges. That’s because PugetBench is a suite of serious benchmarks and almost all the time the people who are using it are running it on computers that have top-notch hardware, like an RTX 4090 graphics card, and 48GB of RAM, etc. Still – and this is just to give you an idea – I tried to look for systems that could be considered equivalent to the base Mac Mini with 4K. For comparison, I choose the Core i5 14500 Intel processor because that’s what you’re likely to get. Most Dell or HP or Lenovo computers in India cost around Rs 1 lakh, and the AMD 7700X, which I found in a Lenovo gaming desktop, costs around Rs 1,30,000.

mac mini m4 benchmark

To cut a long story short: If you are buying a desktop computer in India with an existing but mid-tier Intel or AMD chipset, a basic graphics card like RTX 4060 and 16GB RAM, you can easily spend between Rs 1 do. ₹00,000 to ₹1,50,000. This will be about 2X to 3X the price of a Mac mini with the M4.

So, how does the Mini M4 perform in Pugetbench? Commendable. Look at the numbers. Given that it is almost impossible to find a system profile that allows direct comparison, this is only a crude comparison. But still it gives an idea.

What these figures essentially say is this: not only is the M4 fast, but it’s kind of crazy that this performance can be achieved in a device like the Mac Mini, which is as small as a box in which Burger King serves French fries. And what’s even stranger is that this performance can be had for Rs 59,900. Till 5 years ago if you were a content creator or a professional photographer, you needed to spend some huge amount of money on editing setup. Now, many people can make do with a Mac mini powered by the M4 or M4 Pro chipset.

More importantly, if you’re looking for a home computer then you can’t go wrong at all with the Mac Mini, especially if you can manage to get a student discount of Rs 10,000 on it. This is an extremely fast computer for everyday use. And apart from performance, the best thing is macOS, which is better than Windows. It is better designed, more feature-rich and harmonious. It is more secure. It’s smoother and has better animations and performance. The only reason not to like macOS would be AAA gaming, an area where Windows and consoles like PlayStation remain superior. Otherwise, the new Mac mini is functional out of the box, with all necessary applications installed. You don’t have to buy this license or that license just to write a letter or an essay.

Apple sells some expensive products. But the new Mac mini, iMac — and even the new base MacBook Pro — aren’t on that list. These are great value computers. And of the three, the base Mac mini M4 looks like an absolute steal considering its performance.