While it may not be the literal fastest CPU ever, it still seems very, very fast, and the efficiency is pretty compelling. I'm not sure how much of those efficiency gains are a product of the design constraints that Apple is not beholden to (external memory, x86 backwards compatibility, other aspects of the AMD64 architecture, etc.), the slightly better process nodes, or superior design. I'm honestly dying to know, but I guess we won't find out, and as far as the products go, it doesn't really matter that much. The end result is a pretty good deal.
As a mainly non-Apple user I see the following caveats for my own uses:
- I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)
- I'm worried about the SSD situation still. It seems like it hasn't amounted to much (yet), but some use cases might be more impacted than others, and once the SSD does finally fail, the machine's dead. This is not how things work in most PCs, even mini PCs, and it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
- The pricing is great at the baseline, but it gets progressively worse as you go up. The Apple M4 Pro Mac Mini has a baseline price of $1,399.00, which I think is pretty decent for a high-end computer with 24 GiB of RAM. But, it maxes out at 64 GiB of RAM, which is less than half of what I have in my current main machine, and believe me, I use it. That 64 GiB of RAM upgrade costs $600. For comparison, the most expensive 64 GiB DDR5 RAM kit on PCPartPicker is $328.99. Don't get me wrong either, I understand that Apple's unified RAM is part of the secret sauce of how these things are as efficient and small as they are, but at least for my main computer I really don't need things to be this compact, so it's another tradeoff that's really hard to swallow.
But on the other hand, for people happy to use macOS as their primary operating system, the M4 line of Macs really does look the best computer Apple has ever produced. (For me, it is rare that I feel compelled to even consider an Apple computer; the last time was with the original M1 Mac Mini, which I did buy, although after some experimentation I mainly just use it for testing things on macOS rather than as a daily driver machine.) There really aren't many caveats especially since the base memory configurations this time around are actually reasonable.
I suspect these things could be great on homelab racks if the longevity issues don't wind up being a huge problem.
> - I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)
As I understand it M3 is not supported because there's no M3 Mini to run the continuous integration
There is now an M4 Mini, so there might be a chance Asahi Linux will eventually support M4.
I don't think there's enough high quality benchmark information to really make a statement like that, but most importantly, I care about both single-core and multi-thread performance. I don't really have any workloads that only use one thread.
Comparing the M4 with PC CPUs will be hard. Typically when comparing two PC CPUs, to make the comparison more realistic, you'd set some reasonable similar constraints, like using the same memory kits and so on. However, even without considering overclocking, the actual performance of a given CPU can vary massively depending on the thermals, power delivery, memory and so forth. (It can vary by over 50%. I didn't check but you should be able to see this on benchmark charts that allow user submission.)
(However, for what it's worth, I always do at least a bit of mild overclocking personally. Nothing extreme, but what does fit within the power and thermal budget is basically just free performance at the cost of some efficiency, a trade-off I'm happy to make for my main desktop machine.)
Nah that's all pointless trivia. It is dark inside the box. Nobody gives a rip whether the mini is faster because it's got better ram or if it's faster because it's got better arithmetic logic. So you do not have to control things like memory because you don't have a choice anyway.
You don't really seem to understand the point of benchmarks. You're trying to compare the performance between two devices to quantify which one is better at some specific task in some scenario. The tricky part here isn't that people care whether the CPU is better or not, the problem is that on the PC side you can fix the variables between CPUs so that you can just look at the value of individual CPUs, but you can't do that when comparing across PCs and Mac devices. So what do you pick to compare with? There is no correct answer, but there are some answers that are more sensible than others. e.g. you probably don't want to jump massively into another price class.
If money is no object and you just want ridiculous multicore performance it's going to be pretty hard to beat EPYC. Yes, the single core performance is going to be worse; it won't probably be the best even among PC parts, but many use cases gladly take that tradeoff.
The SSD in the new small Mac Mini is replaceable, though it is proprietary (not standard NVMe) and uses different physically sized and shaped drives that are incompatible with each other physically between the M4 base version and M4 Pro version.
As a mainly non-Apple user I see the following caveats for my own uses:
- I'd love to see better Linux support. (As far as I know, Asahi Linux only covers the M1 and M2 lines, and as amazing of a project as it is, last I looked, it's neither upstreamed nor exactly what one might consider first class. Maybe it's getting there now, though...)
- I'm worried about the SSD situation still. It seems like it hasn't amounted to much (yet), but some use cases might be more impacted than others, and once the SSD does finally fail, the machine's dead. This is not how things work in most PCs, even mini PCs, and it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
- The pricing is great at the baseline, but it gets progressively worse as you go up. The Apple M4 Pro Mac Mini has a baseline price of $1,399.00, which I think is pretty decent for a high-end computer with 24 GiB of RAM. But, it maxes out at 64 GiB of RAM, which is less than half of what I have in my current main machine, and believe me, I use it. That 64 GiB of RAM upgrade costs $600. For comparison, the most expensive 64 GiB DDR5 RAM kit on PCPartPicker is $328.99. Don't get me wrong either, I understand that Apple's unified RAM is part of the secret sauce of how these things are as efficient and small as they are, but at least for my main computer I really don't need things to be this compact, so it's another tradeoff that's really hard to swallow.
But on the other hand, for people happy to use macOS as their primary operating system, the M4 line of Macs really does look the best computer Apple has ever produced. (For me, it is rare that I feel compelled to even consider an Apple computer; the last time was with the original M1 Mac Mini, which I did buy, although after some experimentation I mainly just use it for testing things on macOS rather than as a daily driver machine.) There really aren't many caveats especially since the base memory configurations this time around are actually reasonable.
I suspect these things could be great on homelab racks if the longevity issues don't wind up being a huge problem.