More Mac M4 thoughts

My current hardware setup: M1 Max studio in the office, M1 mini in the recording studio.

The Mac studio is great for editing video and doing compute-heavy tasks, and also has amazing peripheral connectivity which mostly goes unused. Connected to it I have an external NVMe enclosure, a second monitor, and a USB hub full of other stuff. Also a spare audio interface that it basically just uses as an unnecessary, overpriced DAC for my speakers and headphoens (and which I keep meaning to move to my gaming PC to get better audio for my VR concerts).

The mini in the studio is always short on connectivity options; it only has the two Thunderbolt ports, and could really use a third. It also has sufficient CPU for my music, but it’s a bit lacking in I/O, both because its internal 512GB SSD is slower than what’s in the Mac Studio, but also because it’s small enough that I have to offload most of my instrument sample data to a much slower external drive.

So what I need in the studio is more connectivity and more disk I/O, and what I need in the office is more compute…

Anyway, early benchmarks of the M4 mini have come out and it looks like the M4 mini is better on compute than the M1 studio, and while there’s no word on the I/O I’d expect it to be at least as fast.

So, after Transitions finally gets finished, I’ll probably get an M4 mini for the office (where I don’t need as much connectivity and where the underside power button isn’t as much of an issue), move the M1 studio to the, uh, studio, and then sell the M1 mini (or figure out some other alternate purpose for it, although nothing really comes to mind, I already have enough computers as it is).

I guess I need to decide whether I need a Pro (+$600 over the 512GB standard model) and if I should future-proof it with 10GbE (+$100). Here’s some spec comparisons:

System GeekBench single-core GeekBench multi-core notes
M1 2399 8499 Current studio machine
M1 Max 2424 12989 Current office machine
M4 3832 14977
M4 pro 3719 22370

Given that the base M4 still outperforms the M1 Max (sigh…) and the M1 Max is more than sufficient for my needs, I think I’ll save the money and go for the standard model. I could also then justify a larger internal drive, probably? Since my office machine gets enough video editing on it that more internal storage is still better (although 512GB is probably plenty).

The only downside to the standard vs the Pro is that the Pro has more video encoding engines in it, but it’s super rare that I need to encode multiple videos at once. The only time I think that would ever come up is while doing complex livestreaming and I don’t do that from my office anyway. (And that’s another reason why I’d want the Studio in the studio, because I do do1 livestreaming there sometimes.)

UPDATE: I was wrong about this; only the M4 Max has the second video encoding engine. Thanks, Keta! So yeah I have absolutely no reason to get a Pro.