Video ID: mzJT46G70b0
YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJT46G70b0
Added At: 13-06-25 21:17:22
Processed: No
Sentiment: Neutral
Categories: Tech
Tags: Apple, Mac Mini, Productivity, Gaming, Video Editing, Logic Pro
Summary
The speaker discusses their experience with the M4 Mac Mini, a base model and the Pro version. They highlight its capabilities for handling complex projects in Logic Pro, editing videos, and gaming. The speaker also compares the two models and notes some limitations.
Transcript
it's been about a month now since I started using the M4 ma mini the base model and wow what a journey it's been from handling complex projects in logic pro editing videos and gaming yep I did proper gaming as well even running llms locally this little Wonder here has handled more than I thought it would ever be possible I did push it to the limits I found some limits I'll show them in a minute but for the the price it's got me rethinking my entire productivity set up here not just for Content creation but for everything that I do in fact I'm wondering did Apple make a mistake here did they give us too much and because my based model videos were so popular I went and tested so many of you asked me to do it so I went and bought the M4 pro version pushing both of the limits and testing them and comparing them as well and today I'll break it all down for you you know what the experience has been in the last almost like a month where they fall short and which one might be the perfect one for you I don't know how much computer you need but I'll share with you those limits that I found in each of these and hopefully that can help you with your decision I'm Alex and I do down to earth te videos let's start with a base model then because this machine is without exaggeration the best computer from a value perspective that you can buy right now r599 I think is even cheaper now if you're watching this during the Black Friday or cybermonday period it's not just a Mac Mini it's I don't know it's a Workhorse right it's it's one one of those things that after my stress tests uh the videos that I've done kind of really pushing these machines I've been recommending this to so many people genuinely going I mean if you watch my videos if you've been here for a while you know that I'm not a big fan of Apple stuff but but I can't help but recommend this you know I have to give credit where credit is due whether you're student content creator anyone on a budget it checks so many boxes not just because of the budget perspective but it's just very capable the only thing I would suggest and I've been saying that to everyone is pair it with a good external SSD and a good Hub as well because especially if you're a photographer there's no SD cards in here so you're going to need some access to that because seriously if you can avoid Apple's storage upgrades right because in the majority of scenarios they just don't make a lot of sense financially the mini is fantastic uh from a value perspective but it can quickly become overpriced you know if you start giving money to Apple for uh for storage upgrades talking About Storage Thunderbolt 5 is not readily available yet which is frustrating but Thunderbolt 4 is and to be honest it's more than enough for today's needs as I've shown you here everything that I did was either you know via a thunderbolt 4 cable or you know on its local storage and in my tests it could easily handle even 4K press 422 projects in English that's pretty much as heavy as it gets from a video processing perspective and by the way I didn't just try like 5 to 10 minute Clips right it was like in in one scenario was a 45 minute long video lots of log footage you know really like not compressed at all with plenty of transitions in effect and it felt great you know working through the the timeline everything was very smooth sure you know got to be honest right the export times are very slow much slower than a beff or Mac but editing itself it's very smooth and frustration free and the export times were slow in a very extreme scenario for most people that export time you know will probably be 10 15 minutes you know for for most sort of short videos and this has been the case as well with After Effects and llm work as well but right now based on the test that I've been running a thunderbolt five Hub in this scenario makes no odds really because the bottleneck is usually being on GPU and the media engine for most of the stuff that I've been testing rather than access to fast storage and what's been so nice about the Mac Mini as well is that I keep discovering different use cases for it right it's not just a productivity beast and you know content creation Beast Mac Mini can be a great portable Solution that's one of the things that I discovered almost by accident having to take this home one day to do some tests I was like oh I can literally just pack a keyboard and a mouse and that I'm in and is also perfect as a home entertainment Hub it's quiet low energy and Incredibly capable of running you know 4K content no issues right you get the thing which is where our sponsor for today comes in there's something quite magical right about about turning your living room into a cinematic experience you know getting your family in and having a movie night for example I tried a few projectors this year and let me tell you you know the 4 movie theater premium is a bit like the Mac Mini the Mac Mini made me rethink my Computing needs and the four movie theater premium made me completely change my home entertainment setup and this is more than just a bog standard projector it's a 4K laser TV that blend Cutting Edge alpd RGB plus 4.0 technology with a super compact Ultra short throw design you can project a massive 150 in screen from just a few centimeters away that means you could get the full theater experience without turning your home into like a Tech Lab right the visuals are stunning even though they look good here I don't think it does Justice to to what I can see you know with a naked eye with over 2200 ISO lumens and a 107% of the bt220 color gamma the picture is very bright detailed and Incredibly like lifelike and yes it's also got dby Vision support hdr10 plus decoding support as well for those true to life highlights and shadows I know this sounds a little bit like a spec sheet but it's true it does look incredible the setup itself was ridiculously easy as well focusing is no problem just a couple clicks really to do very easy Keystone correction that can be complicated in some projectors not here absolutely you know I only needed some minor tweaks anyway but it was a breeze to do plus it comes with Google TV and Native Netflix so no more fussing with extra streaming devices you know everything or more cables even right everything you need is builting right there once I signed into my Google account all my other services synced up which was nice and can we talk about sound wow BS and wiing second gen acoustic do Atmos here in dtsx makes everything sound as good as it looks really from a budget point of view I think there's something really cool here right because you could start with this projector alone without the need to invest in audio gear straight away because the audio quality is so good on this projector you really allow you to you know run it by itself for a few months until you're ready to upgrade to a home theater set up if you want to you know because in a lot of rooms just a projector might be more than okay whether you're into movies gaming with ultra low 80 milliseconds latency or just want a a killer home entertainment system the full movie theater system is going to be a fantastic upgrade for you if you want to check them out just check the links in the description they're always running you know promotions anyway or if you're watching this from a TV scan the QR code here and thanks so much for movie for sponsoring this video I'm put this back my back so now let's talk about heavy workloads on this tiny little one this year to recap I tested and retested blender for 3D projects as many of you asked I mean it was one of the most popular things that you asked me to do and the results were truly eye opening right I can't think of any other words especially when I compared rendering performance on the M1 Max Book Pro which is a Mac style 64 gig R machine the Mac Mini wasn't just a little bit faster but in one scene which is a very complex scene in blender the render speed was 30 minutes faster on the base model Mac Mini the Mac Mini had 40 active tabs in Chrome while it was exporting and I was using that at the same time um yeah I I still have I haven't recovered from that the M1 Max only had blender running and it did yeah it did half an hour later so like in some situations it's obviously better to have more memory more CES well a lot of situations that's going to be true but in in some situations what I found is that it's better to have just a newer chipset Apple hasn't been great on many things especially from a handheld perspective but when it comes to that chipset you know it's exponentially better so when they say you know it's 10 times faster 30 times faster a lot of it is marketing Mumbo Jambo but when it comes to the Mac Mini it's it's true it's you know for 600 bucks that's mental equally incredible though is using the Mac Mini for logic pro I had to learn some of this stuff but the base model only started to struggle past 150 tracks very complex tracks as well in my first video I I didn't really know much of what I was doing but one of you sent me actually a live project that I then kind of expanded into and added some thirdparty plugins I think it was wasn't really anything too complex but it was enough to kind of show a real life in there so 150 tracks was when I saw the Mac Mini the base model struggle a little bit and the M4 Pro Mac Mini also the base model other one went beyond 200 and only really struggled with 300 tracks which I don't know I mean it's it started to get a little bit unrealistic know to even try to do something like that but if you've missed my earlier tests definitely check them out after this because I haven't seen many videos out there that covers so many different tests and as you can probably tell I'm quite proud of that one I mean it was it was hard work but I think because you got involved in it it made the videos more meaningful so um yeah definitely watch that if you haven't seen it yet now for photographers there using Lightroom in the last month I tried a few different scenarios the base model handles something like 200 RW Imports you know and trying to edit them at the same time anything more than that you know it kind of struggles I tried 1,500 at one point and that definitely yeah broke the Mac minity the base model so yeah if your workflow involves thousands of raw files the M4 Pro is probably going to be the better option for you with a bit more memory in fact you know this was the first test that I saw the the system overload error that said like you have to close some stuff because we can't handle this the Mac Mini within reason will be a fantastic machine for many Pros out there but if you want to see it you know what really makes it crash out and die those videos will give you an idea and talking about crashing out I fully expected this not to work on the especially on the on the $600 version but it did which is um running AI workloads using llms specifically I was running L models I tried different sizes 3B and 7B and some crazy ones that fail straight away but running llms on the base model was surprisingly smooth I mean fine-tuning remains a challenge not necessarily for the Mac Mini itself but for me it's been a steep learning curve having to Learn Python and you know it's no joke but I will persevere and the results so far have have shown some some crazy things right you can definitely explore AI on a budget as is my bottom line here but and by the way I'm so grateful to all of you who have been asking to for me to do that dedic C llm video and it's coming and I now know enough to be dangerous let's put it that way um and I found some like you know what makes the M1 Max for example completely die so I know the limits are in there and I nearly cracked it last week to do that on the on the M4 Max minis but there are so many challenges in doing AI work on this especially fine-tuning so when I fix one thing it breaks another so I have to keep tweaking in find I reckon I'm about a week away from the video being ready for you so hanging there I haven't forgotten I just appreciate that you you're asking for it now gaming also blew me away that was the first thing that made me think hang on how is this even possible I was playing cyberpunk 277 on the base model using crossover of course I tried using like parallels in Windows you know there's some limitations in in that software cuz it doesn't have direct X or the right version of it anyway but running things that the native games like Resident Evil natively is looking stunning it's not yet like a gaming PC level of course but for casual gaming it's more than enough it's it's actually weird to even be talking about gaming at this level on a Mac but they're getting there slowly but they are getting there after a couple of weeks I switched my attention to the M4 Pro also the base model I refuse to give Apple any extra money right it's was $1,400 or pounds here in the UK but the speed boost is undeniable right tasks like exporting 4K video and rendering large 3D scenes are not just a little bit faster they are signif you know you can see where your money is going it's not just about speed though what I found specifically with uh AI workloads bear in mind I'm I'm a total Noob I'm making lots of mistakes here but I'm really enjoying this but I'm finding that the quality of the response is better on the M4 Pro in some in some situations which is a bit counterintuitive you know the more I learn about this the more I'm thinking maybe I'm doing something wrong but particularly in um image generation I found the pro to to give more accurate results so not just faster but he responded better to prompts right just I just saw that quite clearly in stable diffusion when I was doing those tests you know some some prompts on the M on the base model MC mini just got completely ignored whereas on the pro the exact same prompt exact same software all the settings are the same I got different results more accurate results look at the end of the day the decision comes down to your workflow you know what you do with these is what's going to dictate what you buy who am I to tell you what to do right but if you're a student a casual Creator or someone who just needs a solid desktop the base model is unbeatable but if you're constantly working with hundreds of raw images you know extreme large logic pro sessions or Advanced AI models the M4 Pro of course is going to you know with lots more memory as well is going to be better for you I might even consider the M2 Ultra Studio I don't know from a from a money perspective I wonder if that's going to be better but that's another video when it comes to the Mac Mini I'm still team base model so leave a hasht I don't know Bas model gang or something uh down here in the comments so so I know that you watch this far by the way creating these videos is something that I don't know reignited my passion for for YouTube reviews in general oh yeah not even kidding it's 1:00 a.m. here in the UK but I'm really enjoying talking about this stuff and you know kind of discovering all the limits on these things and mainly because they are answering questions that you have and you know going out learning logic pro llms machine learning made me consider different points of view for for my videos in general going forward and ultimately I think made me a better reviewer so anyone can take a gadget out of the box and say how pretty it is how small it is how affordable it is but answering my audience's questions is something that I don't know felt much more rewarding especially when I saw all the feedback in the comments as well and over 3,000 of you signed up to that this month alone and I'm beyond grateful honestly you know that's why I'm here at 1:00 a.m. on a Saturday night making this video because I know it's meaningful to some people of course I've had to make other videos that end up funding these stuff and funding the channel but you taught me something this month and I'll definitely take that on board for for the next year with that said if you haven't subscribed yet this is a perfect opportunity for that if you like my content of course right now for me and the Mac minis what's next I'm planning something quite cool I think you're going to like this you know I'm going to turn the Mac Mini into a portable Run and Gun workstation with a travel case an external monitor let me show you this oh God this is the espresso display and all it needs is a USBC cable to the Mac Mini very lightweight easy to take anywhere I think it's going to be the ultimate on the go setup whether it's useful or just a bit of fun I'll let you decide when that video comes out and if you know if you want to know how that turns out obviously you know where to find me make sure you subscribed and honestly thank you again for all your ideas and all your support for these videos If you enjoyed this video share it with your Tech loving friends as well put it on that WhatsApp group I'm sure someone in there will find it useful and let's keep geeking out on these machines here I I think Apple did a Blinder here they're really good see you [Music] soon of our own device in the dunes and dance the forest still the night