The brand new M4-powered Mac Mini is down to a great price from Amazon
Apple's new Mac Mini, no less.
I'd probably argue that Apple's recent brand new M4 Mac Mini release has constituted one of the most exciting releases for the product line since, well, the M2 option a couple of years ago. It comes with a redesigned, smaller chassis, even beefier internals, and most integrally, an upgrade to the base model so that it comes with 16GB RAM. From Amazon, this new model is available for £569 at the moment, which is a decent price on this brand new Mac Mini.
As much as the M1 chip that released nearly five years ago now represented a truly generational leap in performance against the Intel-based Macs in the pre-Apple Silicon world, the M4 chip continues Apple's incremental upgrades of previous years. As much as this is the case, the M4 Mac Mini is no slouch. With a 10 core CPU and 10 core GPU and improvements in both single and multi core performance, it's quite the beefy choice for everything from basic computing to those more intensive workloads, especially for such a small desktop machine.
The upgrade to 16GB of RAM (or unified memory in Apple's case) is useful for the sake of giving this machine more headroom for creative tasks such as video editing and even simple multi-tasking, while meaning you can take full advantage of its even more powerful internals, too. This base-spec M4 Mac Mini also comes with a 256GB SSD, which is sufficient for your programs but we'd recommend getting a fast portable SSD or other external or network-attached storage if you'll be doing video editing or storing large media libraries which you can have quick and easy access to. Of course, you can also use any number of USB drives or external HDDs you may have laying around, but a fast portable SSD will provide quicker access.
The other big difference with the new Mac Mini is simply how small it is. The older model carried dimensions of 7.75 x 7.75 x 1.4-inches, while the new option is 5 x 5 x 2 inches. It may be slightly taller, but is shorter and narrower. With this in mind, the port selection has only improved in spite of the M4's diminuitive size. The front supports a pair of USB-C inputs, while the rear I/O totals three Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports, as well as a full-size HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack and Gigabit Ethernet. The only slight oddity here is that the power button is on the underside.
If you want to grab a brand new Mac Mini for a bit less, this Amazon deal on the new M4 option is well worth your time.