Apple Mac mini M4 Pro Review: The £1,399 Desktop That Makes Gaming PC Builders Uncomfortable

The Verdict

The M4 Pro Mac mini at £1,399 is the best sub-£1,500 productivity desktop you can buy, full stop. It is silent, it is absurdly small, it runs 14B-parameter language models locally at usable speeds, and it compiles large codebases faster than Windows mini-PCs twice its price. It is also, unavoidably, a Mac — which means your Steam library shrinks by 90% the moment you plug it in. If you want one desktop that plays every AAA Windows title on day one, this is not it. If you want a second desktop that makes your gaming rig feel overbuilt for everything that is not gaming, it is unbeaten at the price.

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What Apple Actually Shipped

The Mac mini has lived in the same 19.7cm aluminium square since 2010. The M4 generation quietly killed that chassis and shipped something new: a 12.7cm square that stands 5cm tall and weighs 670 grams. For context that is the footprint of a CD case and the weight of a paperback novel. It disappears on a desk. It sits happily on a shelf. It hides behind a monitor on a VESA arm mount if you buy a £15 bracket.

The price of the shrink is a reshuffled port layout and the most-complained-about design decision Apple has made this decade: the power button is on the bottom of the chassis. Yes, you have to lift the thing to turn it on. No, it is not actually a problem in daily use because a Mac mini boots once in a blue moon, wakes instantly from sleep, and most owners will never press the power button again after setup. The internet screamed. Apple shrugged. A week later nobody cared.

All the ports are on the back except a single 3.5mm headphone jack on the front. Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, one HDMI 2.1, two USB-A, Gigabit Ethernet (upgradeable to 10GbE at checkout for roughly £100), and the power inlet. The external power brick is gone — it lives inside the chassis now, which is the quiet engineering feat that makes this whole thing possible. The Mac mini runs on a standard IEC-style cable with no wall-wart in sight.

Thermally it behaves in a way no Windows mini-PC in this class manages. Under light and moderate load the single internal fan does not spin. You can put your hand on the top of the chassis and feel it warm, and that is all you get. Under sustained Cinebench or Blender the fan ramps to a soft whoosh that measures around 22 dBA at one metre — quieter than the idle fan on most gaming PCs. Apple’s thermal engineering on the chip plus the small aluminium mass plus the single blower is genuinely a generational jump over Intel NUCs and AMD mini-PCs in this price bracket.

Core Specifications

Configuration reviewed (£1,399 Amazon UK trim, the base M4 Pro):

• Chip: Apple M4 Pro, 12-core CPU (8 performance + 4 efficiency), 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
• Memory: 24GB unified LPDDR5X, ~273 GB/s memory bandwidth
• Storage: 512GB NVMe SSD (claimed ~5,000 MB/s read, ~4,700 MB/s write)
• Display output: None built in (headless — drives up to three external displays)
• Ports: 3x Thunderbolt 4 (40 Gbps), HDMI 2.1, 2x USB-A, Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE optional at checkout), 3.5mm headphone
• Wireless: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Dimensions: 12.7 x 12.7 x 5 cm
• Weight: 670 grams
• Operating system: macOS Sequoia 15, “Built for Apple Intelligence”
• Price (this config): £1,399 Amazon UK

No retail Mac mini ships with anything weaker than this M4 Pro trim at this price point, and the £1,399 configuration is what you get on Amazon. Memory and storage upgrades are configure-to-order only via Apple direct, which we will come back to.

Performance Where It Matters

The honest test for any £1,399 desktop is how it holds up against equivalently priced Windows mini-PCs with modern APUs — think Minisforum HX99G, Beelink SER9, GMKtec K11 and friends — plus the handful of compact desktops from the majors that slot into the same price band. Here is what the M4 Pro actually delivers:

Test	M4 Pro Mac mini (24GB)	Minisforum HX99G (Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32GB)	SFF i7-14700 + RTX 4060 PC (£1,400)
Cinebench 2024 Single	173	118	131
Cinebench 2024 Multi (sustained)	1,420	1,090	1,340
Geekbench 6 Single	3,820	2,640	2,910
Geekbench 6 Multi	22,600	13,800	17,900
Xcode compile, WebKit full build (sec)	312	n/a	n/a
Blender 4.3 BMW27 GPU (sec, lower is better)	28	94	41
Final Cut Pro H.265 4K transcode	1.8x realtime	n/a	n/a
Llama 3.3 8B Q4 inference (tok/sec)	78	22	64 (fits in 8GB VRAM)
Qwen 2.5 14B Q4 inference (tok/sec)	34	7 (spills to system RAM)	fails to fit cleanly

The Xcode compile number — roughly five minutes and twelve seconds for a full WebKit build — is the one that makes developers perk up. That is the fastest sub-£1,500 machine we can find for Swift and Objective-C compilation, full stop. Intel workstations at the same price are nowhere near it, and the single-thread lead the M4 Pro carries over the Ryzen 9 7940HS is not a margin-of-error thing, it is a wall.

On sustained multi-core the M4 Pro holds its boost far longer than any mini-PC in this bracket because the thermal envelope is not fighting a 100W package. The chip runs in the 30 to 45W window under full load and does not throttle meaningfully at room temperature. Windows mini-PCs in the same price bracket either run hot and loud or throttle off their peak numbers within 90 seconds.

Where the mini loses cleanly is anything CUDA-dependent. If your workflow is Stable Diffusion via Automatic1111, any PyTorch project that assumes CUDA kernels, or Blender with OptiX, go buy the SFF PC with the RTX 4060 and do not look back. MLX and PyTorch’s MPS backend are real and improving fast, but they are not a drop-in replacement for a ten-year-old CUDA ecosystem and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.

DaVinci Resolve on a 4K timeline is smooth with plenty of headroom. Final Cut, unsurprisingly, flies — H.265 4K transcodes at 1.8x realtime because Apple’s media engine is doing the heavy lifting in hardware. Logic Pro sessions with 40+ tracks and a reasonable plugin load run without breaking a sweat. This is the profile of a very good small workstation, and at £1,399 there is no Windows equivalent that matches the sustained performance plus the silence plus the footprint.

Gaming: The Honest Bit

This is where a certain kind of reader skips straight to, so we will not dress it up.

macOS gaming in 2026 is genuinely better than it has ever been. That is a low bar and the honest framing is that the Mac native catalogue on Steam now sits at roughly 500 titles with meaningful performance, versus the 50,000-plus that run on Windows. Apple Game Porting Toolkit 3 handles a surprising amount of DX12 without hand-holding, CrossOver 24 is a legitimate option for most single-player titles without kernel anti-cheat, and publishers are shipping more native Mac ports than at any point in the platform’s history. Baldur’s Gate 3. Resident Evil 4 Remake. Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. No Man’s Sky. Control Ultimate Edition. Lies of P. Cyberpunk 2077 is announced as a native Mac port, not yet shipped at the time of this review but confirmed coming.

Here is what the base M4 Pro Mac mini actually delivers on native titles at the TV-friendly resolutions people plug this machine into:

• Baldur’s Gate 3 (Mac native, 4K, High): 52 fps avg, 41 fps 1% low
• Resident Evil Village (Mac native, 4K, Max): 68 fps avg, 54 fps 1% low
• Death Stranding: Director’s Cut (Mac native, 4K, Very High): 55 fps avg, 44 fps 1% low
• No Man’s Sky (Mac native, 4K, High): 61 fps avg, 48 fps 1% low
• Lies of P (Mac native, 1440p, High): 58 fps avg, 46 fps 1% low
• Cyberpunk 2077 (CrossOver 24, 1440p, FSR Quality): 38 fps avg, 27 fps 1% low

That is a legitimate “play Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4K on the living-room TV” machine. It is not a competitive-shooter machine and never will be. DLSS does not exist on macOS and is not coming. Ray-tracing parity with RTX cards does not exist and is not coming. Kernel-level anti-cheat games — Valorant, every major tactical shooter of the last five years, every ranked PvP ecosystem — are a hard no and always will be on this architecture.

If AAA Windows gaming is the primary job of the desktop you are buying, skip this and build a £1,500 PC around an RTX 5070 Ti. We say that on a gaming site because it is the truth. The Mac mini is a different machine for a different job. The question is whether you have room in your life for both, and at £1,399 the answer for a lot of readers is going to be yes.

The Unified Memory Argument (24GB Edition)

The quietly interesting thing about the base M4 Pro configuration is the 24GB of unified memory. This is the number that makes the £1,399 Mac mini a serious local-LLM machine in a way no £1,399 Windows mini-PC can match.

Unified memory means the 24GB is addressable by the CPU, the GPU, and the Neural Engine simultaneously with zero byte-copies across a PCIe bus. On a Windows mini-PC with a discrete iGPU you have either a slice of system RAM carved off as shared VRAM (slow and capped at typically 8GB) or a dedicated GPU with a small, fixed VRAM pool. The moment a model spills that VRAM budget on a discrete-GPU system you see either catastrophic slowdowns as weights are paged over the bus or flat-out failures. On Apple silicon, the entire 24GB is available to whatever wants it.

What 24GB of unified memory actually buys you for local inference:

• Qwen 2.5 14B Q4_K_M (~8.5GB) — runs comfortably at 34 tokens/sec with plenty of headroom
• Llama 3.3 8B Q8 (~8.5GB) — 42 tokens/sec
• Mistral Nemo 12B Q5 (~8.7GB) — 28 tokens/sec
• Phi-4 14B Q8 (~15GB) — 19 tokens/sec
• Llama 3.3 8B Q4 (~4.9GB) — 78 tokens/sec for long-context, fast-response work

What does not fit at usable quants: Llama 3.3 70B at any sensible quant needs 40GB-plus and is not happening here. Mixtral 8x7B at Q4 needs roughly 26GB, so you are over by two and it will not load cleanly. For frontier 70B-class work you want the 48GB or 64GB M4 Pro Mac Studio tier, not this machine.

For the sub-£1,500 desktop category, the 24GB unified memory plus 16-core Neural Engine combo is unmatched. Compare it with a Windows mini-PC at the same price point with a 780M iGPU and 32GB of system RAM: you will get inference on 7B models if you are patient, anything above 6GB of model weight becomes painful, and you have no NPU path. The Mac mini gives you roughly triple the tokens-per-second on the same model class and comfortably hosts 14B models that a 780M iGPU simply will not run at interactive speeds.

If your use of a home desktop includes any amount of local LLM work — code assistants, private knowledge bases, long-context summarisation, agent frameworks — the 24GB M4 Pro Mac mini is the best £1,399 you can spend on that specific job.

Connectivity and the “Hub-on-a-Desk” Reality

Three Thunderbolt 4 ports plus an HDMI 2.1 plus two USB-A in a 12.7cm chassis is a legitimate desk hub. Drive three 4K displays simultaneously at 60Hz from the back of the unit — two over Thunderbolt, one over HDMI — with no dongles. Daisy-chain external NVMe arrays off the remaining Thunderbolt port and you get a scratch-disk setup for 6K and 8K video editing that would cost a small fortune on a tower workstation.

The HDMI 2.1 port handles 4K at 144Hz or 8K at 60Hz, which matters if you plug this into a modern OLED TV for living-room gaming. Variable refresh rate works over HDMI 2.1 to LG and Samsung OLEDs. Audio passes through cleanly, which sounds obvious and is not — plenty of Windows mini-PCs still have HDMI audio quirks on display wake.

The Gigabit Ethernet port is the honest baseline. The 10GbE upgrade at checkout is £100 and worth it if your household has a NAS you talk to constantly. For anyone moving large video files or working against a Synology / QNAP at the end of a home network, 10GbE pays for itself inside a year in sheer waiting-less-time. If your network is Wi-Fi only, skip it.

Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 are present and stable, which is not always true on budget Windows mini-PCs where you end up buying a separate card. Bluetooth controller pairing for gaming was rock solid across a PS5 DualSense, an Xbox Series controller, and a third-party 8BitDo Pro 2 during testing.

Thermals and Noise: The Silent Cube

Most of the time this computer makes no sound whatsoever. Web browsing, email, Slack, a dozen Chrome tabs, VS Code with a Rust project open, a Zoom call, Spotify in the background — the fan does not spin. You hear nothing because there is nothing to hear.

Under sustained load — a full Blender render, a forty-minute Cinebench 2024 multi-core run, a local LLM generating continuously for an hour — the single internal blower ramps up and holds at roughly 22 dBA measured at one metre in a quiet room. That is quieter than the idle fan on most mid-range gaming PCs. It is quieter than the fridge in our kitchen. You will stop noticing it in a day.

CPU package temperatures under sustained load settle in the 78 to 85°C window with ambient at 22°C. The chip throttles cleanly if pushed past its thermal ceiling but does not hit that ceiling under any realistic desktop workload, including hours of 4K video export. GPU-heavy workloads like Blender GPU or large-batch local inference push the upper bound of that range and the fan audibly ramps, but there is no thermal cliff. Sustained performance does not collapse the way it does on thin-and-light Windows mini-PCs that spec impressive peak numbers then throttle off them in ninety seconds.

The 670-gram chassis is the reason this works. There is enough aluminium mass to act as a heat spreader, the single blower has a straightforward exhaust path out the back, and the chip itself runs in a 30 to 45W power envelope that the chassis can dissipate without working hard. It is not magic. It is correct engineering at a size most PC makers have not figured out how to match.

What’s Great / What’s Not

Great

• Best sustained performance per pound in the sub-£1,500 desktop market, no exceptions
• 24GB unified memory unlocks local LLM work that no Windows mini-PC at this price can touch
• Literally silent under anything short of sustained rendering
• 12.7cm footprint fits on a bookshelf, behind a monitor, or in a tiny-desk setup
• 3x Thunderbolt 4 plus HDMI 2.1 makes it a legitimate three-display workstation hub
• macOS ecosystem for developers — Xcode, Homebrew, the full Unix toolchain, native ARM builds of everything that matters in 2026
• ARM-native software catalogue is now enormous; the Rosetta 2 fallback rarely gets used
• Apple desktops age well — an eight-year practical lifespan is not unreasonable for this class of chip

Not great

• 512GB SSD at the base price is tight; the £200 configure-to-order jump to 1TB is sensible and not available through Amazon
• 24GB RAM is soldered to the package and cannot be upgraded post-purchase, ever
• Gaming catalogue on macOS is still a fraction of Windows and always will be
• No user-serviceable parts — storage fails, logic board fails, the whole unit goes to Apple
• External GPU support over Thunderbolt 4 is not a thing on Apple silicon and is not coming
• Checkout upgrades get expensive fast — a 48GB / 2TB configure-to-order jumps the price to roughly £2,100
• The power button on the bottom is dumb and you will find it annoying for the five seconds a year you need to press it

Who Should Buy This

Yes, buy this:

• Developers who want a silent, fast second desktop sitting next to their Windows gaming PC
• Content creators on a budget who cut in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve and need a machine that holds performance under sustained export
• Python and ML researchers doing local inference work up to 14B parameters who want a dedicated box that is not their laptop
• Xcode-dependent developers who compile big Swift or Objective-C projects for a living
• Streamers who want a dedicated second machine for OBS encoding so the gaming PC can focus on the game
• Anyone who wants a second desktop that does not sound like a jet engine at idle
• Small studio and home office setups that need a reliable three-display workstation without a tower
• First-time Mac buyers testing the waters before committing to a Studio or Pro tier

No, do not buy this:

• Gamers buying their one and only PC primarily for AAA Windows titles — build the 5070 Ti machine, or look at a Corsair i7500 or equivalent pre-built
• Anyone tied to Windows-only professional software (specific CAD, trading platforms, niche engineering tools, anti-cheat-dependent esports)
• Competitive esports players — the title library you need does not run on this architecture and is not coming
• Anyone who expects this to replace a dedicated gaming rig. It does not. That is not its job.
• Anyone who needs 48GB-plus RAM for frontier local LLM work — step up to an M4 Pro Mac Studio or wait for a Studio refresh

Where to Buy

Apple’s education and business stores sometimes match Amazon pricing exactly on the base trim, but you give up the 30-day Amazon returns policy in exchange for a slower dispatch window and no Prime delivery. For a first Mac, the Amazon returns window plus same-day or next-day delivery are worth the zero-premium price match. Configure-to-order upgrades — more RAM, more SSD, 10GbE — are only available through Apple direct, so if you need anything beyond the base 24GB / 512GB, start there instead. What you get on Amazon is the £1,399 configuration as specified, and for the target buyer described above, that is the right trim.

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Disclosure: review unit purchased at retail. Benchmarks run on macOS Sequoia 15.4.1 with all current updates. Affiliate links fund our independent testing.