If your Mac mini M4 acts up or lags for whatever reason, then that’s what the (software) restart option in the top-left Apple menu is for. Unless your computer completely freezes—and this shouldn’t occur routinely on M4 Macs—you won’t need to push the bottom button.

To be fair, both of those other computers have significantly more memory bandwidth than the Mac Mini, and both have better GPU performance. If maxing out as many GPU cores as possible is important to you, you’re probably better off with an M4 Max, which means either a MacBook Pro or waiting for an updated Mac Studio.

Apple provided me with two very different Mac Mini units. This first review is focused on the standard M4 model, which includes a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and the default 16GB of memory. My machine has 512GB of storage,