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apple m1 vs m4
hey guys,
iam going to get a used mac mini for music production, 16gb ram 1tb ssd.
the m4 cost me about 200€ more than the m1 version from 2020.
someone compared both and is it worth going for the m4?
cheers
Comments
I would go for the base model m4 with external ssd for storage.
I have no experience with the. M1. I jumped from an intel based 2017 MacBook to a 2025 M4 MacBook and the performance difference was, well, staggering.
Spend the extra 200€. If you don’t, you’ll always be second guessing yourself.
extrnal ssd is a no-go, its a bottle neck even if its a ssd.
i want that 1tb internal ssd and that jump from a 256gb to 1tb is where apple is criminal.
thanks mate, will do
I have a MacBook Air M1 and a Mac Mini M1. Both with 8Gb ram. I’ve never had to do a track freeze on any project.
They are beasts.
I have an M1 Macbook Air and feel no need to upgrade for my needs, but the tech YouTubers who've said "wait" on the M2 and M3 seem to be saying the M4 is a big enough jump to upgrade.
My M1 Mini 16gb freezes up when I use some VST’s in Live (Spacecraft, Fors Tela), but generally it’s been ok.
My upgrade to an M4 Pro MBP on the other hand has been a revelation, a total beast that handles everything I throw at it.
My recommendation would be to future proof your setup and go for the M4, particularly if you run a lot of external apps and VST’s in MIDI tracks, plus Mac OS updates usually slow things down - for an extra £200 it’d be a no-brainier for me.
USBC SSD’s are fine for external storage - I put all my sample and sound libraries (e.g. Native Instruments) on them. On the new Mac I’m even using a cheap thumb drive for external libraries, as it’s more compact.
I’ll probably upgrade the Mini desktop to the M4 next year, it’s an incredible deal.
Never had any freezes using Spacecraft etc… but do agree, buy the most powerful system you can afford.
Might have been the v2 beta, I’ll check next time I’m on it. I tend to be laptop based these days though, so haven’t used it for a while.
Yeah, my computer buying philosophy is buy the biggest, most recent, fastest machine you can afford at the time you are purchasing. A couple hundred $/€ is worth spending if you can afford it.
It will not be the biggest, fastest machine in 6 months. It will also be less expensive. Thats life.
I usually find RAM is the bottleneck - so I try and go one-up from the base configuration. I was using a 2012 MacBook Pro up until this year, that I’d manually added an extra 4gb to, and my 16gb Intel is still going strong while the base 8gb’s are struggling. I went for the 16gb Mini, and now the M4 Pro 24gb MBP.
Just seems that extra couple of hundred quid gets you a few more years usage.
M4, definitely. Either way though, 16GB/1TB is a good decision. Keep in mind though that external SSDs are not as slow as you might think, compared to internal ones. Really, the difference isn’t quite what some might claim.
And if you’re anything like me, you’ll need more than 1TB, pretty damn soon if not immediately.
I fully support that. I have an external SSD on my Mini M4 and it runs even faster than the internal SSD (Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 2 TB). The external runs in an 40Gbps M.2 NVMe SSD housing, ANYOYO.
Total cost around 230€. Thats very fair compared to the apple upgrade pricing.
Hard to imagine the music app that needs more than what you can get with an NVME SSD attached via Thunderbolt. If you're doing heavy-duty video editing then maybe.
Yeah, unless you're running some extreme volume transactional database system there ain't no way disk is going to be a bottleneck these days.
$200 for probably at least four more years of usable life doesn't sound like a lot to me.
You can apparently upgrade the m4 mini drive yourself. There’s a bunch of videos on this, so gets the first that came up in a search:
I hear the m4 minis are a screaming machine, even in the base configuration. I have an m1 mbp and when I get a full session going, almost always just audio tracks, only once in a while with a virtual instrument, and then put console 1 on every channel, I do get some playback stops if I begin playback on a dense section, but generally my m1 is doing what I need. At some point I’d like to get a new mini or studio. Since most of my work recently has been in live sound and not studio mixing though, I can’t upgrade right now.