Marko Zivkovic
MacStadium now offers multiple configurations of Apple's latest Mac mini, with the M4 and M4 Pro chip. Here's what that means and why it matters.
MacStadium is a company that offers cloud-based infrastructure using Macs and on-demand virtual machines of macOS for developers and engineers. The company previously enabled the use of the M2 Mac Mini, and how it has introduced support machines with the latest Apple Silicon chips.
Shortly after the announcement of the redesigned Mac mini in October 2024, MacStadium revealed that it would make the new machine available through the cloud and that multiple configurations would be at users' disposal.
The company offers four different configurations for the New Mac mini, ranging from the base model M4 variant, with 256 GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM, up to the M4 Pro, with 64GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD.
MacStadium has labeled the available Mac mini configurations as follows:
- M4.S — M4 chip with 10 Core CPU, 10 Core GPU, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 1 GB Ethernet
- M4.M — M4 chip with 10 Core CPU, 10 Core GPU, 24 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, 10 GB Ethernet
- M4.L — M4 Pro chip with 12 Core CPU, 16 Core GPU, 48GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 10 GB Ethernet
- M4.XL — M4 Pro chip with 14 Core CPU, 20 Core GPU, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 10 GB Ethernet
According to the company's website, MacStadium will have the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro available in its data centers for easy access to cloud development. The company's new data centers were featured in Apple's announcement video for the redesigned Mac Mini.
Though MacStadium has called the Mac mini with the M4 chip "the most major update to the Mac Mini in its entire history," its initial rack designs will maintain the same density as previous versions. There is hope for improvements down the line, though, as the company becomes familiar with the new form factor of the redesigned Mac mini.
The new Mac mini offers significant performance improvements relative to older models with the M2 chip
MacStadium considers the new Mac Mini an excellent machine for hosted computing on a larger scale and says that the new form factor unlocks greater potential. Relative to the previous model, the new-and-improved Mac mini offers significant performance improvements, which will still be noticeable even if the machine is used in the cloud.
In general, the base M4 chip offers an increase in performance from 30-50% compared to the standard M2 chip, though the percentage will vary depending on the task at hand. Xcode build times on the M4 are substantially lower compared to the M2 chip, while general compute performance is close to the high-end M2 Pro chip.
The 12-core M4 Pro chip also delivers better performance relative to its predecessor, with scores comparable to the M1 Ultra in most situations. It even comes close to the M2 Ultra in other instances, according to tests and benchmarks conducted by MacStadium.
AppleInsider highlighted many of the design aspects and its performance improvements in our dedicated review of the Mac mini with the M4 chip. We also have a review of the variant with the more powerful M4 Pro chip.
As a whole, the revamped Mac mini packs a serious punch in a remarkably small form factor. This makes it a viable option in the area of cloud computing, with MacStadium making it available to engineers and developers worldwide.
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5 Comments
Wouldn’t this be one of the worst ways to mount a bunch of M4 Mac minis? The new mini air intake is on the front part of the bottom circle and exhausts hot air through the back of the bottom circle, blowing hot air directly into the next Mac mini. Making the Mac minis on the left side intake up to 3x heated air…
Well, look at that! All those power buttons in optimal and accessible positions. 😂
haters gonna hate…
Honest question. What sort of work flows would one do with cloud based virtual macOS? I run cloud based server VMs but they’re not particularly graphic UI intensive and most server based processes don’t need macOS.