Which Apple Mac M4 to buy for Software Development?
Hello, I wanted to tell you which Mac I would choose from the new range of computers that came out on the market, that is, from the update they made to the M4 chip that they presented a week ago, the date on which I recorded this video, so basically the computers that they renewed would be the Mac mini, which is the one we have here, the laptops only the pro, better said, which also renewed the M4, the iMac and also the Air, I am going to take it into consideration here, although it seems to me that they will not renew it and they are waiting for it to be renewed, so here the first thing I am going to take into consideration is the price, it is also important that I clarify that I am going to give you are only my perspectives, that is, what considerations I would take to select one of these computers and remember that my profile is that of a developer, so once that is clarified.
I hope that my points of view are useful to you, well, in case you adapt it to your needs, let's get started.
Discarding Macs
Here to rule out then let's remember here the main thing for me and I think for everyone is the price factor, that is to say we want to spend the least and have the maximum possible performance or the maximum possible profits, therefore I would rule out the lactos, either the pro or the Air, which have not even been renewed to date, therefore I again want to go for the latest model and note that for example this one costs about 1300 here, by the way, it is the Amazon of the United States, in Spain it would be a little more expensive, this would be 1400 in summary. This is good. This is the previous version, I am not going to take it into consideration, I am again going for the latest chits and this would be from 1700, I think there was one also at 1300 and the Mac mini by default would cost about 579, we are talking about the same chit that would be the M4, that is to say, it is not the M4 Pro or anything like that, therefore there is a difference of about 700 800, so unless you really need a laptop to do this type of work an Apple lapop By the way, I have one with the Mac mini because again in terms of power we are having the same power, even more, since laptop gadgets always have less performance for a much lower price. If you wanted a laptop, I would.
Laptop Windows + Mac Mini
On the one hand I would buy the MC Mini and on the other hand a laptop, for example a Windows type. It's a pity that at the time I'm recording this video the price is no longer listed because I think this equipment is out of stock. I have this one, currently they are selling it on sale for about 850:
ASUS TUF Gaming FX607JV-N3149 https://amzn.to/3YJ8qiF
So again with the price difference which is precisely around 800 going for example for this computer or directly for the iMac it is enough for me to buy the Mac Mini and also a laptop there was a MacC on Amazon Spain that cost around 1000 it had a third generation i7 it had a 17 inch screen and for the rest it was similar to this one and it was a little more expensive that one could also be a candidate there but again I would go for this one I have this computer and it works perfectly and I don't have any problems.
So you would be gaining two computers instead of one so again unless necessary
Monitor + Mac Mini Better than iMac
Unless you require an Apple laptop I would go for one of the options I just mentioned and the same with the iMac. Instead of buying an iMac, if you don't have a monitor, keyboard and mouse, for example, I would prefer to buy the Mac Mini and buy a monitor that I can use with other types of devices, for example if I have a laptop and I want to connect it to the monitor, I can't with the iMac as far as I understand, whereas if you buy a generic monitor you could do it perfectly, apart from the fact that the Apple keyboard and mouse seem to me to be one of the few things that I find horrible about Apple, I prefer something more ergonomic and therefore I would not go for an Apple keyboard and mouse either. So I would prefer to buy it separately, so that's all cleared up, I would go for the combination that I just mentioned, Mac mini and a Laptop with Windows.
Evaluating the Mac Mini
So let's go in here and see which one we can select again my profile is developer what is the first problem that I see here precisely the storage which is something that they have criticized quite a bit with 256 you can really start to suffer a little I'm going to show you mine I have in this case is a Mac mini pro with 16d RAM and the package that came was with 512 look at the storage that I already have here currently that is to say if I had used the 256 GB which was precisely the Mac M2 since the pro was from 512 already by here the operating system would have already collapsed since I am occupying half and what do I have installed as I tell you all my development environment that I have my docker that I have my my note that I have the entire php environment I have my visual studio code my browsers and so on but apart from this I am also using I am also developing what is the video game part therefore I also have a real here installed and this I have to install it directly on the hard drive of the mac that is to say where you have the operating system installed apart from this I also have scod because I also develop a flurer and therefore with only these programs I have nothing else since I do not store local files on this hard drive for that I have all the volumes I have a hard drive here apart where I store all my files I am very limited as I told you in this case you have to compare it if you are not interested in developing for example in scout or you do not want to develop directly in programs like UnReal or Blender that are going to consume a little bit of hard drive it may be useful for you but again I see it very limited really for the next few years I see it very limited then.
Mac Mini M4 https://amzn.to/3UN8Bbt
Recommendation, increase the Ram and Disk of the base model but almost double its initial value
The good news is that you could select one for 512 and notice that it increases by $200 since here it has an offer applied here which is well quite horrible and suppose that you also want to increase the RAM a little since 16 is now the base I suppose that they also raised the base it is good because over the years now the programs are consuming little by little more RAM and especially because of what is the Apple intelligence therefore being 16 the base and it is a new computer that I am going to buy for the next few years I would also if it were possible I would put a little more ram and with this we would have the figure that they are now on offer of $999 which was the price without offer only that I don't know what happened here but at least yesterday I had placed that and it was the price of $999 Although 20 $ more $ less for this computer the same So now you can see here is a little how Apple works Remember that we are starting from a base price of 579 and by simply increasing it by A little bit of RAM and a little bit of hard drive, so at this point we could compare it with the other chip.
Mac Mini M4 Pro the best choice
Here we have the M4 Pro that I have here open, it seems to me that it comes out at the figure of $1369, that is, more than double what we had initially, which was $579, but but but here the advantages that we also have is that it already gives us:
24 GB of RAM and also 512 GB of storage, which you can see here, no, the price would be 972, therefore for a difference of around $400 a little less by selecting this model we also have an improvement in what is the processing, I am not going to start talking about the performance that each processor will have. For that there are multiple videos on YouTube, it is not my strong point, and there are people who do it and really, again, it is not my objective, my objective is to tell you which Mac I would select based on the requirements that you have just specified, so here again we have the same 24 and 512 and we also have an improvement in CPU, it seems to improve it a little, and also the cores, which I think double this.
Again you can check it on other YouTube channels compare the M4 versus the M4 pro and almost all the performance at the cpu level are the same it has I think a 20% difference in multicore but the one that improves brutally is the gpo in which it seems to me that it even doubles it or has at least 80% more performance than the base computer that we have here that again by simply changing the ram and the hard drive we have the same cpu So for example for me that again my profile is a software developer and apart from this I am also getting into the 3D development part, understood with Blender, understood with a real one, understood also that the flurer part when we raise the emulators and everything else this also helps a little, they are considerations that we have to keep in mind therefore having a better gpu we are also going to have a better performance in the programs that I just mentioned apart from this also remember that if you want to get a little bit into Gaming Although here on Mac we have fewer options having a better gpu this will also help you a lot in running these games therefore.
Summary
Making a brief summary for this price you can have a machine to develop whatever you want also to use any type of program such as graphic design, video editing, gaming, video game development, etc. with much better performance than the base model apart from these improvements if you use the Pro option you have, excuse the redundancy, other improvements such as thunderball 5 if I remember correctly therefore you have a higher transfer speed and you also have one less limitation on the memory width that it can handle since the base model has less memory width than the Pro model I really don't have the figure here in this table according to the people at sakata it is 120 GB per second for the base model, that is, the M4 but I don't remember if this was really the Pro or This was the base one but what I do remember is that the Pro is larger therefore there you also have an improvement I think it doubles it also remember that the memory width of the 120 GB per second is at the operating system level and not the application level and it is in a few words the width of a memory is nothing more than the maximum data transfer capacity of the memory that the memory supports to perform read and write accesses, that is, when it communicates with, for example, the processor. Remember that this is at the operating system level, therefore, the wider this width is, the redundancy should have better performance, although this also depends a lot on the ecosystem that you have, therefore here you can see a little bit of the comparison that this is really a much simpler model and is not designed for such complex operations, although it will really be able to develop it, but what I mean is that the Pro model will have better performance in everything that refers to or has to do with graphics as I mentioned above, video games, videos, photo design, gaming, etc. Therefore, based on the criteria that I just mentioned, this is the model that I would choose:
- Mac Mini M4 Pro https://amzn.to/40Z42z1
- Amazon EEUU Mac Mini M4 Pro - https://www.amazon.com/-/es/dp/B0DLBVHSLD/&tag=acy29-21?th=1
- Andrés Cruz
Develop with Laravel, Django, Flask, CodeIgniter, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, JavaScript, Vue, Android, iOS, Flutter