Mac Mini vs Studio

The M4 Max Mac Studio will give you a few more ports than the M4 Pro Mac mini would:

• One extra rear-panel USB-C (Thunderbolt 5) port – for a total of four
• Two extra rear-panel USB-A ports
• A front-panel SDXC (UHS-II) card slot
• An upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. (Note: The upgraded port is only compatible with 1 Gigabit speeds & above.)

You'll get some extra CPU cores, but I'm mot sure you'll notice them. You'll get more video encoding and decoding engines, but that wouldn't matter for still photography work.

You'll get a lot of extra GPU cores, and support for a ton of displays. (The Mac mini can drive three; the Mac Studio can drive five.). Whether the extra GPU cores will matter for your work will likely depend on your workload and upon whether you run a lot of filters that lean heavily on the GPU.

It almost sounds like you're making the decision based on ports and on number of GPU cores – 16 cores for $2199, 20 cores for $2399, 40 cores for $2899.

FWIW I traded in my Mac Studio for the new Mac Mini M4 Pro and found it ran better than my Studio at less cost and smaller footprint. You can see reviews on Youtube where they have compared units and usually conclude the Mini M4 Pro is the better buy. Also not sure you would need 64GB of Ram but you will have to decide that for the programs you use.

Servant of Cats wrote:

• An upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. (Note: The upgraded port is only compatible with 1 Gigabit speeds & above.)

FWIW, Mac mini M4 2025 has a 10 GbE option available, too.