Which m4 Mac mini to buy for photo and some video editing

Please click Mac - Which Mac is best for me? - Apple

My recommendation would be 24GB or RAM and a 2 TB of storage. Yes it’s more expensive however based on what your needs state that’s what I’d get. I don’t see a need for the Mac Studio though.

For your stated purposes the M4 mini 32GB/1TB SSD will be perfectly fine. IMHO the M4Pro would be overkill at a high price. Take a deep dive on the differences in specs between those models and you will find only some incremental difference in M4Pro CPU/GPU cores and memory speed (imho largely irrelevant for your uses) but more importantly the M4Pro supports Thunderbolt 5 & DisplayPort 2.1 ... if you don't need them, you don't need the M4Pro model. And if you need more storage, it's much less expensive to get a good external drive than investing in a larger internal SSD.

Back to the basic decision ... for editing Z8 RAW files (even with Photoshop) and doing some basic video editing with iMovie (or even Final Cut) the M4/32GB/1GB will be fine.

The Studio models? Hard to justify at all in this situation.

If your iMac could do the job all you need is the cheapest £599 M4 mini as it performs 3 times faster than your old iMac. I know because I have both computers.

Regarding storage steer clear of anything Apple sells.

I have just bought a 2TB SanDisk NVMe with a USB-C enclosure for £101 . . . Apple would charge £800.

OK it's not as fast as the Apple SSD but that has no effect whatsoever on normal film or photo use. The only time you will notice any difference is when copying massive (50GB plus) files which will obviously take a bit longer.

Another important advantage of having a plugin SSD is that you have more flexibility to use it with different computers and should you ever sell your M4 or if it broke down you still have all your media and the SSD safe.

Given enough RAM, single-core CPU speed is going to be very similar between

• A M4 Mac mini
• A M4 Pro Mac mini
• A M4 Max Mac Studio

The higher-end chips will give you stronger GPUs – which might matter if you were playing high-end games (e.g., running the X-Plane 12 flight simulator with detail settings cranked up) or doing certain other types of work. The higher-end chips will also give you better CPU performance for long CPU-bound batch jobs that can make good use of all CPU cores.

But the plain M4 is good enough that for many things, if you have enough RAM, the decision may depend mainly upon expansion ports and support for multiple displays. There, too, a Mac mini with a plain M4 chip offers some definite upgrades over ones with plain M1 and plain M2 chips.

If you feel the storage cost is high then use an external TB drive. I have the Mini M4 pro and I off load large files to a TB5 drive (which is faster than the internal) so I only need a 512GB internal drive.

The first M4 Mac mini in the Apple Refurbished store as of this post date that has a 1 TB drive and 32 GB RAM is listed for $1189. Less expensive versions of the M4 mini may offer 24 GB of RAM (typically 16 GB) and smaller storage.

The applications that you will be using to open and edit those Z8 NEF images and videos will determine the base and recommended RAM requirements, and inherently, that will drive your configuration decision and cost. Then you need to consider the additional cost of a display additional to the mini purchase.

I happen to be using an M4 Mac Mini Pro with 64 GB and a 1 TB internal storage, but that RAM configuration would likely be overkill for your stated usage.