M4 chip on ipad vs mac mini vs macbook.

As we are your fellow end users and not Apple, we cannot officially confirm anything. Like Servant of Cats, I feel it is hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison of any iPad to any Mac computer. You can look at some benchmarks by downloading the free MacTracker database app from the Mac App Store.

HOWEVER, I feel benchmarking across major product classes is akin to comparing fuel usage per mile between a horse and an sports car. Benchmark numbers in MacTracker show only a couple of percent difference between the fastest current iPad Pro, Mac Mini M4 Pro, and M4 Max Macbook Pro:

In fact, the scores are so close that it makes me question how effective GeekBench can be for testing Apple Silicon processors.

If there is going be a difference, I suspect it is in heat management. Gaming devices get HOT and, based on owning iPads and Macbook Pros, and studying the cooling system of the current M4 Mini, I say the Mini should better handle cooling tasks.

Here are the Geekbench Metal scores. Metal is a graphics API that serves a similar purpose to Microsoft's DirectX. So the Metal scores give us a better idea of the capabilities of the respective GPUs.

To round things out, here are the multi-core CPU scores. The Pro and Max processors can chew through a heavy CPU-bound job faster than the plain one – if that job can make effective use of all of the cores.

Operating System

Macs and iPads have different operating systems. You cannot run Mac games on an iPad. You can run some iPad games on an Apple Silicon Mac, but it's possible that the user interface might not translate well.

Hardware Resources

You can get both iPads and Macs based on plain M4 chips. But there are Macs based on higher-end M4 Pro and Max chips. The M4 has up to 10 GPU cores. The M4 Pro has up to 20. The M4 Max has up to 40.

Power and Cooling

Something like a 14"/16" MacBook Pro, or a Mac Studio, is obviously going to have advantage over an iPad here.

Allan Jones wrote:

Benchmark numbers in MacTracker show only a couple of percent difference between the fastest current iPad Pro, Mac Mini M4 Pro, and M4 Max Macbook Pro:

…

In fact, the scores are so close that it makes me question how effective GeekBench can be for testing Apple Silicon processors.

Those are single-core CPU benchmark results. The results there will be very similar between all of the levels of processors, because for a particular Apple Silicon generation, plain, Pro, and Max processors all share the same basic performance CPU core, and efficiency CPU core, designs.

If you are shopping for a Mac for general-purpose use, this is good news. Given enough RAM, a Mac that has a plain M4 chip may – for a lot of everyday productivity and light gaming uses – have performance that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a Mac with a M4 Pro or M4 Max chip.

What the higher-end chips bring to the table is more of various types of hardware units: CPU cores, GPU cores, display generators, etc. So you'll see multi-core CPU scores jump when you go from a plain M4 to a M4 Pro or Max – something that may be of interest to people who run long batch jobs that can make good use of all cores. Much general-purpose use depends more on single-core performance, or stresses the CPU so little that even a plain M-series chip will complete jobs "instantaneously", given sufficient RAM.

You also get stronger GPUs with the higher-level chips. But the Geekbench CPU scores don't reflect that.