Apple M4

Well, hey, what the heck? I'll keep rolling with the 10 best pieces of tech we bought.

So number two, I put down the M4 Mac Mini.

That is possibly the single best deal in computing of the past 10 years, was the M4 Mac Mini.

Arguments can be made for some other things, but I just...

It's a it's a good computer and I do love it dearly.

It's so efficient.

It's great.

So, yeah, I think M4 Mac Mini, absolutely no regrets on that one.

That and faster connectivity, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, along with available 2.5 gigabit Ethernet plus storage that's up to two times faster.

Offering real-world performance examples, Apple iMac with M6 enables up to 2.5x faster performance in apps like Microsoft Excel compared to iMac with M1 and up to 1.5x faster performance than M4.

Up to 3.3x faster graphics performance compared to iMac with M1 and up to 2x faster performance than the M4.

Up to 12 times faster on-device AI performance for prompt processing in LM Studio compared to iMac with M1, and up to 5 times faster performance than M4, and up to 2 times higher gaming performance with ray tracing compared to M4.

Also, again, you Intel people, time to get with it.

Apple says those upgraders get up to 18 times faster performance than the most popular Intel-based iMac.

So who needs to upgrade? Well, obviously those schlubs with M1 or Intel.

Gross.

What

was the old iMac chip? Was it M4? M4.

Yeah, M4.

Yeah.

Okay.

But yeah, if you had like a powerful system at home and you wanted to use it for your code harnesses that are running on a laptop or something else, you could just add it and access it over the network.

Interesting.

If I just have, like, I have an M4 MacBook Pro, I think, will that run a model? And will the model that it can run, is it capable of doing anything yet? Or are we waiting for, like, the next generation? Oh, you got excited.

You can run it right

now.

So that's another thing that we need to consider.

one question is how does this compare to let's say Apple Silicon M4, M5 Max that would be a good question to ask

Because in the end of the day, it's whether or not, again, we always say this, but it's true, it's the ecosystem, number one.

Number two is the type of agents that you want to use.

On Geekbench 6, the MacBook Neo scores about 3541 single core and 8958 multi-core.

That beats the M1 MacBook Air on both counts, and the single core number is close to the M4 MacBook Air, which scores about 3680.

Multi-core is a different story, two performance cores are no match for the M4, S4, and the M4 Air Lands around 14,900.

But for the browsing, documents, video calls and light creative work that most laptops actually do, a phone chip from 2024 is simply enough.

Apple claims the Neo is up to 50% faster at web browsing and up to 3x faster at on-device AI than Windows laptops built on Intel's Core Ultra 5.

Intel answered in 2021 with Alder Lake, which brought the phone's big, little idea to x86, fast performance cores and frugal efficiency cores on one die.

That idea has shaped every Intel laptop ship since, up to Panther Lake's three tiers of cores in the 2026 Google Books.

By 2024, Apple's M4, built on second-generation 3nm with 28 billion transistors, shipped as the same die in both the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air, differing only in how many cores each model enables.

And more recently, I did get an M6 Mac mini to upgrade my M2 model.

And I was running some tests, and I was doing, like, all the models and everything, and I was looking at the differences between the M6 and the M4 Pro, which is my MacBook Pro from a couple years ago.

And the interesting thing I was seeing is that across the different models, there were different uplifts in performance.

So...

So they will max out a single CPU core, typically whatever your fastest core in that device is, but they don't scale with more cores.

This is why you got Marco Arment earlier this year.

where he was building up his M4 Mac Mini army to transcribe Overcast episodes, why he was seeing that, like, the M4 or the M4 Pro models, like, they basically did the exact same job, so just get the M4.

And, yeah, 100%.