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Can someone please help me out with this? I'm torn between Mac mini and and MacBook Pro, specifically the CPU spec difference.

MBP: Apple M4 Max chip with 16‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine

Mac mini: Apple M4 Pro chip with 14‑core CPU, 20‑core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

What kind of workload would make me regret not having bought MBP over Mac mini given the above. Thanks!



Doesn't it make a bigger difference that one of them is a laptop and one of them is a mini computer that you have to leave plugged in?


Since the only real difference is number of GPUs, it'd be:

- photo/video editing

- games, or

- AI (training / inference)

that would benefit from the extra GPUs.


^3D work - Maya, Blender, etc. Probably would be best on a Studio or workstation if/when those are available again.


The Max also has much more memory bandwidth. Especially for running local LLMs, that is the limiting factor much more than the number of GPU cores is.


For normal web dev, any M4 CPU is good as it is mostly dependent on single core speed. If you need to compile Unreal Engine (C++ with lots of threads), video processing or 3D rendering, more cores is important.

I think you need to pick the form factor that you need combined with the use case:

- Mobility and fast single core speeds: MacBook Air

- Mobility and multi-core: MacBook Pro with M4 Max

- Desktop with lots of cores: Mac Studio

- Desktop for single core: Mac mini

I really enjoy my MacBook Air M3 24GB for desktop + mobile use for webdev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41988340




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