Now the compact Mac meets a spectacular price: The Apple M4 Mac Mini is now off from $599 to bring it to a lowly $479. That’s a flat 20 percent savings on Apple’s latest desktop, and it ties the season’s lowest widely tracked total for this model.
If you have been holding out to dive into Apple silicon without paying laptop prices, this is the time. Lowest price point Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch, eight gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes SSD (base configuration). Street price: $1,299; deal price: $1,200. The base model at this price is the simplest entry point into a modern Mac setup, and after selling out before we could blink last time around it’s currently discounted again in waves — so stock availability will vary.
Why This Discount Is So Notable For Mac Mini Buyers
That’s a pretty outrageous discount for a Mac desktop at this period following release. In the past, most current‑generation Macs usually have just single-digit markdowns, often much smaller when not during a major sale. Price‑tracking firms and deal communities have identified $479 as the low-water mark for peak shopping periods, but re‑emerging there now is rare — and enticing — because it undercuts many refurbished prices of older chips.
Against regular SFF PCs, you are of course also changing the value calculus when it comes to software longevity (obviously more open too). It’s also worth noting that independent teardowns and reliability trackers routinely point out the longevity of Apple’s desktops in terms of receiving macOS updates; a cheap bottom-of-the-range machine today will see even more years without being rendered obsolete by chronically short-lived promotional SKUs like those found with most Windows mini PCs at this price.
What The M4 Mac Mini Brings To The Table
The M4 chip is Apple’s second‑generation 3‑nanometer architecture, featuring a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU in its standard configuration, along with an on-device AI workload targeting the Neural Engine rated at 38 TOPS. With cross‑reference (Geekbench 6 submissions for M4 systems and lab reviews of M4‑equipped devices), single-core scores frequently fall somewhere between the mid and upper 3,000s, a major leap beyond M2’s mid‑2,000s; multi-core improvements in the range of 30–45% are common in real-world app builds, photo exports, and code compilation. And that uplift bears out Apple’s performance framing here, even within early M4 coverage: it’s been parroted by reviewers at outlets like AnandTech and The Verge.
Port selection is practical and desk‑friendly: you get high‑speed Thunderbolt 4 for the latest peripherals and displays, HDMI for direct TV or monitor connections, USB‑A for your legacy gear, Gigabit (or optional 10Gb) Ethernet for wired reliability, as well as a headphone jack. Look for solid dual‑display support and silent operation under most loads — one of the Mini’s calling cards since the M‑series showed up.
The other silent victory is efficiency. Apple’s silicon style is usually to sip around single‑digit watts at idle, yet still remain peppy even under bursty load; that’s why creative pros frequently park a Mini in a studio rack as a dedicated render node, or have it serve headless duty as a media server. Analysis from IDC on the PC market in April suggests that teams are making more considered trade-offs between power, energy use and cost again — the M4 Mini falls firmly into the center of those considerations.
Who This M4 Mac Mini Deal Is Really Best For Today
The biggest winners are students, developers, home‑studio creators: Xcode builds, Lightroom catalogs and multi‑app workflows feel palpably faster coming from an Intel Mac or from an M1 Mac. If you’re on an M2 Mini and performance isn’t holding you back, the upgrade is nice, not essential — unless you have a hankering for the beefier Neural Engine to tackle local AI tasks or that additional GPU headroom for 3D and video timelines.
For first‑time Mini owners — remember that you can’t upgrade your unified memory and storage, so choose wisely. The $479 configuration with 8GB of memory is for light to moderate productivity, coding and some creative work; heavier projects (large Logic sessions, high‑resolution or long 4K timelines, big ML models) are friendlier to at least 16GB of RAM. In terms of storage, many users — to save money — use the base drive and a fast external NVMe SSD over Thunderbolt.
Important Advice To Consider Before You Buy This Mini
Noteworthy, though: Find out who’s actually offering the $479 price, and whether it comes attached to a particular color or configuration.
Review return windows and ponder AppleCare if the Mini is to be mission‑critical hardware. (If you want more ports, a Thunderbolt dock can take the place of a thicket of adapters and leave some space in the bag when you travel; if you are doing creative work, a color‑accurate monitor will do more for you than a CPU bump alone.)
If you’re debating and holding off, yes, older M2 Minis sometimes go lower on clearance, however the CPU+GPU+AI acceleration gains of the M4 and a longer software support horizon make $479 the smarter long‑term buy.
Once that deal ends, the price generally bounces back up to $599, so right now is probably as good as it gets for a brand‑new Mac.
Bottom line: This M4 Mac Mini is easily one of the sweetest deals around, mixing solid desktop value with performance and lifespan, here in the form of years of updates. If a tiny, silent, and seriously fast Mac is right for you, now’s the time to take the plunge.
