Which M4 Mac Is Best for Video Editing
Is the new M4 Mac Mini suitable for video editing? Is it a better buy than the M4 MacBook Pro?
As a professional video editor, I’ll be sharing answers to these and other questions as I decide whether to update to an:
- M4 Pro Mac Mini
- M4 Max Macbook Pro
- or hold out for the M4 Ultra Mac Studio.
If you’re in the same boat, read on.
These Questions Will Be Answered
Keep reading for the complete answers but here they are in a nutshell:
- Which M4 Mac should I get for video editing?
- That depends – keep reading
- Is the base model M4 Mac Mini good enough for video editing?
- Yes certainly, it’s fantastic value.
- Which M4 Mac Mini configuration is best for video editing?
- Pro chip, Thunderbolt 5, 1TB SSD, 48-64 GB RAM
- Which M4 MacBook Pro is best for video editing?
- 16″ screen size, M4 Max, 48-64 GB RAM, Thunderbolt 5, 1TB SSD
- What M4 MacBook Pro upgrades are worth it?
- More RAM but this requires the top M4 Max chip.
- Should I wait for the M4 Ultra Mac Studio?
- It’s not that far off, if you have the money and want the performance
What I want to buy and why
I mostly use two devices: a desktop and a laptop. I need the mobility of the laptop, but I spend a lot of time in my home edit suite, which used to be run by my spec’ d-out 2013 Mac Pro—until it died, and now my 2017 MacBook Pro holds down the fort.
So I’m considering both the M4 Pro Mac Mini and the 16″ M4 Max MacBook Pro.
I’ve detailed my ‘buying philosophy’ in the next section, but I’m looking for future-proofed performance that’s actually good value.
Given that, here’s how I’d configure either single purchase:
M4 Pro Mac Mini
- Apple M4 Pro chip with 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- 64GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- 10 Gigabit Ethernet
- Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI port, two USB-C ports, headphone jack
- Cost: $2,499.
M4 Max 16″ MacBook Pro
- 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display (Standard display)
- Apple M4 Max chip with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine
- 64GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- 140W USB-C Power Adapter
- Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, headphone jack, MagSafe 3 port
- Cost $4,199.
Note: You can only buy certain custom configurations like mine directly from Apple, but Amazon has a selection of options that are sometimes discounted by a small amount.
Read on to see which one I will choose and why I’m (probably) not waiting for the M4 Mac Studio.
The Best Price to Performance Configuration?
If you want to make my recommendations more affordable drop to 24GB RAM (-$600) on the Mac Mini and remove the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (-$100). Drop to 36 GB RAM (-$400) and lower M4 Max chip spec ($-300) on the MacBook Pro.
In that case, this MacBook Pro configuration may be the best value option: M4 Max, 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU: 36GB RAM, 1TB SSD at $3499.
This doesn’t future-proof you as much in terms of RAM and CPU but it does save you money.
To save even more money, the 16″ M4 Pro 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU with 24 GB RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage is $2,699, which is undoubtedly an incredibly good value editing machine.
For almost $1000 less the identical spec Mac Mini is just $1,799.
But know this.
Even if you bought the absolute cheapest M4 Mac Mini for $599 you could still edit video on it beautifully. I am editing video effectively on a 7-year-old laptop.
To go from an i7 to an M4 will feel monumental.
£/$ – I’ve listed all of the prices in dollars as Apple charges the same in pounds, despite the currency conversion difference!
The Best Way to Buy a Mac
You might think about all this quite differently to me, but here’s how I think about spending thousands of pounds on hardware that is critical to my business as a freelance film editor.
My Purchasing Philosophy
When buying any new hardware I generally have the same approach: Buy the best I can and keep it for as long as I can. I will pay more now for better future proofing later.
For example, I’ll pay for the Thunderbolt 5 upgrade which is only available on the M4 Pro Mac Mini, even though currently there are no Thunderbolt 5 SSDs to purchase this second and very few peripherals (more on this later.)
That said, I will always look for a middle ground where price to performance delivers the best returns. Often, the highest-spec machines don’t provide commensurate performance increases.
What does this look like in real life?
My last laptop cost $2,800 and has lasted me over 7 years. That’s only $400/year!
As someone who owns a now-defunct 2013 Mac Pro (Trashcan) and still edits on an aging 2017 MacBook Pro with a 2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 (remember those?) I’ve been biding my time to upgrade.
- The M1s were tempting, but first-gen, and four years ago, my systems were still rocking along.
- The M2s saw only incremental improvements over the M1s, which prompted me to wait for the superior performance increases in the M3s.
- The M3s were a bigger step up, but I still had life left in my older machines and finances were tight.
But the time has now come to upgrade.
My loyal Trashcan is dead and my trusty laptop is showing its age: I’m on the last OS version it will update to, performance is sluggish and the screen has developed the stage light effect.
I also like to upgrade as early in the upgrade lifecycle as possible.
The specifications I listed above represent the best of these two tactics.
They’re the best I can afford where future-proofing is a core consideration and the configurations represent the best value for money in terms of price to performance.
Which Mac Upgrades Matter Most To Video Editors
- 16″
- Storage
- RAM
- GPU before RAM
- Thunderbolt 5
Different upgrades come with different benefits, so which investments will give you the best performance, and can you inadvertently imbalance your system?
Thermal Management
For professional video editors considering a laptop, you’ll want to stick to the 16″ MacBook Pro. It has better thermal management (two fans instead of one), which will avoid any heat-related throttling when you crank the machine.
SSD Storage
The only thing that really matters is to get away from the 256GB SSD in the base M4 Mac Mini, which is a $200 upgrade. But ideally, you would have at least 1TB of SSD in your configuration.
Why?
- SSD performance degrades as they fill up
- Apple’s SSD swap memory feature uses SSD storage as temporary RAM when your RAM is full. If that’s in limited supply, you’ll experience performance slowdowns.
Given how expensive Apple’s SSD upgrades are I would go with 1TB or 512 GB in a pinch and use fast, affordable external storage instead.
RAM
Video editing is a graphics-hungry trade. Most video editing software has offloaded a lot of the processing workload to GPU and RAM. Not that the CPU is a slouch either.
As a video editor who wants to use these machines for as long as possible, and given that you cannot update either of these components after purchase, I will always try to upgrade these as much as I can.
According to the Max Tech video above, though, somewhere around 36GB of RAM is plenty for most 4K video editing tasks.
MacBook Pro RAM Options
- M4 Pro 14/20 core: 24GB | 48 GB (+$400)
- M4 Max 14/32 core: 36 GB
- M4 Max 16/40 core: 48 GB | 64 GB (+$200) | 128 GB (+$1,200)
FYI: The better Max chip adds 2 additional performance cores and 8 GPU cores.
How most editors will think: By the time you’re already spending enough to get the best Max chip (+$300) which comes with 48GB of RAM as standard, spending an additional $200 for 64GB of RAM seems like it would be foolish not to…
Mac Mini M4 Pro RAM Options (12/16 or 14/20 core)
- 24 GB | 48 GB (+$400) | 64 GB (+$600)
To get to 64 GB of RAM (what I’m thinking is the sweet spot) that’s an additional $700 on the MacBook Pro and an additional $600 on the M4 Pro Mac Mini.
Understanding Apple Silicon Cores – Performance vs Efficiency vs GPU
AFAIK: If you max out your RAM capacity without also upgrading your chip, you can unbalance the system, which will not give you the best performance for your money.
This is why it helps to understand the GPU and the performance cores that go into the Apple Silicon unified chips.
The Apple M4 chip has four performance cores and up to six efficiency cores:
- Performance cores: These cores are more powerful.
- Efficiency cores: These cores are more efficient and are used for background tasks that don’t require much processing power.
The M4 chip is available in different models, including:
- M4: 8-core CPU: 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- M4 Pro: Up to 14-core CPU: 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- M4 Max: Up to a 16-core CPU: 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- M4 Pro has up to 20 GPU Cores while the M4 Max has up to 40 GPU Cores
- M4 Max has double the video encode and ProRes encode/decode engine vs the M4 Pro
For video editors, the more performance and GPU cores, the better.
Thunderbolt 5
Faster is always better, especially when you’re transferring hundreds of GBs. Upgrading to get Thunderbolt 5 on the Mac Mini (thus the M4 Pro chip) could be worth it unless you’re out to spend as little as possible.
What does Thunderbolt 5 actually give you?
While Thunderbolt 5 theoretically boasts significantly higher bandwidth (120 Gbps) compared to Thunderbolt 4 (40 Gbps), the practical limit for data connections is currently capped at 80 Gbps.
So the 120 Gbps is more relevant to supporting multiple large displays, although you’ll still get double the data transfer speed!
It can also do some clever things like Thunderbolt Bandwidth Boost and you can still use older Thunderbolt 3 and 4 cables at the new 80 Gbps speeds.
Why this matters: This would all suggest that increasing your SSD will help with having less than the maximum RAM and paying for as many performance and GPU cores as you can will also deliver extra performance for less money.
Therefore if you’re going to invest in a higher-performance machine that should last longer, this configuration might be the best value for long-term performance:
M4 Max 16″ MacBook Pro
- 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display (Standard display)
- Apple M4 Max chip with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine
- 48 GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- 3x Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, SDXC card slot, headphone jack, Magsafe
- Cost $3,999
You can actually buy this today on Amazon for $100 cheaper than Apple.
Thunderbolt 5 Docks and SSDs
While it’s nice that Apple has moved to a greater number of Thunderbolt ports on the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro, I still have plenty of things in my edit suite that still need to be plugged in via USB-A.
To that end, I’ve been using an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock very happily for a long time. But it will make sense to upgrade this to at least a Thunderbolt 4 dock, if not Thunderbolt 5 too.
How many ports do you get?
On the M4 Mac Mini there are three Thunderbolt ports on the back, ethernet and HDMI, plus two USB-C 3 (10 Gb/s) on the front. Plus the headphone jack.
On the M4 MacBook Pro you get three Thunderbolt ports, SDXC, HDMI and a headphone jack.
Backward Compatibility
Thunderbolt 5 is directly backward compatible with Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 3 cables and devices (docks and drives), although if you use a Thunderbolt 4 cable (or older) you’ll be limited to that generation’s speeds.
So you’ll need a Thunderbolt 5 cable for your new Thunderbolt 5 docks and drives.
- Apple Thunderbolt 5 Cable (1m) – $70
- OWC Thunderbolt 5 Cable (1m) – $40
- Cable Matters Thunderbolt 5 Cable (1m) – $33
Thunderbolt 1 & 2 connectivity – Based on Scott Simmons’ review, you can use a Thunderbolt 3 to 2 Adaptor, like this one from Apple, to connect older devices and drives to your Thunderbolt 5 Mac.
OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock
Currently in pre-production OWC will have a Thunderbolt 5 dock, presumably very similar to their Thunderbolt 4 dock (see below) just with faster speeds!
I’ve included a couple of Thunderbolt 4 Docks below for reference of whats available right now.
Kensington Thunderbolt 5 Dock
Product: Kensington SD5000T5 EQ Thunderbolt™ 5 Triple 4K Docking Station
Ports: 11
- 3 x Thunderbolt™ 5 downstream ports
- 1 x Thunderbolt™ 5 host
- 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps ports,
- Combo audio jack
- Dual SD/Micro Card readers
- 2.5Gbps Ethernet for seamless productivity
Price: $399
OWC Thunderbolt 4 Dock
OWC have a trio of docks that would be interesting options.
Their pre-production unit seen above looks like their 10-port Pro Dock ($349), while it would be nice if they updated their 14-port Thunderbolt 3 Dock ($179) – just to have more ports!
There is also the OWC 11-port Thunderbolt 4 Dock too.
Product: OWC 11-port Thunderbolt 4 Dock
Ports:
- 1 x Host Port – Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) up to 40Gb/s (5000MB/s)
- 3 x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) Ports
- 3 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A Ports up to 10Gb/s (1250MB/s)
- 1 x USB 2.0 Port
- 1 x Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) RJ-45 Port
- 1 x 3.5mm Stereo Audio Input/Output Combo Port
Price: $220
CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Dock
Product: Caldigit TS4 18-port Thunderbolt Dock
Look at all those ports! Plus it can stand up or lie down. It doesn’t roll over though.
Ports: 18
- 3 x Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb/s)
- 3 x USB-C (10Gb/s)
- 5 x USB-A (10Gb/s)
- 1 x DisplayPort 1.4
- 1 x SD 4.0 (UHS-II)
- 1 x microSD 4.0 (UHS-II)
- 1 x 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet
- 1 x Front Combo Audio In/Out (3.5mm)
- 1 x Rear Audio Out (3.5mm)
- 1 x Rear Audio In (3.5mm)
- 1 x DC In (19.5V 11.80A)
Price: $378
Thunderbolt 5 SSDS
There are currently no Thunderbolt 5 SSDs available on the market, although OWC has one in the works that you an pre-order now – The Envoy Ultra ($399) with transfer speeds of up 6,000 MB/s.
I’m sure more will appear soon.
M4 Mac Mini vs M4 MacBook Pro – Which Should Video Editors Buy?
I’m a big fan of the YouTube channel Max Tech.
They do an excellent job of understanding the technical nitty-gritty, staying on top of the latest Apple rumours and performance test all the machines for video editing. All while staying grounded on what is actually worth paying for.
I fed the transcripts of six of their M4 Mac Mini and M4 MacBook Pro (and M4 Mac Studio) videos into Google’s Notebook LLM to crunch all of their data and insights into a single coherent recommendation.
Recommendation for Professional Video Editors
For professional video editors who require a balance of CPU and GPU performance with ample RAM, the sources suggest the M4 Max MacBook Pro in the 16-inch size offers the best value.
- M4 Max Chip: The M4 Max chip delivers a substantial boost in both CPU and GPU capabilities. Although it retains the same 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores as the M3 Max, Apple has implemented performance enhancements that result in a 25% increase in graphics performance and impressive single-core performance exceeding 4,000 points.
- 16-inch Model for Optimal Performance: Opting for the 16-inch model is crucial for maximizing the M4 Max chip’s performance potential. The larger chassis accommodates a more robust cooling system, preventing performance throttling that might occur in the smaller 14-inch model when handling demanding video editing tasks.
- RAM Considerations: While the base M4 Max MacBook Pro comes with 32GB of RAM, professional video editors may benefit from upgrading to 64GB for smoother multitasking and handling larger projects. However, it is important to note that the cost of upgrading RAM from Apple is quite high.
- Storage: The sources generally recommend against excessive SSD upgrades due to Apple’s high prices. Instead, they suggest investing in a fast and affordable external SSD for storing large video files and backups.
Why this configuration is better than alternatives:
- M4 Pro Mac Mini: Although the M4 Pro chip offers impressive CPU performance, even surpassing the M2 Ultra in some cases, its GPU capabilities are significantly less powerful than the M4 Max. For video editors, GPU performance is crucial for tasks like rendering and effects processing, making the M4 Max a better choice.
- M4 Ultra Mac Studio: While the forthcoming M4 Ultra Mac Studio promises even greater performance, its estimated starting price of $4,000 makes it a considerably more expensive investment. The M4 Max MacBook Pro delivers excellent performance for a lower price. However, if your video editing work demands the absolute highest level of performance and you are willing to spend more, then waiting for the M4 Ultra Mac Studio might be a better option.
Overall:
The M4 Max MacBook Pro (16-inch) provides a compelling combination of performance, portability, and value for professional video editors. Its powerful CPU and GPU, ample RAM, and efficient cooling system make it well-suited for demanding video editing workflows.
What about the M4 Ultra Mac Studio?
According to the rumours, the M4 Ultra Mac Studio should be released between March and June of 2025, which could only be 4-5 months away.
If it starts at around $4000 for the Ultra with its incredible core counts and anticipated performance metrics, it will definitely be a machine that will last!
But while it would be nice to have all that power and all of those ports in a desktop machine, it’s probably more than I realistically need right now, or will need in the near future.
I can’t see my clients moving to 8K, given that most of what I still deliver is in HD and for the web, plus I can already reasonably edit 4K on my aging laptop and the speed of the storage the files are being pulled from is usually a bigger bottleneck to performance.
I can wait a few more seconds/minutes for things to render and export.
Which M4 Mac Will I Actually Buy?
Well, I don’t know.
I use my laptop a lot both inside my garden edit suite to drive my main display, peripherals and everything else, and it is really important that I can unplug it all and take it in the house or on the go.
So stumping up for a $4000 M4 Max MacBook Pro seems like a logical decision.
While it would be nice to have both a super-fast laptop and a super-fast desktop, I don’t have a spare £8000 to buy a MacBook Pro and wait for the M4 Ultra Mac Studio. Plus, in reality, I don’t need that level of performance.
Or could I get a cheaper version of both the Mac Mini and MacBook Pro?
14″ MacBook Pro – $1599 ($20 cheaper on Amazon)
- 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display
- Standard display
- Apple M4 chip with 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- 16GB unified memory
- 512GB SSD storage
- 70W USB-C Power Adapter
- Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, headphone jack, MagSafe 3 port
M4 Pro Mac Mini – $2,199
- Apple M4 Pro chip with 14 core CPU, 20 core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- 48GB unified memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI port, two USB-C ports, headphone jack
Total = $3,800
Which is still cheaper than my original specification for my M4 Max MacBook Pro ($4,199), but neither machine is really all that performant – but certainly good enough!
Can I have my cake and eat it?
Decisions, decisions.
What would you do?
