It's Apple Mac product launch week, which means it's time for my annual Airing of Grievances over Apple's Mac marketing; and specifically, this time around, its boast that the latest Mac mini is substantially faster than the 2018 Mac mini, the last with an Intel Core processor.
The new Apple M4 chip is a state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip, built using TSMC's 3nm process node, and it will likely be able to run circles around a lot of the best desktop PCs on the market when it goes on sale next week.
And so it goes without saying that Apple's M4-powered Mac mini is going to absolutely wallop the heckin' daylights out of a mini PC from six years ago. How is that even a question?
But Apple's insistence on comparing its latest chips and Mac products to a several-year-old ancestor isn't just silly, it's borderline malpractice.
The 2018 Mac mini and the latest version aren't even close to being in the same league
For starters, let's compare the processor specs of the 2018 Mac mini vs 2024 Mac mini:
As you can see, the 2018 Mac mini just isn't comparable to the latest 2024 Mac mini in terms of specs. It's just not.
And saying that you can get 13.3x better performance on an M4 Mac mini compared to one with a processor six generations out of date that isn't even being produced anymore is like a fully grown adult boasting that they're taller than a toddler.
The advancements that have been made over the intervening six years between these two devices are totally valid to discuss as an academic matter, but as a marketing matter it's just disingenuous at this point.
Now, many will point out that Apple is talking to owners of the 2018 Mac mini to let them know how much better performance they'll get with the new 2024 model. Sure, there are certainly those who haven't made the jump yet, but after six years, these users know better than anyone that their hardware isn't keeping up, and have already been primed by their own experience to want to upgrade.
The only other possible reason to dunk on the 2018 Mac mini like this is to entice more Mac users away from Intel-based chips entirely in order to eliminate the need to support x86 architecture on the software side of things. That's a totally valid reason, but Apple could simply stop supporting Intel-based Macs (after an appropriate notice period, of course), which would prompt users to upgrade from these older devices.
But that's also not really what's happening here.
Apple has a reputation for fuzzy claims around performance gains
There's no question that the Apple M4 SoC is a powerful chip, and it may even put competing Intel and AMD offerings to shame (though Intel Core Ultra 200- and AMD Ryzen AI 300-series chips look like very serious threats to Apple's dominance).
But let's also be clear, it won't be that much better than the Apple M3, and saying that something gets 10-12% better performance just isn't Apple's thing. Not when Apple can brag that the new Mac mini "[e]nhances photos with up to 33x faster image upscaling performance in Photomator."
I'm duly impressed, especially considering that an 8th-gen Intel chip can even run Photomator in 2024. What are we doing here?
Apple constantly uses these very non-standard performance metrics that no one else even tests for, making it hard to judge the performance for yourself at a glance – see also: bragging about the Mac mini M4's 1.7x faster Excel formula calculations than the M1 Mac mini, also cited in its press release announcing the new model. How much faster is it than a competing Intel Core Ultra 5 at the same task? Who can say – and that's kind of the point.
The worst part of all this is that it's so completely unnecessary
Why Apple's press release has me catching the vapors over here is that Apple does not need to do this. It does not need to say it's got the "world's fastest CPU core" while burying in a footnote that this claim is based on testing "using shipping competitive systems and select industry-standard benchmarks".
Meanwhile, I can tell you that the Apple M4 chip in the iPad Pro scored an average of 3,700 points in Single Core performance on Geekbench 6.3, compared to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V in the Acer Swift 14 AI, which scores a 2,753 on that same benchmark. That puts the M4 chip as much as 34% faster than Intel's mobile workhorse.
Apple doesn't need to hide the quality of its products behind a rose-colored wall of marketing gimmickry; but for whatever reason, it insists on doing so when its products are demonstrably and consistently some of the best PCs, laptops, and processors on the planet. It's maddening.
