I’m a Windows guy who has always built his own PC desktops. But this tiny $600 M4 Mac Mini is making me question everything I know about budget video editing.
I bought this Mac Mini with my own money. Apple didn’t send it to me. And after buying an M4 MacBook Air earlier in 2025 and being genuinely blown away by it, I really wanted to see how the Mac Mini would perform with the same chip but now with an actual fan.
What Specs Did I Get?
I put together a full Mac Mini buyer’s guide that breaks down the best bang-for-your-buck option, and spoiler: it’s the base model you can pick up for around $600. That’s the sweet spot. Same M4 chip, same 16GB of unified memory.
For my own setup, I spent a little more. I added $200 for a 512GB SSD (up from 256GB) and another $100 for a 10-gigabit ethernet port so I could connect my NAS. But performance-wise, this machine operates at the same speed as the base $600 model. Same chip, same RAM.
Size and Ports
The M4 Mac Mini is downright tiny. I’m used to a mid-ATX tower case. My first desktop was a full-size tower that weighed around 80 pounds and I carried it back and forth to my apartment in college. The fact that the Mac Mini fits in your hand and outperforms a large desktop is still kind of wild to me.
But the small size comes with a tradeoff: the port situation is minimal. My PC has around 8 USB-A ports, USB-C, plus multiple DisplayPort and HDMI connections from my Nvidia 3080. The Mac Mini? You get 3 Thunderbolt ports on the back, 2 USB-C on the front, and one HDMI port. That’s it.
I run a lot of external hard drives. I’ve had up to 3 monitors going at once. I love ports. So yes, this was a noticeable adjustment.
Sleep, Startup, and macOS
One thing that surprised me coming from PC: the Mac Mini’s sleep and wake behavior is fantastic. With my Windows desktops, I always had to do a full shutdown every night because sleep and hibernation were unreliable. Blue screens, unresponsive computers, you name it. And turning it back on meant waiting anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes.
The Mac Mini just works. It sips power in sleep, wakes up instantly, and I rarely ever have to fully shut it down. It’s a genuinely great quality-of-life improvement.
I’m still learning macOS. Some things work better than I expected, others are still a bit confusing coming from Windows. I still don’t love the backspace behavior or cut-and-paste workflow, but I’m getting there.
Video Editing Performance: Timeline and Playback
If you read my M4 MacBook Air long-term video editing review, you know that laptop completely blew my mind. Things loaded fast, the timeline scrubbed effortlessly, and it handled 4K and 6K footage without breaking a sweat.
I expected the Mac Mini to be a noticeably bigger step up because of the fan. But honestly, the timeline performance is essentially the same. Fast load times, buttery scrubbing, multiple effects applied with no issues. The M4 chip with 16GB of unified memory handles 4K and 6K editing so well that I struggle to think of a typical video editor who would need the M4 Pro version, let alone a Mac Studio.
The Fan: Quieter Than You’d Expect
The MacBook Air is completely fanless, which was already shocking coming from Dell and Asus laptops that sounded like jet engines. My custom PC has six fans and creates a constant background white noise in my room.
The Mac Mini has one fan. And I consistently find myself wondering if it’s even spinning. It runs at around 1,000 RPM most of the time, including during video renders. You can put your ear right next to it and hear almost nothing. It’s remarkable.
Export and Render Speed: Mac Mini vs. MacBook Air
This is where I expected to see a big difference, and honestly, it’s more minimal than I thought.
If you want to go deeper, I’ve also got A Video Editor’s Review of The Zotac Magnus Mini PC (vs Mac Mini).
In DaVinci Resolve, both the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air took almost exactly the same time to export a 10-minute video with a mix of 4K and 6K clips: around 4 minutes and 8 seconds each.
In Premiere Pro, there was a small gap. The MacBook Air took 11 minutes and 50 seconds. The Mac Mini took 11 minutes and 9 seconds. A 41-second difference on an 11-minute export.
Interestingly, even during that Premiere Pro export, the fan stayed at its baseline 1,000 RPM. I even used a fan control app to manually ramp up the fan speed to see if it would help. It didn’t. Same render time either way. The computer just wasn’t getting hot enough to need more cooling.
Bottom line: if you’re expecting the Mac Mini to be a massive leap over the MacBook Air for rendering, the gap is smaller than you’d think. The MacBook Air is that good. And the Mac Mini is essentially half the price of the Air as long as you already have a monitor and keyboard.
So, Is It the Best Budget Video Editing Computer?
Yes, in my opinion, it absolutely is. As a lifelong Windows PC builder, I can say clearly: nothing on the Windows side comes close to this performance at this price. For a long time, Windows was the go-to for budget video editing. That’s no longer the case.
You will not get this kind of editing speed from a Windows machine at $600. It’s not even close right now.
That said, am I ditching my PC? Nope. I still love PC gaming, and my desktop is still extremely fast. I’ll keep using both, just like I switch between DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro depending on the project.
Want to Get Better at Video Editing?
If you’re using a Mac Mini or any other computer for video editing and want to level up your skills, check out my free Edit Videos Like a Pro guide. It covers some of the biggest pro tips I’ve learned over years of editing, and it won’t cost you a thing.