Not terribly seriously, but yeah, of course I pondered it. I did a little digging just for fun; I have zero complaints about my desktop Mac. It does everything I want and can do so much more. It’s fine. What’s more, I enjoy using it.

Because the Mini would replace a Studio, I would not need to worry about a display or keyboard or anything. I could easily swap out the studio, plug the Mini into the KVM switch, and carry on.

So everything else being neutral, and cost aside, what’s the difference between the two?

Spec	Mac Studio (M1 Max)	Mac Mini M4 Pro
CPU	10	14
Peformance Core	8	10
Efficiency Cores	2	4
GPU Cores	24	20
Neural Engine	16	16
Memory Bandwidth	400	273

I imagine the CPU performance in the M4 would be better than the Studio, but not in ways that I’d experience or appreciate. On the spec side, the Studio does have more GPU cores and that memory bandwidth is only bested by the Ultra. That might not really matter in real life, but hey it’s fun to know.