14 years later, the Mac mini has finally been reborn

Apple’s big week of Mac announcements continued this morning with the unveiling of the M4 Mac mini, featuring a new chip, a revamped design, and some important hardware changes. Importantly, it marks the first time the Mac mini has seen a major redesign since the unibody model launched in 2010.

The footprint is now just 5 by 5 inches, taking up less than half the space on your desk. To be fair, it’s slightly taller now at two inches (up from 1.4 inches), a bit like a shrunken down Mac Studio, which is 7.7 by 7.7 inches. The new Mac mini is also significantly lighter at just a pound and a half. The previous Mac mini weighed 2.6 pounds.

Thanks to the reduction in aluminum and manufactured with 100% renewable materials, Apple is calling the new Mac mini its first carbon neutral Mac.

At the same time, Apple has added the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini, bringing it in line with the iMac and iPad Pro. Compared to the M2 chip in the previous-generation Mac mini, the M4 adds up two CPU cores for a total of 10. That includes six performance cores and four efficiency cores.

The M4 Pro, meanwhile, gets you up to a 14-core CPU, which comes with 10 Performance cores. In at least some tasks, the CPU is 1.8x faster than the M1, 1.4x faster than the M2. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro is twice as fast as the M2 Pro — again, at least in some tasks.

Graphics also get a boost with the M4 chip. The base model of the M4 still starts with 10 GPU cores, same as the M2. While the bigger improvement to graphics happened in the M3 generation with Dynamic Caching, the cores are faster, have wider memory bandwidth, and twice the ray tracing performance. You can also upgrade it now to a high-end configuration with 20 GPU cores in the M4 Pro, one more core than was available on the M2 Pro.

It should be noted that the Mac mini skipped the previous generation, so the upgrade is going from the M2 and M2 Pro to the M4 and M4 Pro. Apple is marketing the M4 Mac mini as being six times faster than the top selling PC desktop in the same price range.

Obviously, Apple Intelligence is a big part of this release too, with the boosted Neural Engine in the M4, which is twice as fast as the previous generation. The core count hasn’t changed (still 16 cores), but Apple is continuing to build up examples of local AI processing to speed up tasks in Photos and Premiere Pro.

One of the handiest hardware changes is the port selection. For easy access, you now have two USB-C ports on the front, next to a headphone jack — again, not unlike the Mac Studio.

As was rumored, the two USB-A ports are gone, replaced with three Thunderbolt ports in the back, which supports up to three 6K displays. On the M4 Pro model, those are Thunderbolt 5 ports with 120Gb/s data transfers, whereas the M4 base model is on Thunderbolt 4, which 40Gb/s data transfers. Fortunately, both give you an HDMI port and Ethernet jack on back as well. The power jack is still there, but the power button itself seems to be gone from the photos shown.

Like with the iMac, Apple has also doubled the base memory from 8GB to 16GB after it faced criticism that the previous amount wasn’t enough for multitasking and serious workloads — all without increasing the starting price of $599. For what it’s worth, Apple was charging $200 to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB on the previous Mac mini.

Apple unveiled the new Mac mini a day after the M4 iMac was announced in the midst of what was promised to be an “exciting week of announcements.” The new matching Mac Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad that were announced yesterday alongside the iMac.

Apple is expected to follow up today’s announcement at some point this week with bringing the M4 to the MacBook Pro, as well.