Mac week continues in Cupertino with the release of Apple’s biggest Mac mini redesign in a decade, with M4 and M4 Pro power in tow
It’s only Tuesday, but it feels like Apple is going to be trickling out updates this week. Hot on the heels of the company’s iMac M4 announcement yesterday, today we are treated to a huge upgrade to the smallest Mac, the Mac mini. This thing is packed to the gills with either an M4 or an M4 Pro SoC, a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, and the first full redesign of the smallest Mac since the 2010 model. Mac mini M4 Gets More Mini
The Mac mini was always small, but it was a square with rounded corners that measured 7.75 inches in width and length, with a footprint measuring roughly 60 square inches. That’s been reduced to five inches in width and length, or 25 square inches — less than half the footprint of its ancestor. It’s still quite a bit bigger than the Apple TV 4K but more in line with modern mini PCs from the likes of Minisforum or Beelink.
The Mac mini’s cooling system seems a little over-engineered at first glance. The fan draws cool air in through the bottom of the system’s front, circulates up and through the internals, and then pushes hot air down and out the rear of the base. Prior models had rear vents for straightforward exhaust, and the Mac Studio has a large perforated vent. We have no doubt it works, but we’ll have to try it for ourselves at the first opportunity.
To achieve its diminutive size, the Mac mini does away with one familiar port type — USB Type-A. You won’t find any on the Mac mini any longer, much like the iMac. However, there are now a couple of USB-C ports on the front of the device, which it borrows from the Mac Studio, to go alongside the three Type-C ports on the rear. The rear ports also include Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI (2.0 for the M4 good for 4K 60 Hz, and 2.1 for the M4 Pro, which finally supports 4K 240 Hz or 8K 60 Hz connections). Notice we haven’t said exactly what protocols those Type-C ports support, though. That’s a little complicated, so maybe we should turn our attention to the M4 and optional M4 Pro upgrade that the tiniest Mac can hold. Mac mini’s M4 and M4 Pro
The M4 is the same chip found in yesterday’s iMac announcement, but unlike the all-in-one, the Mac mini only gets the full 10-core chip with a 10-core GPU.
