Apple’s adorable M4 Mac mini is an absolute beast under the hood

Apple has officially announced the M4 Mac mini. It’s the second of three expected announcements, with the M4 iMac being revealed first.

The new Mac mini features an M4 or M4 Pro chip, and the base M4 chip has a 10-core CPU/10-Core GPU. The base model starts at $600, while the higher-end M4 Pro Mac mini starts at $1400. The release is set for November 8th.

Storage-wise, the Mac mini starts at 256GB, but can be upgraded with up to 8TB of SSD storage. RAM starts at 16GB and can be upgraded to 64GB. The Mac mini is still only available in silver, and is certainly not as colorful as Apple’s recently announced M4 iMac lineup.

The most powerful Mac mini yet

It almost looks like an Apple TV

Apple

The biggest change with the new Mac mini is its design. It is now the smallest it’s ever been. The footprint of it is less than half the size of its previous design. The Mac mini five by five inches, and that’s just simply incredible considering the performance packed into this thing.

Apple thanks the Mac mini’s compactness to the power efficiency of the Apple Silicon and also a new innovative thermal architecture which allows air in the system to be guided to different levels of the machine. All the venting is done through the foot of the Mac mini. Apple claims the Mac mini is up to six times faster than the best-selling PC desktop in its price range, while at one-twentieth of the size. The Mac mini is so small now you can play catch with the thing.

Port-selection wise, the Mac mini is loaded. The front I/O has two USB-C ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. The back has ethernet, HDMI and three USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. The speed of the Thunderbolt ports is dependent on which M4 chipset you choose. The regular M4 chip includes Thunderbolt 4, whereas the M4 Pro has Thunderbolt 5.

Related

Apple’s colorful new iMac features its M4 chip and Apple Intelligence support

The first of Apple’s several expected M4 Mac announcements has arrived.

There’s a lot of performance under the hood;

Apple’s M4 chipset is a force to be reckoned with

Aside from the design of the Mac mini, the only other major change in the Mac mini is, of course, the M4 chipset in it. The 10-core CPU found in the base model is an upgrade from last year’s 8-core M2 chip. However, the GPU core count is the same at 10.

Looking at the M4 pro chip, Apple claims the M4 Pro in the Mac mini features “the world’s fastest CPU core with lightning-fast singled threaded performance.” The M4 Pro can be configured up to a 14-core GPU and 20-GPU, an upgrade from the 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU found in last year’s model. Apple claims the Mac mini with M4 pro compared to the Mac mini with M2 pro renders motion graphics to ram twice as fast in Motion, and completes 3D renders up to 2.9x faster in Blender.

I can’t wait to see the new Mac mini in action, and see how it performs given its new M4 chipset and smaller form factor.

Related

Apple’s rumored smart home display could be ready to party like its 2002

Apple’s first foray into the smart display market will involve an iMac G4-inspired product, indicates Mark Gurman in a fresh report.