If you were hoping for the next-gen Mac mini, it’s been announced and features rather nifty M4 chips.
Apple on Tuesday announced its fully redesigned Mac mini models, the desktops offering the M4 and M4 Pro chips in a considerably smaller casing, two front-facing USB-C ports, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and more.
The refresh marks the first time the Mac mini has been redesigned in over a decade, and the enclosure now measures 5″ x 5″ and offers a new thermal architecture wherein the air is guided up through the device’s foot to different levels of the system.
The new Mac mini can be configured with either the M4 or M4 chip, the M4 Pro featuring a 14-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, and up to 64GB of Unified Memory. The Mac mini with the M4 chip features a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and now starts with 16GB of unified memory as standard. The M4 Pro features 273GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple has stated that the M4 Mac mini is up to 1.8x faster and in CPU performance and 2.2x faster in GPU performance than the M1-based Mac mini from 2020. Both the M4 and M4 Pro offer hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac for the first time, along with an improved Neural Engine. The M4 Pro model offers two USB-C ports on the front and three Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back. The Thunderbolt 5 offers up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds—more than doubling the throughput of Thunderbolt 4. The M4 model continues to have Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The new machine is also Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac. The M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini became available to pre-order yesterday with a starting price of $599, with launch set to take place on November 8.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.