As a part of the corporate’s week of Mac-focused bulletins, Apple has simply launched a smaller, but much more highly effective Mac Mini. It’s now outfitted with Apple’s newest M4 silicon, helps ray tracing for the primary time, and ships with 16GB of RAM by default — seemingly the brand new regular within the Apple Intelligence period. The machine nonetheless begins at $599 with the common M4 chip, whereas the extra highly effective M4 Professional mannequin has a beginning value of $1,399. Just like the refreshed iMac introduced yesterday, the Mac Mini is on the market to preorder instantly and shall be in shops on November eighth.
The very first thing you’ll discover is the brand new design. As rumored, the Mini has been shrunken down significantly — and it was already a comparatively small desktop machine to start with. Now it’s downright tiny, measuring 5 inches in each size and width. Should you’re questioning how Apple manages to maintain issues working cool, the corporate says it’s by means of the M4’s effectivity and “an progressive thermal structure, which guides air to completely different ranges of the system, whereas all venting is finished by means of the foot.”
Even so, Apple has loaded this factor up with loads of I/O: on the entrance are two USB-C ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. Round again you’ll discover ethernet, HDMI, and three USB-C / Thunderbolt ports. The USB-A ports are certainly historical past, however it’s price noting that the bottom M2 Mini solely had two Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-A ports. With the M4, you’re getting 5 ports in all. So that you’re shedding native USB-A however selecting up an additional Thunderbolt port.
The pace of these Thunderbolt ports will differ based mostly on which M4 processor you select. The common M4 chip consists of Thunderbolt 4, whereas the M4 Professional will get you the very newest Thunderbolt 5 throughput.
The M4 Professional Mac Mini additionally delivers higher general efficiency with its 14 CPU and 20 GPU cores. RAM may be configured as much as 32GB with the common M4 or 64GB with the M4 Professional. Storage tops out at a whopping 8TB. So whereas the Mini is sort of small, you may make it critically mighty when you’re keen to spend sufficient. 10 gigabit ethernet additionally stays an non-obligatory improve for many who need it.
We’re more likely to see the M4 Professional chip come to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Professionals that Apple is rumored to announce this week, together with an much more succesful M4 Max chip that’s not obtainable within the Mini. However the Professional must be lots as is for a lot of prosumers and creatives.
It’s a busy week for Apple. The M4 iMac made its debut on Monday, and the corporate additionally rolled out its first Apple Intelligence software program capabilities throughout iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. (Extra AI options, together with picture technology and ChatGPT integration, shall be launched in December.) Tomorrow may see the debut of these upgraded MacBook Professionals as Apple rounds out its new {hardware}. The corporate is ready to report quarterly earnings on Thursday, throughout which it can little doubt trumpet its newest fleet of Macs.
