We got the appetizers out of the way with the M4 iMac, yesterday, so it’s time for the entrée for this week, and today, as the next Mac in the line of announcements, Apple introduced the all-new Mac mini that’s even mightier and smaller thanks to the power of M4 and M4 Pro, it’s built for Apple Intelligence from the ground up.
Smaller, yet mightier design
The new Mac mini’s footprint takes up less space than the previous design’s by up to 50%. The new Mac mini is in a 5×5 square, yet Apple is able to pack all of that technology, the power of Apple Silicon, and an innovative active-cooling system in such a smaller package. Thanks to the M4 chip found in iPad Pro and iMac, the new Mac mini is up to 1.8x faster in CPU performance and 2.2x faster GPU performance than the original M1 model.
Introducing M4 Pro
But the performance breakthroughs and improvements don’t stop there because Apple is debuting the M4 Pro for pro-level performance. M4 Pro is packed with up to 14 CPU cores (10 performance/4 efficiency cores), up to 20 GPU cores, and an all-new Neural Engine that’s over 3x faster than the M1 Mac mini, so everything you’re going to do on the higher-end Mac mini is going to be blazingly fast, especially for Apple Intelligence features and games that support hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. And for the first time on any Mac, the M4 Pro now supports Thunderbolt 5, which provides up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds on the Mac mini, that’s more than double the max throughput of Thunderbolt 4.
Improved Versatility with New I/O and Display Support
The new Mac mini does away with USB-A ports as expected. Instead, the new Mac mini has two USB-C ports and a headphone jack with support for high-impedance headphones on the front. On the back, you’ll find a Gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI port, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports on the M4 model. If you get the M4 Pro model, those ports are Thunderbolt 5. This advanced set of I/O ports makes the Mac mini more versatile than ever before.
The M4 model can connect to up to two 6K displays and up to one 5K display, and the M4 Pro model can connect to up to three 6K displays at 60Hz.
The First Carbon Neutral Mac
Apple has started its goal of making its products carbon neutral by 2030 with the Apple Watch. Now, the new Mac mini is Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac with packaging that is now entirely fiber-based.
Pricing
Here is the breakdown of all the prices for the new Mac mini:
- $599 – M4 / 10-core CPU / 10-core GPU / 16GB unified memory / 256GB SSD
- $799 – M4 / 10-core CPU / 10-core GPU / 16GB unified memory / 512GB SSD
- $999 – M4 / 10-core CPU / 10-core GPU / 24GB unified memory / 512GB SSD
- $1,399 – M4 Pro / 12-core CPU / 16-core GPU / 24GB unified memory / 512GB SSD
Note that the new Mac mini with M4 now starts with 16GB of memory as standard, and it starts at the same price as before, so this is a huge win for customers.
The new Mac mini is available to order today, with initial shipments arriving in Apple Stores and homes on November 8.