The week of Macs keeps rolling along with a brand-new Mac Mini. The rumors were true: The M4 edition finds the company scaling the little desktop down to not much larger than an Apple TV. The Mini enclosure measures 5 x 5 inches, versus the Apple TV 4K’s 3.66 x 3.66.
The significantly smaller size was made possible by the efficiency of Apple’s in-house silicon. In spite of the smaller size, there’s still a fan onboard, with the thermal vents on the bottom. Presumably this is because the Mini comes with either the base M4 or the newly announced M4 Pro, the latter of which may need to be cooled, depending how hard you push it.
Apple’s opted to compare performance to the original M1 model (versus 2023’s M2 Pro), noting that the standard M4 represents a 1.8x CPU bump and 2.2x on the GPU side.
The M4 Pro makes its debut on the new Mini — with a sizable price bump. Apple is touting the new chip as the “world’s fastest” — take that for what you will. The new GPU array, meanwhile, improves ray tracing by 2x, showcasing Apple’s deepening interest in bring gaming to the Mac.
The M4 Pro is also the first Apple Silicon chip to support Thunderbolt 5 (the M4 model is still rocking Thunderbolt 4). Apple has also moved a pair of ports to the front of the desktop, bringing it more in line with the Mac Studio. Around back, you’ll find three more Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, HDMI, and Ethernet.
Also worth a mention is the fact that the new Mini is Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac, another step toward the company’s plans to be fully carbon neutral by 2030.
The M4 Mini ships with 16GB of memory and starts at $599. The upgrade to M4 Pro is a big one: That model starts at $1,399. That is, notably, $100 more than the new M4 iMacs introduced on Monday.
Preorders for the Mini open Tuesday, with the device set to start shipping on November 8.
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Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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