A day after unveiling the M4 iMac, Apple has just announced its all-new Mac mini. With a Mac Studio-like design, this is Apple’s most compact computer ever. This product announcement comes a few hours after Amazon accidentally leaked its design and specs.
That being said, the Mac mini now has a 5 by 5 inches form factor. Apple says the “super-compact system is enabled by the incredible power efficiency of Apple Silicon and an innovative thermal architecture,” making it less than half the size of the previous design.
With the M4 chip, this computer delivers up to 1.8x faster CPU performance and 2.2x faster GPU performance over the M1 model. The M4 Pro makes the Mac mini even better, with more impressive specs.
With up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, M4 Pro also provides multithreaded performance. With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU in M4, and both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini.
The Neural Engine in M4 Pro is also over 3x faster than in the M1 Model, so on-device Apple Intelligence models run faster. M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth—twice as much bandwidth as any AI PC chip—for accelerating AI workloads. It also supports Thunderbolt 5, which delivers up to 120 Gb/s data transfer speeds on Mac mini and more than doubles the throughput of Thunderbolt 4.
The new Mac mini features a wide array of ports to drive any setup. It includes front-facing ports for more convenient access, two USB-C ports that support USB 3, and an audio jack with support for high-impedance headphones. On the back, the Mac mini with M4 includes three Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the Mac mini with M4 Pro features three Thunderbolt 5 ports.
Mac mini comes standard with Gigabit Ethernet, configurable up to 10Gb Ethernet for faster networking speeds, and an HDMI port for easy connection to a TV or HDMI display without an adapter. With M4, it can support up to two 6K displays and up to one 5K display, and with M4 Pro, it can support up to three 6K displays at 60Hz for a total of over 60 million pixels.
Customers can pre-order the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro starting today. Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 with 16GB of RAM, and the model with M4 Pro starts at $1,399.
