Apple’s new M4 Mac Mini lives up to its name

Macs Week continues with the brand new Mac Mini. The rumors were true: The M4 lineup finds the company scaling a small desktop not much bigger than an Apple TV. The smaller enclosure measures 5 x 5 inches, compared to the Apple TV 4K’s 3.66 x 3.66.

The extremely small size is made possible by the efficiency of Apple’s in-house silicon. Despite the small size, there is still a fan on the board, with thermal holes underneath. This is probably because the Mini comes with the base M4 or the recently announced M4 Pro, the latter of which may need to be cooled, depending on how hard you push it.

Apple chose to compare performance with the original M1 model (vs. 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 in the new Mini – with a big price increase. Apple is touting the new chip as the “world’s fastest” – take that for what you will. The new GPU lineup, on the other hand, improves ray tracing by 2x, which shows Apple’s deep interest in bringing gaming to the Mac.

The M4 Pro is also the first Apple Silicon chip to support Thunderbolt 5 (the M4 model still rocks Thunderbolt 4). Apple has also moved two ports to the desktop front, bringing it in line with Mac Studio. On the back, you’ll find three more Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, HDMI, and Ethernet.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that the new Mini is Apple’s first neutral Mac, another step towards the company’s plans to go completely neutral by 2030.

The M4 Mini ships with 16GB of memory and starts at $599. The upgrade to the M4 Pro is huge: That model starts at $1,399. That means, essentially, $100 more than the new M4 Macs introduced on Monday.

Pre-orders for the Mini opened on Tuesday, with the device set to start shipping on November 8.