Apple Wants to Make the Mac Mini Even Smaller. Why?

The thing about mini PCs is… well it’s spelled out in the name. They’re relatively small, small enough to lay comfortably on your desktop and stay out of the way. The $600 M2 Mac Mini is already a fine specimen of performance at scale, but a new report details how Apple is planning to completely revitalize its small-scale computer along with its entire Mac lineup with AI-centric M4 chips first seen in the latest iPad Pro. The Mac Mini, however, is going to get even more miniaturized, even smaller than the Apple TV. 

The report comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman who cites several anonymous sources that claim the Mac Mini, a revamped iMac, and MacBook Pro are all getting sequels with the M4 chip. Those are slated for release this year. In spring of next year, we’ll get MacBook Airs with M4. Just a few months after that, Apple will reportedly drop an M4 Mac Pro and Mac Studio into our waiting hands. 

The footprint of the Mac Mini effectively hasn’t changed since the days of Steve Jobs. It’s a 7.75-inch square weighing in at about 2.6 pounds (slightly more with M2 Pro). It measures 1.41 inches high, or about three stacks of Post-it notes laid on top of each other. The new Mac Mini would be “approaching the size of an Apple TV” box, according to Bloomberg. That means a length and width of about 3.66 inches. 

The Mac Mini might be slightly taller than before, but if we’re griping about millimeters we’re probably obsessed about all the wrong things. The more important thing is ports, and the new small-form computer could have three USB-C ports, a power connector, and an HDMI port.

Apple is jumping with both feet on the AI hype train with the release of M4. The rest of the M-series chips contained neural processing capabilities, with the M3 hitting up to 19 TOPS (trillions of operations per second, a common way to measure NPU speeds). The M4 can do 38 TOPS, which is still slightly less than the latest ARM-based Qualcomm chips powering Copilot+ PCs. 

The M4 is a more powerful chip than the M3, though by a very slim margin. It comes with one more core and thread along with higher GPU speeds, but in Gizmodo’s own tests, we didn’t find too wide a gulf between the M4 on iPad and M3 on MacBook Air. That’s a very loose comparison considering the difference in operating systems, so we’ll have to wait for an M4 with MacOS to offer a true comparison. Like the M3, Apple’s likely going to put out a M4 Pro version of the Mac Mini that won’t arrive until October, according to Gurman’s sources. There’s no additional word on an M4 Max, which would likely power the ultra-high-end MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, and Mac Studios.