Apple's Newly Redesigned Mac mini Gets A Tiny Chassis With Big M4 Pro Performance

It's only Tuesday, but it feels like Apple is going to be trickling out updates this week. Hot on the heels of the company's iMac M4 announcement yesterday, today we are treated to a huge upgrade to the smallest Mac, the Mac mini. This thing is packed to the gills with either an M4 or an M4 Pro SoC, a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, and the first full redesign of the smallest Mac since the 2010 model. 

Mac mini M4 Gets More Mini

The Mac mini was always small, but it was a square with rounded corners that measured 7.75 inches in width and length, with a footprint measuring roughly 60 square inches. That's been reduced to five inches in width and length, or 25 square inches -- less than half the footprint of its ancestor. It's still quite a bit bigger than the Apple TV 4K but more in line with modern mini PCs from the likes of Minisforum or Beelink.

The Mac mini's cooling system seems a little over-engineered at first glance. The fan draws cool air in through the bottom of the system's front, circulates up and through the internals, and then pushes hot air down and out the rear of the base. Prior models had rear vents for straightforward exhaust, and the Mac Studio has a large perforated vent. We have no doubt it works, but we'll have to try it for ourselves at the first opportunity. That's not all that's on the bottom; for some reason Apple put the power button down there, too. So now to turn on a Mac mini you first have to tip it up. 

To achieve its diminutive size, the Mac mini does away with one familiar port type -- USB Type-A. You won't find any on the Mac mini any longer, much like the iMac. However, there are now a couple of USB-C ports on the front of the device, which it borrows from the Mac Studio, to go alongside the three Type-C ports on the rear. The rear ports also include Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI (2.0 for the M4 good for 4K 60 Hz, and 2.1 for the M4 Pro, which finally supports 4K 240 Hz or 8K 60 Hz connections). Notice we haven't said exactly what protocols those Type-C ports support, though. That's a little complicated, so maybe we should turn our attention to the M4 and optional M4 Pro upgrade that the tiniest Mac can hold. 

Mac mini's M4 and M4 Pro

The M4 is the same chip found in yesterday's iMac announcement, but unlike the all-in-one, the Mac mini only gets the full 10-core chip with a 10-core GPU. It's a relief that they didn't cut down the chip at all, as the iMac got some other nasty cuts to stay at its original price point. Going the other way, the Mac mini gets an M4 Pro that has either 12 or 14 cores.

That only sounds like a two or four core increase over the base M4, which isn't much considering you have to pay twice as much to get there, but it's actually bigger than that. The M4 Pro only has four efficiency cores compared to the M4's six, so that means you get either eight or ten performance cores rather than the M4's quartet. So right out of the gate, the M4 Pro should be much faster than the stock M4.

Apple talked at length in yesterday's announcement about M4's huge boost to single-threaded performance. That carries across to the M4 Pro, and should be compounded by the fact that the Mac mini never got any M3 silicon. Apple says that the CPU performance of the M4 is upwards of 60% higher than its direct descendent, and 80% faster than the 2020 Mac mini that launched Apple Silicon for the masses. 

The same can be said for the GPU, which bumps up to 16 or 20 cores from the M4's mere 10. Due to the M3 Pro and Max's troubled origins of being built on TSMC's N3B process, this marks the first time that Apple has bothered with hardware accelerated ray tracing on a Mac desktop. Architectural improvements should bring a big increase in peak graphics performance, though.

Combined with a huge bump in memory bandwidth from 120 GB/sec on the M4 to 273 GB/sec on the M4 Pro, Apple says the graphics performance of the Pro chip is doubled from the base model. Apple says that's a 75% increase in bandwidth over the M3 Pro Macs, but don't forget that M3 Pro was actually a massive decline in bandwidth compared to M2 Pro. That increase in bandwidth is just a 35% upgrade in bandwidth over M2 Pro. One thing is clear: Apple is trying very hard to build the graphics hardware to make the Mac a competent gaming platform. We have to wonder when (or even if) developers start coming to the party. Apple Arcade is not the way. 

The last big change in M4 Pro is its support for external connectivity, which brings us back to those USB-C ports. Thunderbolt 5 appears on the Mac for the first time in the M4 Pro-equipped Mac mini, which allows for 120 Gigabits of bandwidth. That's three times the theoretical transfer rate of M4-based Macs, which still stick with Thunderbolt 4 and its 40 Gbps of throughput. Either way, the Mac mini supports three displays at a time, though the resolution and refresh rate support varies depending on what exactly you want to plug in. Thunderbolt 4 is limited to DisplayPort 1.4, where Thunderbolt 5 brings with it DisplayPort 2.1, which means more bandwidth, higher resolutions, and higher refresh rates in general. 

Mac mini Specifications and Price

Considering we're coming from the M2 and M2 Pro, the Mac mini looks to be getting a huge upgrade. In addition to the extra CPU performance we talked about earlier, even the base model M4 Mac mini comes with 16 GB of memory, which as we mentioned yesterday is a long-overdue upgrade. It's still stuck with a 256 GB soldered, non-upgradeable SSD, which is likely to be pretty limiting for plenty of folks. Fortunately it's only $599, though Apple's storage and RAM upgrades are pricey. Doubling the storage all by itself is a $200 upcharge, as is each additional 8 GB of RAM all the way up to 32 GB, but would go a long way towards extending the usable life of the machine. 

The M4 Pro Mac mini is $1399, which gets the same 24 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage, but adds the 12-core M4 Pro with a 16-core GPU. That's a lot of extra horsepower due to having double the performance cores (even with fewer efficiency cores) and a whole lot more memory bandwidth. Upgrades are a similarly pricy affair - going to the 14-core CPU / 20-core GPU version of the M4 Pro is $200 extra, as is doubling the storage to 1 TB. RAM upgrades can be either to 48 GB for $400 or 64 GB max for $600. 

Just like the iMac, the Mac mini is up for preorder on Apple's website, and starts shipping on November 8. However, Apple's slow flow of releases have this author paralyzed -- should we review the M4 Pro Mac mini, or wait to see what might come tomorrow or the rest of the week? The rumor mill says M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBooks Pro are up next. We'll let you know what hits when it happens.