Andrew Cunningham
Apple hasn’t updated its Mac mini desktop lineup since early 2023, when it added the M2 and M2 Pro chips and dropped the last of the Intel models. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the update drought will end later this year, when the mini will jump straight from the M2 to the M4, which he originally announced in April.
But the mini won’t just have new chips: it’ll also feature a new, smaller design, which Gurman says will be closer to the size of an Apple TV box (more precisely, it might be a bit larger, but will have a noticeably smaller footprint). The new mini could have “at least three USB-C ports,” as well as a power connector and an HDMI port.
This would be Apple’s first design overhaul of the Mac mini since the original aluminum unibody version was released in June 2010. That model included a slot for a built-in SuperDrive DVD burner, something Apple dropped in later models as optical drives became less necessary, but the M2 Mac mini has the same basic design and footprint as the Core 2 Duo Mac mini introduced more than a decade ago.
For years, Intel and other PC makers have been offering computers smaller than the Mac mini, starting with Intel’s (now discontinued and then sold) NUC desktops and growing from there. Often, these systems saved space by including an external power supply, whereas the mini has always used a built-in power supply. But the Apple TV, also powered by Apple Silicon chips and with an internal power supply, suggested that it was possible to design a physically smaller system without making that particular design compromise.
While the design is changing, Apple’s general approach to the Mac mini remains the same as it is now. There will be a base model with a regular Apple M4 processor and an upgraded model with the yet-to-be-released M4 Pro to help bridge the gap between the low-end mini and the more powerful Mac Studio. While the new mini will have significantly fewer ports than the current models, that would also be a point of differentiation, though it would hopefully continue to include enough USB-C ports to support multiple external monitors and other accessories.
Gurman isn’t sure whether Apple will change the price of the Mac mini to match the new design, but he thinks the new mini “might be cheaper to make.”
The new Mac minis would be available later this year, though the M4 Pro models could be announced or released later than the standard M4 models. Gurman says new iMac and MacBook Pro models with M4 chips could be released “as early as this year,” while the M4 MacBook Airs would wait until spring 2025, and the Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktops wouldn’t be updated until “the middle of next year.”
The M4 chip was introduced in this year’s iPad Pro update, just months after the M3 launched; it marked the first time one of Apple’s M-series processors had debuted in something other than a Mac.
