The Mac Mini has been Apple’s smallest, cheapest member of the Mac lineup for years. But soon it could be even smaller.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is on track to launch a next-gen Mac Mini later this year, and it could be about half the size of the current-gen Mac Mini.
According to Gurman, the new Mac Mini will be powered by the Apple M4 chip that debuted with the 2024 iPad Pro, bringing up to a 1.5X boost in CPU performance and even bigger gains in AI and graphics performance when compared with the M2 processor used in the 2023 Mac Mini.
While the new model should be faster, it’s also expected to be smaller than the current Mac Mini, which measures 197 x 197 x 36mm (about 7.8″ x 7.8″ x 1.4″) and features a design that hasn’t changed much for more than a decade.
Gurman says when the new Mac Mini with an M4 processor arrives later in 2024 it could be a little taller than the current model, but its overall footprint is expected to be closer to that of the latest Apple TV boxes, which measure 93 x 93 x 31mm (about 3.7″ x 3.7″ x 1.2″).
The Mac Mini has always been a small, relatively affordable, space-saving computer. So it’s not surprising that now that Apple would try to make the computer even smaller now that the company is using its own energy-efficient chips for laptops and desktops and not just for smartphones and tablets.
But there are some trade-offs that you have to make to release a computer that small. The current Mac Mini has room for up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, and audio jacks. It seems likely that a smaller Mac Mini would have fewer ports, although Gurman says Apple “has tested models with at least three USB-C ports” as well as an HDMI port and power cable connector.