The new Mac mini is a big chip in a small package

Apple Mac mini front facing ports.

A new Mac mini was announced sporting new M4 and M4 Pro chips packed into a tiny form factor of only 5 by 5 inches. The new M4 chips give the new mini a CPU performance bump of 18x and GPU increase of 2.2 over the M1 model.

Mac mini with M4 Pro

Thunderbolt 5 is the new way of moving data in and out of the new Mac mini. The Mac mini with M4 Pro ships with three of them on the back. Running at up to 120Gb/s they support up to three 6K displays. On the front are two USB-C ports at USB 3 speed. And a first ever on a Mac, a forward facing headphone jack.

Inside is where the M4 Pro shines. With availability of up to 14 cores you should see a marked improvement in multithreaded performance. And with the M4 Pro GPU offering up to 20 cores, you will see a 2x improvement over the M4 chip.

Mac mini wth M4

Three Thunderbolt 4 ports arrive on the Mac mini with M4. These support up to three also displays–two running at up to 6K and one running at up to 5K. Like the M4 Pro, you get two USB-C ports on the front offering USB 3 speeds and the same front facing headphone jack.

There’s a lot more to these new machines. Follow this link to read Apple’s Press Release for the nitty gritty details.

Pricing

The new Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 with 16GB of memory while the Mac mini with M4 Pro starts at $1399.