14 years later, the Mac mini has finally been reborn

Apple’s big week of Mac announcements continued this morning with the unveiling of the M4 Mac mini, featuring a new chip, a revamped design, and some important hardware changes. Importantly, it marks the first time the Mac mini has seen a major redesign since the unibody model launched in 2010.

The footprint is now just 5 by 5 inches, taking up less than half the space on your desk. To be fair, it’s slightly taller now at two inches (up from 1.4 inches), a bit like a shrunken down Mac Studio, which is 7.7 by 7.7 inches. The new Mac mini is also significantly lighter at just a pound and a half. The previous Mac mini weighed 2.6 pounds.

Thanks to the reduction in aluminum and manufactured with 100% renewable materials, Apple is calling the new Mac mini its first carbon neutral Mac.

At the same time, Apple has added the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini, bringing it in line with the iMac and iPad Pro. Compared to the M2 chip in the previous-generation Mac mini, the M4 adds up two CPU cores for a total of 10. That includes six performance cores and four efficiency cores.

The M4 Pro, meanwhile, gets you up to a 14-core CPU, which comes with 10 Performance cores. In at least some tasks, the CPU is 1.8x faster than the M1, 1.4x faster than the M2. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro is twice as fast as the M2 Pro — again, at least in some tasks.

Graphics also get a boost with the M4 chip. The base model of the M4 still starts with 10 GPU cores, same as the M2. While the bigger improvement to graphics happened in the M3 generation with Dynamic Caching, the cores…