• The Mac Mini is a small iMac PC with everything but the screen, SSD and added accessories.
• It contains considerable performance hardware and can be upgraded with the M4 Pro chip for nearly double the price.
• It also comes with Apple Intelligence features, which will become available for South Africans in December.

Fresh after launching its latest iMac computers, Apple has quietly added to its PC lineup with the new Mac Mini (stylised “mini”), a screenless PC that is much smaller than your usual tower, but still packed with the same performance hardware as a regular iMac.

The Mac Mini is just five by five inches so it’s helpful for anyone without a lot of office space. You can connect any HDMI display to it, and it is packed with the latest Apple hardware, including a stronger M4 processor, suitable RAM and storage space and it is much cheaper than the new iMac.

Of course, Apple Intelligence is also included and the company says it has an over 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across its materials, manufacturing, transportation and running.

The next generation of Mac PCs

Comparing its hardware to the new iMac, the Mac Mini is the real performance monster of the Mac family. Disregarding the Retina display, Apple has packed the tiny silver box with stronger hardware than the new iMac, including the M4 Pro processor and M4 Pro GPU, containing 14-cores and 20-cores respectively.

It starts with 16GB of Unified Memory (RAM and storage) – supporting up to 64GB. It says that the Mac Mini also comes with a Thunderbolt 5 port, capable of really fast data transfers (120 Gb/s) for users of external storage.

There is no additional SSD, so external memory will likely be a necessity.

“The new Mac mini delivers gigantic performance in an unbelievably small design thanks to the power efficiency of Apple silicon and an innovative new thermal architecture,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

“Combined with the performance of M4 and the new M4 Pro chip, enhanced connectivity on both the front and back, and the arrival of Apple Intelligence, Mac mini is more capable and versatile than ever, and there is nothing else like it.”

Indeed, unlike the new iMac, you’ll have to but the mouse and keyboard separately.

Just how fast is the M4 Pro chip?

Apple has given some comparisons to note the performance speed of the new M4 Pro chip, compared with a PC equipped with an i7 Intel processor and a Mac Mini with only the M1 chip.

It says that the M4 chip can offer up to 13.3 times faster gaming performance with the latest edition of World of Warcraft running on Intel, but since that game is from 2004 it’s not much of a boast. Meanwhile, the M4 chip allows spreadsheet calculations on Excel that are 1.7 times faster than the M1 chip.

This comparison seems odd and that Apple is grasping at straws. We don’t know of many office workers that will say, “Man, I really need my Excel calculations to be almost two times as fast as they are now.”

But the M4 Pro chip, which bumps up the price almost double, offers four times faster work in Microsoft Excel, executes scene-edit detection nearly 10 times faster in Adobe Premier Pro and can complete renders nearly three times faster in Blender compared to the M2 Pro chip.

AI features coming later this year

Coming in December for South African users of iPhone devices and iMac PCs, Apple Intelligence is the Cupertino giant’s suite of generative AI features. This includes the addition of ChatGPT accessible right from the OS of the Mac Mini, without needing to make a profile.

There are also Writing Tools to fix grammar, summarise and more, and the new and improved Siri that can handle more complex tasks, like answering messages and fetching images and files for you.

Pricing and availability

The new Mac Mini, with either the M4 chip or the more powerful M4 Pro chip is already up for pre-order in the US, with the company saying it will start arriving for users from 8th November 2024. However, it hasn’t indicated when pre-orders will begin worldwide, like in South Africa.

Likely we’ll know more come 8th November, but the local iStore may have pre-orders from earlier.

The Mac Mini starts at $599 (~R10 511) with the M4 chip standard, and up to ~R24 548 for the Mac Mini with the M4 Pro chip, capable of that fast, fast Excel speed.

“Customers can pre-order the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro starting today, Tuesday, October 29, on apple.com/store and in the Apple Store app in 28 countries and regions, including the U.S. It will start arriving to customers, and in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers, beginning Friday, November 8.”