The world’s smallest, powerful AI PC? It’s a Mac mini

Amazon might have accidentally broken the story early, but as anticipated the introduction of Apple’s all-new, M4-processor-powered Mac mini is making big waves. The tiny but incredibly powerful desktop exemplifies all the advantages of Apple Silicon — smaller, faster, and cheaper than we could have seen before, a new building block in the Apple Intelligence ecosystem.

All the rumors were true (again)

It turns out that all the expectation for the tiny Mac were correct:

The Mac mini offers either an M4 or M4 Pro chip.

The M4 CPU offers 4 performance, 6 efficiency cores and a 10-core GPU.

The M4 Pro offers 10 performance and 4 efficiency cores, boosted by a 20-core GPU. And it has 75% more memory bandwidth than the M3 Pro, twice as much bandwidth as available to any AI chip. 

All have at least 16GB of unified memory.

As anticipated, it’s much faster than the M1 Mac mini which blew everybody’s minds when it was introduced, and the Neural engine in the M4 Pro model is more than three times faster than the M1 Mac mini.

For connectivity, you’ll find two USB-C ports, a headphone jack on the front, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports (or Thunderbolt 5 ports on the Mac Pro models), Ethernet, and HDMI at the rear.

The M4 Mac mini can support up to two 6K displays and up to one 5K display, while the M4 Pro can support up to three 6K displays at 60Hz. You get hardware-based ray-tracing, too.

For size, it’s just 5-in. square (about 127mm each side).

Pricing: Mac mini with M4 starts at $599. The Mac mini with an M4 Pro starts at $1,399.

Apple

The power, the glory, and now the M4 Pro

Apple Silicon has been transforming Apple’s ecosystem ever since the company acquired PA Semi. First, it enabled the company to deliver uniquely powerful smartphones that delivered computational performance at low energy. Apple has now taken those ideas and put them inside Macs equipped with M-series chips. Not only do these Macs make the Intel chips the company previously used the equivalent of Elmer Fudd trying (and failing) to keep up with the Road Runner, but they also deliver performance while sipping electricity.

As a result, Apple can continue to focus on delivering real computers in multiple form factors — want a tablet? Here’s an M4 iPad Pro. Looking for a super powerful laptop? MacBook Pro is there for you. Searching for a small “bring your own mouse and keyboard” system that won’t break the bank for use in your home or office? This is what Mac mini was born for.

Apple Silicon continues to unleash the imagination of Apple’s product design teams, and I suspect we’ve barely seen what’s coming. And all this performance power is now available to Apple Intelligence, which Apple will introduce globally into spring 2025.

Apple

How can a Mac mini help you get things done?

Hyperbole aside, how will Mac mini help you get your work done? Apple shares the following proof points to attest to the performance boost you can expect from M4 chips in mini:

When compared to the best-selling PC desktop in its price range, the mini is up to six times faster and 1/20 its size.

With M4, Mac mini delivers up to 1.8 times faster CPU performance and 2.2 times faster GPU performance over the M1 model.

When compared to the Mac mini with an Intel Core i7, the new M4 mini delivers up to 33 times faster image upscaling performance in Photomator.

When compared to an M1 Mac mini, the new model is up to twice as fast transcribing on-device AI speech-to-text in MacWhisper.

These real world performance advantages are even more impressive on the M4 Pro device.

When compared to the Mac mini with Intel Core i7, the Mac mini with M4 Pro performs spreadsheet calculations up to four times faster in Microsoft Excel. It’s also 26 times faster at DNA sequencing in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW.

The Neural Engine in the M4 Pro is also more than three times faster than in the M1 Mac mini.

M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GBps of memory bandwidth — twice as much as any AI PC chip — for accelerating AI workloads.

Apple

Climate control

So, apart from being smaller, faster, and more energy efficient, how else can the new Mac mini help your company reduce its carbon impact? Just by existing, I suppose — the new Mac mini is Apple’s first carbon neutral Mac. It is made with more than 50% recycled content overall, including 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards, and 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. Apple has also told us the device uses 85% less aluminium than it did before. (Even the electricity used in its manufacture is sourced from 100% renewable electricity.) 

This is important stuff and marks a really solid stepping stone on the company’s progress toward being completely carbon neutral by the end of the decade. But Apple is going even a little further than that. 

The company understands that within carbon neutrality, it must also consider the consequences of its products during normal use. To address this, Apple has invested in clean energy projects around the world to help mitigate the electricity consumption customers will cause when using these Macs. It is also investing in carbon credits, which it characterizes as being “high-quality.”

Apple has slammed some carbon credit schemes for not delivering what they promise, but in this case has focused those efforts on nature-based projects. Finally, the packaging for the Mac is also entirely fiber-based. Apple aims to remove all plastic from its packaging by next year.

The new AI PC

What this means for users is that Apple’s new AI PC is also the most environmentally-friendly PC. For enterprise buyers, it means that when you purchase a larger number of these machines you’re also ticking a few more boxes in your corporate sustainability policy, while also entering a new space for digital transformation of your business. Plus, of course, you’re reducing your TCO, tech support draw, and reducing your exposure to ransomware and hacks.

With Apple Intelligence already available in some nations and scheduled to arrive in Europe in April next year, Apple’s approach to AI is mandatory. It has set out to design a safe, private, and secure system that works across its entire ecosystem, and the immense contribution of Private Cloud Compute means any business can begin to explore the productivity-boosting capability of AI on machines more powerful than anything else you can purchase at that price.

And given that Private Cloud Compute is something you can weave into your internal enterprise applications, it makes sense for heavily regulated industries to explore it, too. The company is defining what everyone should expect from cloud-based AI.

It’s also important to think about how Apple Intelligence works across Apple’s ecosystem — smartphone, tablet, and Mac. It means the company now offers business the fastest and most flexible secure AI experience. It’s hard not to avoid thinking that when it comes to the incoming world of AI PCs, Apple now (as anticipated) offers the world’s very best ecosystem for AI — all in a tiny box that has created very big waves in a very big pond.

By its actions, Apple is making it clear that it sees the AI opportunity very well and intends to seize the moment. 

Please follow me on LinkedIn, Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill group on MeWe.