Apple Announces New Mac mini, Leaving the Mac Studio and Mac Pro Hanging
Hartley Charlton, reporting for MacRumors:
Apple today announced fully redesigned Mac mini models featuring the M4 and M4 Pro chips, a considerably smaller casing, two front-facing USB-C ports, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and more.
The product refresh marks the first time the Mac mini has been redesigned in over a decade. The enclosure now measures just five by five inches and contains a new thermal architecture where air is guided up through the device’s foot to different levels of the system.
The new Mac mini can be configured with either the M4 or M4 Pro chip, with the latter allowing for a 14-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, and up to 64GB of memory. The Mac mini with the M4 chip features a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and now starts with 16GB of unified memory as standard. The M4 Pro features 273GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The Mac mini starts at $600, but the upgrades are where Apple’s pricing begins to hurt. 16 gigabytes of memory is fine in the base model and is exactly what I was expecting for years, but the machine still ships with 256 GB of storage at the low end. This makes the $600 Mac mini a nonstarter for anywhere but server environments, where network-attached storage is more commonly used. The best Mac mini for the money is the $800 version, which comes with a more respectable amount of storage. I think the worst is the high-end but base-M4 24 GB memory model, which retails at $1,000, an abysmal value. In fact, I’d usually say any Mac mini above $1,000 is a bad deal, but that would be if the Mac Studio were in the running for Best Desktop Mac.
The bump from M4 to M4 Pro is modest, aligned with last year’s realigning of central processing cores in the M3 Pro. For $400, all that’s added is two more CPU cores and six more graphics cores. For video editors, I guess the upgrade is worth it, but that’s a narrow subset splurging for the $1,400 model. If someone is spending that much money on a Mac, I’d advise them to get a MacBook Pro instead, which will have the same chip (on Wednesday) but a whole laptop attached for just about $1,000 more.1 The more upgrades, the worse the value — and the more appealing a base-model MacBook Pro becomes.
Of course, the logical solution for maximum price-to-performance is the Mac Studio, but again, that computer is out of the running: It’s stuck with an M2 Max from nearly two years ago, and at this rate, even the base model M4 could do laps around it in specific single-core-heavy tests. The Mac Studio, as it stands, is objectively a bad value, and that’s even considering the laughable proposition of the Mac Pro. When the Mac mini’s specifications first leaked Monday night, I immediately thought of how fragmented Apple’s desktop lineup is. From one dimension, it makes sense: Desktop Macs don’t sell well, so instead of perfecting the lineup, Apple just decided to make a computer for every specific use case. But the only two reasonably priced desktop Macs with specific use cases that anyone should actually buy are the mid-range iMac and the low-end $800 Mac mini, perhaps with a Studio Display. Neither of those computers is particularly well-equipped for professional workloads, leaving professionals to buy a MacBook Pro.
All roads lead to the MacBook Pro, which I still believe is Apple’s best computer. Here’s how I’d recreate Steve Jobs’ iconic grid in 2024:
Portable | Desktop | |
---|---|---|
Consumer | MacBook Air | Mac mini and iMac |
Pro | MacBook Pro | MacBook Pro (?) |
The Mac mini and iMac each have a specific specialized purpose — the Mac mini is cheap and smaller than ever; the iMac is an all-in-one — but the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are both long in the tooth and slow by comparison. At this point, even the Mac Pro has a better reason for existing than the Mac Studio: peripheral component interconnect express slots, or PCIe expansion. Apple needs to start updating the Mac Studio every year alongside the MacBooks Pro, or it should just kill the product line entirely, shift Mx Ultra resources to the Mac Pro, lower the price of the tower by a few thousand dollars, and market the MacBook Pro as the computer most creative professionals should purchase. People really underestimate the desktop-laptop lifestyle, and as someone who’s been living it for a year now, I can testify that it’s awesome. I’ve never felt happier using a computer.
The bottom line is this: Anyone looking for a professional or even prosumer Mac should look toward the Mac laptop line — the base-model MacBook Pro or a high-end option, depending on if they’re eyeing the M4 Pro Mac mini or the Mac Studio — and away from the exorbitant upgrade prices Apple charges. The M4 Pro Mac mini is too expensive, the Mac Studio is too old, and the Mac Pro is just neglected. There are three solutions to this conundrum: (a) lower the prices of Mac mini upgrades, (b) update the Mac Studio every year, or (c) ditch the Mac Studio for a cheaper Mac Pro. All three do just fine but accomplish different objectives: the first makes desktop Macs more attractive; the second subverts MacBook Pro sales; and the third positions the desktop Mac line as specialized and niche.
As for the new Mac mini itself, I think the redesign is adorable. It’s just 5 inches by 5 inches — a tad larger than an Apple TV — and works well in any arrangement. Thunderbolt 5 is a nice addition, its $600 starting price is competitive, and it’s awe-inspiring how Apple managed to engineer this much technology into such a minuscule chassis, even with the power supply enclosed. The only trade-off is the new bottom-located power button, and even that is unimportant and not even nearly as bad as the Magic Mouse’s port. Modern Macs don’t need to be restarted or powered off frequently; putting them to sleep works just fine and is more efficient. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve hit the power button on my MacBook Pro.
-
People will be upset that I said “just” $1,000 more, but $1,000 isn’t really all that much for a whole entire laptop. ↩︎