The Mac mini finally lives up to its name

Apple’s Week of Press Releases continues, with Monday’s announcement of a new M4 iMac followed by Tuesday’s new M4 Mac mini. This caught the Macworld team slightly off guard because we thought the company would go to the M4 MacBook Pro first, and leave the mini for last. Why? Because this year’s mini got a major redesign, and Apple usually likes to finish on a high note. Maybe the schedule got rearranged at the last minute after that unfortunate Amazon leak.

Redesigns are important. Not just because they enable customers to show off that they’ve got the latest model–although you can be sure that Apple knows the value of that–and not just because of cosmetic niceties. (If we cared about those we’d be complaining about the lack of a Space Black color finish… which we’re totally not mad about, honest.) The 2024 Mac mini certainly looks good, but design is about much more than just aesthetics; in this case, the benefits of the redesign are functional, with the device finally cashing the check written by that brand name all those years ago. It’s actually a mini Mac in a true and pragmatic sense.

The Mac mini started out at 6.5-inch square, which was impressively petite by the standards of 2005. But as computers have grown smaller, the mini hasn’t. In fact its desktop footprint has actually gotten bigger, with a bump to 7.7 inches in 2010. (For visualization purposes, in case you don’t own one, the 2022 mini’s footprint is roughly the same as four Apple TV 4K units arranged in a square. Which might not be a totally fair comparison, but the point is that it’s not exactly unobtrusive.)

The depth decreased, admittedly, but I’m yet to be convinced that this matters as much. And the weight has remained largely constant. It became more of a Mac skinny than a Mac mini.

Why does this matter? Because the Mac mini’s entire raison d’être is to be small. Its purpose is to take up as little space as possible on a modern minimalist desktop, to be carried easily from room to room, to slip easily into a remote worker’s rucksack as they shuttle between home and office. Having a small footprint is its whole thing, baby.

The tech upgrades for the M4 Mac mini are definitely nice. I like the two-generation processor bump and the increase in CPU and GPU cores; I like the switch from rear USB-A ports to front-facing USB-C ports; I like having the option to get up to 64GB of RAM and support three displays even if I don’t go for the Pro model. These are all valid and pleasing upgrades.

But let’s be honest here: we don’t love the Mac mini for its specs but for its form factor. The 2024 mini is a tidy 5-inch square and has dropped in weight by more than a pound, making it a real marvel of Apple engineering. It looks like a tiny Mac Studio and in photos, it’s almost too small to believe. It’s not just significantly smaller than its predecessor—as Apple said in its announcement video, it’s 1/20th the size of the top-selling PC desktop in its price range and more than six times faster. The Mac mini has always been deceptively powerful, but it hasn’t quite lived up to its descriptive surname.

Until now. With the 2024 redesign, the Mac mini’s form factor is finally delivering the goods.