Apple's Mac mini M4: faster, smaller, 16GB standard, and the firm's first 'carbon neutral' Mac

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Apple has revealed the second of its Macs for this week of announcements at the close of October, and this time it's the Mac mini M4 to follow the iMac M4 that was unveiled yesterday - with only the MacBook Pro M4 remaining, surely to follow tomorrow.

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More memory for the base Mac mini M4 - hurray! (Image Credit: Apple)

The Mac mini M4 doesn't have much in the way of surprises up its tiny little sleeve, though, as all the rumors came to fruition - and Amazon actually leaked the spec by accident yesterday.

We're getting a more compact Mac mini, as predicted, measuring 5-inches x 5-inches, with the M4 CPU inside, and the choice of one faster model which has the M4 Pro. The latter sports a 12‑core CPU, 16‑core GPU (and 16-core Neural Engine), with the option to upgrade to a 14-core CPU (and 20-core GPU) at the very top end. Of those 14-cores, 10 are performance and 4 are efficiency cores, so it's a powerful split.

The M4 Pro model supports up to 64GB of unified memory (offering 273GB/s of memory bandwidth), which is double the maximum loadout you could previously get with the Mac mini. More good news on the memory front: the base model has 16GB of system RAM, and the starting price sticks at $599 for that entry-level Mac mini.

So, it looks like 16GB as a base amount of RAM for all Apple's Macs is actually happening at this point, as surely all MacBook Pro M4 models will have 16GB at the minimum (and we'd be surprised if the MacBook Air M4 didn't follow that lead early next year).

Apple notes that with the vanilla M4 SoC, the new Mac mini sports up to 1.8x faster CPU performance and 2.2x faster GPU performance compared to the M1 version of Apple's compact computer.

As for the M4 Pro, we're told: "With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU in M4, and both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini for the first time."

Apple also gives us a few performance comparisons of the new Mac mini with M4 Pro, versus the Mac mini with M2 Pro, with the former being up to twice as fast for rendering motion graphics to RAM in Motion, and finishing 3D renders up to 2.9x faster in Blender.

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The Mac mini is now just 5-inches x 5-inches (Image Credit: Apple)

Thunderbolt 5 with the M4 Pro

There are two USB-C ports on the front, plus an audio jack (as speculated on due to the blurry leaked image from Amazon). On the back of the new Mac mini with M4, there's a trio of Thunderbolt 4 ports, whereas with the M4 Pro version you get three Thunderbolt 5 connectors. There's also Gigabit Ethernet and an HDMI port.

Apple further declares that the Mac mini M4 is its first 'carbon neutral' Mac. The actual PC is built using over 50% recycled material, and 100% of the aluminum in the chassis is recycled, plus there's 100% recycled gold plating in the circuit boards (those designed by Apple). Also, 100% recycled rare earth elements are in all the magnets.

With the electricity used to manufacture the Mac mini coming fully from renewable sources, Apple has also ensured to use lower carbon modes of shipping (namely ships) to reduce emissions.

Apple claims that altogether, the carbon footprint of the new Mac mini has been reduced by over 80% - and to offset the remaining emissions, Apple has purchased "high-quality carbon credits from nature-based projects" we're told, to make the computer carbon neutral.

The Mac mini M4 goes on sale come November 8, and pre-orders are open now, starting at $599 as mentioned, the same price as the previous-gen model.