Apple’s week of Mac announcements, including the redesigned Mac mini

Apple’s week of Mac announcements, including the redesigned Mac mini

Apple shook things up this week with its new Mac announcements. Rather than a single launch video announcing all of their new products, they announced one new Mac update each day (Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), complete with its own short introduction video. I really liked that change of pace as it extended the interest and excitement. In fact, it allowed Apple to gobble up all of the non-election news on an otherwise quiet week in tech.

Mac mini

I’m starting with this one, because it was the announcement I was most looking forward to. After many years of essentially unchanged Mac mini hardware, Apple finally gave it a design refresh that truly lives up to its name. As you can see in the photo above, the Mac mini is now taller, but with a more compact footprint than the former flatter but wider iteration. In fact, it looks like a baby Mac Studio. It now includes a headphone jack and two USB-C ports right up front. On the back, it still includes HDMI and either 1 Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet, plus three Thunderbolt 4 ports for M4 models or three Thunderbolt 5 ports for M4 Pro models.

Apple released several fun marketing images showing lots of different types of third-party hardware accessories with the new Mac mini, including multiple images featuring mechanical keyboards. This did nothing but add fuel to my desire for Apple to release a first-party modern mechanical board, but I’m not holding my breath.

One unexpected area of controversy for the new Mac mini is that its power button is not on the bottom of the chassis next to the cooling fan’s air vent. Frankly, this is a silly thing to be upset about as it should be very rare that you have to do a full shut down of your Mac that requires you to physically press the power button to start it back up. A periodic restart is healthy, but you can do that from the Apple menu without touching any part of the Mac mini case itself.

iMac

Actually the first of the week’s Mac announcements, the iMac didn’t get a redesign, but it does come in a range of updated colors. This is not a big deal, but I love that Apple returned whimsy to the Mac line with fun colors when it introduced the M1 iMac, and I’m glad that they’re continuing to stay with that choice in this updated release. The iMac now includes a 12 MP Center Stage front-facing camera that now includes Desk View, where when you’re on a video call or recording a video, you can actually record what’s on the desk at your fingertips without manually re-orienting the camera’s position.

Given that the iMac was the first of the week’s Mac announcements, it was the first Mac to include the M4 processor, previously only available in the iPad Pro. We’re only four years away from the launch of the first Macs to include the original M1 processor, so the fact that we’re on the fourth generation of Apple Silicon chips for the Mac in four years speaks volumes about Apple’s ability to quickly iterate on its chip designs and on its partnership with TSMC to manufacture them.

MacBook Pro

No redesign or even new colors here. The MacBook Pro update was primarily about getting the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chips into Apple’s line of pro laptops. I’ll leave it to the speeds-and-feeds guys on YouTube to benchmark these against prior Macs and the latest comparable PC laptops. Like the iMac, these get the new front-facing camera with Desk View.

Quite refreshingly, all of Apple’s Macs now come with a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, an increase from the former 8 GB entry configuration. Apple even took the time to update the MacBook Air to at least 16 GB of RAM, even though the MacBook Air hasn’t yet received the M4 chip. And all of those Macs still have the same starting price. It would be fair to criticize Apple for taking so long set 16 GB as the base RAM configuration, but it’s great for consumers that it’s here now, and with no price increase.

Apple also updated the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad to include USB-C ports instead of Lightning, but for those of you really stuck on the fact that the Magic Mouse’s charging port is on the bottom, it’s still where it has always been. No redesign of any of Apple’s input peripherals apart from the change of port type.