Apple’s (AAPL) week of announcements continued Tuesday as the company took the wraps off of its newest Mac mini desktop computer and all-new M4 Pro chip, just ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season.
The news comes after Apple debuted its updated iMac desktop, complete with the company’s M4 chip, on Monday.
The Mac mini, which is available for preorder today and on sale Nov. 8, starts at $599 and features a significantly smaller design, measuring just 5 inches by 5 inches, down from 7.75 inches by 7.75 inches. Despite the smaller footprint, Apple says the latest mini gets more horsepower than its predecessor.
Besides the obvious holiday rush, the recent announcements come at an important time as the company moves to keep its momentum going.
Apple’s Mac segment struggled in 2023, following a blowout in 2022 caused by pandemic-driven spending among consumers and enterprise customers on computers and smartphones, with revenue falling from $40.1 billion in 2022 to $29.3 billion in 2023.
But sales have begun to normalize, with Apple reporting Mac revenue of $22.2 billion over the first nine months of the fiscal year versus $21.7 billion during the same period last year. In Q3, Mac revenue totaled $7 billion, up from $6.8 billion last year.
PC shipments more broadly are steadily recovering after two years of declines following the jump in growth at the onset of the pandemic. According to Gartner, shipments of Apple’s Macs grew 3.5% in the third quarter from 5.4 million last year to 5.6 million this year.
Apple’s pint-sized desktop features a bevy of connections and ports, making it more useful for consumers and enterprise users who need to hook up various peripherals including expanded storage and tools for photo editing. That includes an ethernet jack, HDMI port, and three USB-C Thunderbolt slots in the rear of the mini and two USB-C ports up front, along with a headphone jack.
Inside, Apple has outfitted the base Mac mini with its M4 chip and 16GB of memory, up from the M2 processor and 8GB of memory found in the prior generation of minis. Apple says the M4-powered mini’s central processing unit (CPU) is up 1.8x faster than the CPU found in the M1-powered model. The M4’s graphics processing unit (GPU), meanwhile, is 2.2x faster than the M1 mini’s GPU.
In addition to the new Mac mini, Apple also revealed its M4 Pro chip. A more powerful version of the M4, Apple says the M4 Pro features a 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, and 16-core neural engine and can be equipped with up to 64GB of memory. Apple says a Mac mini with the M4 Pro is twice as fast as a mini running the company’s older M2 Pro chip.