According to information from Apple, the next Mac mini will be the smallest and most powerful ever and will be available in late 2024.

Bloomberg journalist Mark Garman reports that Apple is planning a major redesign of the new Mac mini M4, which will hit store shelves later this year.

If true, it would be remarkable, as Apple has not significantly changed the design of the Mac mini in over a decade. But according to Garman, Apple is working to make the smallest Mac even smaller.

He claims that while the new Mac mini M4 may be slightly taller than the current Mac mini M2, Apple is working to make it much smaller overall and closer to the size of an Apple TV box.

According to the report, Apple has people working on an M4 version on which to base this slimmed-down Mac mini, as well as a version with an M4 Pro chip, which (if true) would be the first information about the existence of the M4 Pro.

Since we still only know of the Apple M4 chip in the new iPad Pro 2024, it is perhaps not surprising that this new Mac mini M4 is described by Gurman as "essentially an iPad Pro in a small box."

According to Gurman, the base M4 version of the new Mac mini should be available later this year, with a possibly more powerful M4 Pro model expected in October 2024.

While the new Mac mini M4 report is exciting, it is not the first time we have heard about Apple's M4 2024 plans; it is already known that Apple will launch the M4 MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini this year, and the company is also planning to release the M4 MacBook Pro in the fall of 2024, This could be the first year that Apple's hottest chips will be available in all major computers.

But this is the first we've heard about the Mac mini redesign, and we don't know how much difference it will make to customers; the Mac mini is already one of the best mini-PCs on the market, precisely because it's affordable, very small, powerful, and high-performance

M4

Upgrading with M4 power is certainly a good thing, but I don't know if going smaller will make a big difference. It would be great to have an even smaller, more powerful PC that you could sneak into your entertainment center or family desk PC, but if the price is higher for the smaller size, it may not be worth the upgrade.