Like that machine, the mini has a fan for cooling, but it also has the most efficiently cooled chassis of all the new M1 Macs. But the Apple M1 chip stays the same no matter which configuration you choose, and it matches the one in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. The review unit I received costs $1,299, as it increases the SSD size to 1TB and doubles the memory. For that money, you get an eight-core CPU, eight-core GPU, 256GB of storage, and 8GB of RAM. (It’s also worth noting that Apple was using the mini as its early Arm test unit for developers, so the company was already partway to a consumer product.)Īpple has dropped the starting price for the M1-powered Mac mini down to $699, which is $100 less than before. Apple opened new possibilities for the mini with the big upgrade it got in 2018, and two years later, it’s one of the first three Macs to transition away from Intel processors and showcase the potential of Apple silicon and the M1 chip. Sure, most people go for the traditional experience and plug in a display, mouse, and keyboard - but you can also have it serve as a home theater PC, or put it to work with professional photo or audio editing, or turn a group of minis into a server farm.
The Mac mini has always been Apple’s most flexible desktop computer.
