I can’t overstate how radical Apple’s Mac mini was when it debuted in January 2005. It was tiny, measuring just 6.5 inches squared and two inches high—the smallest Mac ever. It boasted a new Bring-Your-Own (BYO) design model that enabled customers to use whichever monitor, keyboard, and mouse they liked with the computer—which was another departure from consumer Macs at the time, namely the iMac and eMac, which had all these accessories baked in. Such modularity conferred several advantages for consumers, particularly a low entry cost, of just $499, and the ability to use their existing PC accessories with the device. Because of this modularity, the Mac mini quickly became known as the “gateway” Mac for people considering switching to Apple—PC users who were curious but reluctant due to cost.
The Mac mini was a gamble for Apple, but the fact that it’s still around after 20 years proves that it was a smart one. Still, the device’s design has changed little during the past two decades. Apple flattened its height to 1.4 inches in 2010 and expanded its footprint to 7.7 inches square. A year later, the company ditched its optical drive. Even when Apple started redesigning its computers in 2021 to showcase that its Apple Silicon Macs were radically different from the Intel ones of old, the Mac mini continued to look the same.
Until last month.
I spoke with Kate Bergeron, Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering, and Sophie Le Guen, who works on the Mac marketing team, about how they developed this mini and what sets it apart from previous iterations.
‘A three-legged stool’
“Mac Mini holds a special place in our hearts,” Bergeron tells me over video call in late November, and the sincerity comes through clearly in her voice. “This product is an incredibly important part of the Mac lineup, and we didn’t want to do it a disservice by not spending the time we needed to to make it great.”
Bergeron has a long history with Apple’s tiniest Mac, having worked on the device since its inception in 2005, and the years it took her team to come up with this new redesign was, in my opinion, time well spent.
The new 2024 M4 Mac mini has the smallest footprint of any Mac ever, at just five inches squared, and it has returned to its original two-inch height. That means that Apple took the volume of the previous Mac mini and reduced it by a staggering amount, nearly 40%. Yet packed inside are Apple’s most powerful chips ever—the M4 and M4 Pro—and a base RAM that’s been doubled to 16GB. All of this means that this Mac is a tiny beast that can run Apple’s new Apple Intelligence platform without a hitch. In addition, Apple has added front-facing ports to the device for the first time. And it’s kept the entry-level price at $599—the same as that of the previous model. Oh, and the new M4 Mac mini is carbon-neutral, the company’s first Mac to achieve that designation.
Like many tech enthusiasts, I’m always intrigued by the design process that goes on behind locked doors in Cupertino. When Apple implements a redesign that is this drastic, where do the designers and engineers start? With a sketch of the hardware, and then they try to figure out how to pack everything inside? Or do they start with the specs, and then build a design around that?
It turns out I hadn’t considered all the variables.
“I would call it a three-legged stool, and the piece that is probably not obvious to too many people is the silicon part,” Bergeron says. By “silicon part,” she means Apple Silicon, the overarching name given to the chips that power Apple’s products. These chips include the A-series in iPhones and the M-series in Macs.
Bergeron explains that when it comes to designing a Mac, the team of Apple Silicon chip designers is as essential as the hardware engineering team, which develops the electrical and mechanical aspects of a device, and the Apple design team, which is tasked with creating the device’s visual look.
“It’s all of us together trying to figure out what the journey of the product is going to represent,” Bergeron says. She explains that the Mac mini was one of the last Macs left to get a redesign after Apple replaced the Intel chips in its computers with Apple Silicon chips. (The previous Mac mini, with the M2 chipset, retained the same Mac mini design from over a decade ago. The only Mac that now needs a post-Apple Silicon design update is the Mac Pro.)
The first question she and her colleagues asked, she says, was, “What is the Mac mini that we want to create that’s optimized around Apple Silicon?” They had to find a balance between the Apple Silicon available to them (which included the M3 and M4 series chips) and Mac mini users’ performance and design expectations.
They knew that Mac mini users would count on the device being both small and versatile. “So in the very beginning, our designers [brought] us something that’s probably too small to get what we want,” Bergeron acknowledges with a smile, “but that’s their job—to challenge us in the physical space.”
A tiny Pro computer
For the 2024 Mac mini redesign, Bergeron says that the “wild card, but in a good way” was their decision to include the M4 Pro chip in the design—an optional upgrade that gives users more computing and graphics processing power versus the base M4 chip included as standard in the new Mac mini.
“We probably could have been even more aggressive [with the smaller size of the Mac mini] if we decided to only design for M4, but we felt that on this journey, it was important to address the pro customer as well,” Bergeron says. They just had to figure out how to rebalance that three-legged stool.
Including the M4 Pro chip as an option in the new Mac mini led to other challenges that the three teams needed to address. For example, a more powerful chip like the M4 Pro requires more cooling, which presents acoustic considerations: The internal fan begins whirring to cool down the powerful processor when the Mac mini is under heavy operational loads, such as when a user renders advanced 3D models.
“It’s very important for us—especially with a product that you can put just about anywhere—that [it] perform in a way where the noise is minimal,” Bergeron says. “We have to bundle all of those [considerations] together and do a lot of negotiating with the design team to figure out where we’ll land.”
Apple’s Mac mini turnaround
That negotiating process has enabled Apple to bring entirely new features to the M4 Mac mini, as well. Every previous Mac mini since 2005 had only offered I/O ports, including those all-important USB ports, on the back of the computer. The 2024 model now sports two additional USB ports on the front, as well as a headphone jack.
Sophie Le Guen, from the Mac’s product marketing team, offers two reasons for this major I/O expansion.
First was the success of the Mac Studio, Apple’s 2022 compact computer that was bigger than a Mac mini but smaller than a Mac Pro, and designed for professionals, including animators and filmmakers. The Mac Studio was the first Mac desktop computer to feature front-facing I/O since the 2012 Mac Pro. “So that helped,” Le Guen tells me.
Second was user feedback about the previous Mac mini: “Some people would change the orientation of the device so that they could have easy access to each of the [rear USB] ports,” Le Guen says. “That led to [us saying], ‘Let’s listen to the users and ensure that we are offering the convenience they’re looking for.’”
Meanwhile, users had also been asking for the ability to swap out the Apple-installed SSD storage for larger storage modules after purchase. The 2024 Mac mini features does feature modular storage (which users can upgrade with some effort, and only on select M4 Mac mini models), but not so much because it’s what some users desired. It was merely one of the trade-offs Apple needed to make during the design process in order to facilitate production. Bergeron says that the modular storage helped provide “flexibility in manufacturing” when the teams were trying to figure out what storage configurations would be necessary on the device.
The Mac Mini “is packed so tightly that actually, in the larger storage configurations, there’s not enough room on the main logic board to put the storage right onto the board,” Bergeron explains. The use of modular storage allows Apple to still provide the storage configurations users want—something it wouldn’t be otherwise able to do due to the limited size of some of the tiny Mac’s other components.
The placement of the new Mac mini’s power button, on the underside of the rear corner of the device, represents another design compromise, but one that some users have complained about.
“We tried and, I think, succeeded, to get as much I/O onto this little product as we could. And so that necessitates some choices in other things,” Bergeron says. She notes that the new placement on the recessed lip of the device offers “pretty good access” to the button—something I would agree with after having used the new Mac mini.
“And honestly, in Apple Silicon Macs, it’s very rare to use the power button” since most people just allow the computer to go to sleep when not in use, Bergeron notes. She says that “the versatility of having all of those [new front-facing USB] ports we thought was really [more] important.”
The Mac goes carbon-neutral
Apple has pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2030. The company has made a massive step towards that goal with the new Mac mini, which is Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac in the company’s history.
For the first time, Apple is using recycled copper and 100% recycled zinc in many of the device’s internal components. Externally, it even uses 80% recycled steel in the stainless steel Apple logo that adorns the top of the mini’s aluminum body. “It’s the first time on a Mac product where that logo has been made from recycled steel,” Bergeron says.
The Mac mini’s body is made from an extruded piece of aluminum cut to the appropriate breadth. In the past, these slices of aluminum were cut with a traditional manufacturing saw that had a thickness of about three millimeters. But that meant that unusable aluminum shavings up to 3mm thick were created with every slice. So, Apple decided to redesign the saw.
“The team developed a new technology, which is a diamond-plated nylon wire,” Bergeron reveals. This wire measures just a fraction of a millimeter thick. “So every time we slice . . . we keep more and more of that material, which is pretty great. [It] doesn’t ever have to even go through recycling. It gets used right in product.”
A sign of Apple’s future?
Apple will certainly try to replicate the environmental achievements of the new Mac mini. I wonder, too, if the computer’s significantly smaller size means that the company is also moving towards a future that prioritizes compact form factors—just as Apple did, almost obsessively, under former design chief Jony Ive. Since Ive’s departure, some Apple devices have grown in girth, including the MacBook Pro and various iPhone models.
Unsurprisingly, Apple wouldn’t comment on its future product road map.
With the M4 Mac mini, Bergeron says, “We wanted to make sure that we’re going to give customers value for many years to come. And we’ll see where the vision takes us next time.”
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