Apple’s big week of Mac announcements continued this morning with the unveiling of the M4 Mac mini, featuring a new chip, a revamped design, and some important hardware changes. Importantly, it marks the first time the Mac mini has seen a major redesign since the unibody model launched in 2010.
The footprint is now just 5 by 5 inches, taking up less than half the space on your desk. To be fair, it’s slightly taller now at two inches (up from 1.4 inches), a bit like a shrunken down Mac Studio, which is 7.7 by 7.7 inches. The new Mac mini is also significantly lighter at just a pound and a half. The previous Mac mini weighed 2.6 pounds.
Thanks to the reduction in aluminum and manufactured with 100% renewable materials, Apple is calling the new Mac mini its first carbon neutral Mac.
At the same time, Apple has added the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini, bringing it in line with the iMac and iPad Pro. Compared to the M2 chip in the previous-generation Mac mini, the M4 adds up two CPU cores for a total of 10. That includes six performance cores and four efficiency cores.
The M4 Pro, meanwhile, gets you up to a 14-core CPU, which comes with 10 Performance cores. In at least some tasks, the CPU is 1.8x faster than the M1, 1.4x faster than the M2. Meanwhile, the M4 Pro is twice as fast as the M2 Pro — again, at least in some tasks.
Graphics also get a boost with the M4 chip. The base model of the M4 still starts with 10 GPU cores, same as the M2. While the bigger improvement to graphics happened in the M3 generation with Dynamic Caching, the cores are faster, have wider memory bandwidth, and twice the ray tracing performance. You can also upgrade it now to a high-end configuration with 20 GPU cores in the M4 Pro, one more core than was available on the M2 Pro.
It should be noted that the Mac mini skipped the previous generation, so the upgrade is going from the M2 and M2 Pro to the M4 and M4 Pro. Apple is marketing the M4 Mac mini as being six times faster than the top selling PC desktop in the same price range.
Obviously, Apple Intelligence is a big part of this release too, with the boosted Neural Engine in the M4, which is twice as fast as the previous generation. The core count hasn’t changed (still 16 cores), but Apple is continuing to build up examples of local AI processing to speed up tasks in Photos and Premiere Pro.
One of the handiest hardware changes is the port selection. For easy access, you now have two USB-C ports on the front, next to a headphone jack — again, not unlike the Mac Studio.
As was rumored, the two USB-A ports are gone, replaced with three Thunderbolt ports in the back, which supports up to three 6K displays. On the M4 Pro model, those are Thunderbolt 5 ports with 120Gb/s data transfers, whereas the M4 base model is on Thunderbolt 4, which 40Gb/s data transfers. Fortunately, both give you an HDMI port and Ethernet jack on back as well. The power jack is still there, but the power button itself seems to be gone from the photos shown.
Like with the iMac, Apple has also doubled the base memory from 8GB to 16GB after it faced criticism that the previous amount wasn’t enough for multitasking and serious workloads — all without increasing the starting price of $599. For what it’s worth, Apple was charging $200 to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB on the previous Mac mini.
Apple unveiled the new Mac mini a day after the M4 iMac was announced in the midst of what was promised to be an “exciting week of announcements.” The new matching Mac Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad that were announced yesterday alongside the iMac.
Apple is expected to follow up today’s announcement at some point this week with bringing the M4 to the MacBook Pro, as well.
Nearly a month after announcing the GPT-6.1 Sol model, OpenAI unveiled GPT-6.1 Terra today. The latest addition to the family focuses on computer use, visual reasoning, coding, and professional work, while costing 50% less through the API than GPT-5.6 Terra.
OpenAI says Terra can handle everything from filling out browser forms and working inside spreadsheets to interpreting technical drawings and editing videos. The company says it can also complete computer-based tasks more than three times faster than GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol.
ASUS has started selling its UGen Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics card in Europe, bringing its take on Intel’s workstation GPU to customers with a hefty €1,799 recommended price. The card is available in Germany and Austria, while ASUS lists it at CHF 1,799 in Switzerland.
Intel first introduced the Arc Pro B70 in March 2026, with its own branded model starting at $949. ASUS’s version arrives several months later with the same core GPU architecture but a different cooling design and a higher power rating. The price also places it well above Intel’s original starting point, although the two prices are not directly comparable because ASUS’s European figure includes VAT.
Anthropic has officially filed to go public, and buried inside its S-1 is a blunt warning about the technology at the center of its business. The maker of Claude AI says advanced AI could cause everything from large-scale cyberattacks and geopolitical instability to catastrophic or even existential risks for humanity.
The warnings take up a surprisingly large part of the filing. Axios notes that more than 90 pages, or roughly a third of the prospectus, focus on risk factors. Many of them warn about what could happen as AI systems become more capable and autonomous.