Apple Silicon is unleashing Apple’s hardware designers

The dawn of Apple Silicon has unleashed new product design opportunities for Apple’s products. We’ve already seen one incarnation of this with the first-generation vision OS devices, everyone is talking about foldable iPads and thin iPhones, but coming up next seems to be a seriously small but M4-powered Mac mini.

Mac mini: Small and uncompromised

That’s the news according to Bloomberg, which claims the new device will be of similar size to an Apple TV. To put that into an inexact perspective, the volume of space occupied by an Apple TV is 16.4 cubic inches, while the current Mac mini occupies 83 cubic inches. If the claim is correct, the Mac will be seriously small.

That size still has some functionality.

The report claims 3xUSB-C and an HDMI port on these systems. The range will grow as well, with the standard M4 Mac mini accompanied by an M4 Pro powered M4 Mac Mini Pro.

The move to M4 should provide incredibly attractive computational performance increases, significant enough that the millions who purchased an M1 Mac mini will be tempted to upgrade. Those using Intel-powered Apple desktops will certainly want to take a look. Why is this the case?

What kind of performance can we expect?

I think the benchmarks will tell the story. The M4 Mac mini will deliver performance improvements that should make it attractive to anyone using an M1 model, will certainly attract people on Intel chips, and because it is smaller is likely to use significantly less energy.

Now, the M4 chip is currently only available on an iPad Pro where it scores 3,667 single-core and 13,280-multi-core according to Geekbench, but see how this compares with the M1-powered Mac and iPad Pro.

It is important I think to note that the M1 iPad Pro delivered results that aren’t a million miles away from the M1 Mac mini benchmarks, and there’s little reason to expect any different from this iteration.

Of course, we expect each Mac to be significantly better than the one it replaces, but what’s also interesting here is that the low energy needs of Apple Silicon makes it possible to deliver design improvements without compromising the computational power of the device.

These smaller Mac minis simply would not be possible without Apple Silicon – can you imagine a hot running Intel chip inside performant Macs in such small chassis? Or even a Power PC chip if your memory goes back that far?

Dream the impossible dream

This opportunity to put real computing power inside devices that occupy shapes and forms that weren’t possible before is likely to open a host of product design opportunities for the company.

We already know that these will in future include smaller and lighter visionOS systems, and we’ve heard speculation of folding iPads and thinner iPhones, all of which are made possible by the nature of the ever-shrinking (soon 2nm) chips.

But given Apple likely already has a ten-year plan for Apple Silicon, there is plenty of time during which its hardware designers will think outside the box of what tomorrow’s computers will be.

A Mac inside a keyboard? Larger Mac mini boxes with projected displays? Foldable, hybrid iPad/MacBook designs?

All these ideas have quite literally been made possible by Apple’s investments in silicon, which have set its hardware designers free to dream of new computer designs that were never possible before.

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