Mac mini (M4, 2024)

The 2024 Mac mini delivered the most dramatic physical redesign the product had seen since its aluminum unibody debut back in 2010, shrinking the chassis down to a strikingly small footprint, barely larger than an Apple TV box, while somehow packing in more capability than ever before. Apple achieved this radical downsizing by fully embracing the thermal efficiency of the new M4 and M4 Pro chips, allowing internal volume to shrink dramatically compared to the previous generation's already compact design, and the result immediately became the smallest Mac mini, and arguably the smallest mainstream desktop computer, Apple had ever shipped. In a genuinely unusual and widely praised design choice, Apple moved the power button to the underside of the machine rather than the rear, and, in an even more welcome move for anyone who had grown tired of reaching around the back of a desktop tower, brought front-facing ports, including a USB-C port and headphone jack, to the mini for the first time, dramatically improving everyday usability for external drives, headphones, and accessories. Performance scaled impressively too, with the M4 Pro configuration offering the most powerful Mac mini chip ever, capable of legitimate professional workloads that would have required a Mac Studio just a couple of years earlier, all within this astonishingly compact new enclosure. Reviewers were genuinely delighted, treating this as one of the most successful and surprising redesigns in the Mac lineup's recent history, praising both the audacity of the shrunken form factor and the thoughtful ergonomic improvements like the front-facing ports, while noting the base model's storage and memory configurations still required careful attention given Apple's continued unified, non-upgradeable memory approach. This generation reasserted the Mac mini's relevance as a serious, versatile desktop option, spanning everyday consumer use, capable home server and developer workstation duty, and now, for the first time in years, genuine professional-tier performance in the Pro configuration, all within a chassis smaller than most external hard drives of the previous decade.