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The personal site of Jamie Knight, an autistic web developer, speaker and mountain biker who is never seen far from his plush sidekick Lion. View the Archive

Topics: Autism Development

The Future of the Mac Mini

I like the Mac Mini, its small, fast and quiet. Just what I want for under the telly.

It could be smaller though. It could also be faster, but I don’t think its likely to get both smaller and faster.

Faster

The Mac Mini uses laptop chips; the same chips as the retina MacBook Pro for the one I have. However, those chips are not the most power sipping, running 44w or so.

If Apple updates the Mac mini today to the equivalent haswell chip it would get ~16% faster and the graphics power would double perhaps triple.

This would be nice. If it stayed upgradable1 that would be perfect. I already game on my Mac mini, and better graphics would be nice.

Smaller

What if Apple swapped to using the processors from the MacBook Air? At 15w these chips run much cooler and sip power. The Mac Mini could get far smaller.

I don’t think it could get quite as small as the current Apple TV. But Pehaps it could get much thinner or change shape into a small round puck.

This would be a totally integrated device. Like the inside of the MacBook Air, everything soldered down except maybe the storage.

If it cost £339-399 with the same guts as the 11” MacBook Air, that would be compelling.

Final words

I have been drafting this post for a while. Since i started Apple accidentally released a reference to a Mid 2014 Mac Mini on the tech support website. So hopefully something is coming soon.

I like the Mac Mini and I hope it has a long and exciting future, hopefully the next step of its evolution will be with us soon.

1 My 2012 2.6ghz Mac Mini has two drives (256gb SSD, 1tb HDD) and 16gb of RAM. Both were easy to install, and could be further expanded in the future.

Published: 30 July 2014 | Categories: , Permalink

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