The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming

[JPack]

Imagine for a moment that Apple kills off the mini for a Mac Neo, and brings in a slightly lower spec’d Studio to replace the higher end mini. Thoughts?

Well, it would make zero sense.

The Neo branding specifically is targeted at first time Mac users. Nobody buys a desktop as their first Mac. The goal of $599 Mac mini is to promote development of iOS/iPadOS apps. Neo sucks at that and Studio is too expensive. So Apple would be screwing over its own ecosystem growth.

What is a "slightly lower spec" Studio? M4 Pro? The purpose of the Studio is housing a big cooling system so Max/Ultra chips can perform well. There is no reason for a M4/M5 Pro Studio to exist.

 

[amancalledsun]

Not really sure what point you're trying to make. OS X has a foundation of UNIX where you can have various file system implementations. You can enable filename case sensitivity in volumes of Tahoe for example. The original MacOS used a baked in third party abomination called Multi-Finder which changed little over the years in lieu of real preemptive multitasking. MacOS was so awful that Apple spent the 90s spinning up skunkworks projects to replace the underlying OS but they all crashed and burned. Apple didn't have any real OS engineers in that period and only survived by buying NeXT OS division. I'm sure history revisionism is written to make it appear that the transition was smooth and planned but Macs of that period were not making money and only Apple 2 as a cash cow kept them going during the dark periods. Michael Dell wasn't wrong when he made his comments about Apple in the mid-90s. It was a garbage company filled with useless people.

NextStep/MacOS X is BSD userland on top of a modified Mach kernel as opposed to a traditional UNIX kernel, somewhat the same way QNX has a UNIX compatible userland with a micro-kernel. This doesn't make MacOS X or QNX bad, but they are subtly different than traditional UNIX.

I have used HP-UX, Solaris, QNX, various forms of Linux, and OpenBSD and aware of the differences between traditional UNIX and MacOS X. The case preserving vs case sensitive aspect of file names was one of the first things I noticed about MacOS X when first exposed to it.

As for OS development in the 1990's, Microsoft was having a lot of issues with extending Windows, it took getting Dave Cutler to get Win NT going.

All of this is well documented on both Walter Isaac's biography of Steve Jobs and on Wikipedia as far as OS history details. Not sure there's really much to discuss on either at this point.

 

[amancalledsun]

Well, it would make zero sense.

The Neo branding specifically is targeted at first time Mac users. Nobody buys a desktop as their first Mac. The goal of $599 Mac mini is to promote development of iOS/iPadOS apps. Neo sucks at that and Studio is too expensive. So Apple would be screwing over its own ecosystem growth.

What is a "slightly lower spec" Studio? M4 Pro? The purpose of the Studio is house a big cooling system so Max/Ultra chips can perform well. There is no reason for a M4/M5 Pro Studio to exist.

I can tell you firsthand that at least a dozen people I know bought Minis as their first Macs; many would have been quite fine with Neo-ish version. As for the Studio, I agree it is too expensive. However, a spec'd-up Mini is also not cheap. I'm not saying Apple should do this, but rather that there are many possibilities for what they could do on the desktop side, especially now that they have killed the Mac Pro. Regardless, a new Mac mini is almost certainly coming.

 

[JPack]

I can tell you firsthand that at least a dozen people I know bought Minis as their first Macs; many would have been quite fine with Neo-ish version. As for the Studio, I agree it is too expensive. However, a spec'd-up Mini is also not cheap. I'm not saying Apple should do this, but rather that there are many possibilities for what they could do on the desktop side, especially now that they have killed the Mac Pro. Regardless, a new Mac mini is almost certainly coming.

Sure, and when I say "nobody" I don't mean it literally. But Gen Z/Alpha, teens, and adults who went through COVID, are not buying Mac mini as their first Mac. They grew up using iPad, iPhone, and understand the value of mobility. That leaves the 35-65 year old Windows users, but given deeply rooted habits, there aren't many switchers in that group.

If Apple were to launch a new Mac, something like MacBook Play or Mac Studio Gaming would make sense. One third or one quarter of PC sales are to gamers. Apple has the chips, the margins are amazing, and such a product wouldn't cannibalize any existing product.

 

[IvyKing]

Imagine for a moment that Apple kills off the mini for a Mac Neo, and brings in a slightly lower spec’d Studio to replace the higher end mini. Thoughts?

What would make most sense with this scenario is limiting the Mac Neo to the base Mx processors and starting the Studio line with the Mx Pro processors. The cooling in the smaller Mini enclosure is a bit marginal for the M4 Pro processors.

 

[Moonjumper]

Imagine for a moment that Apple kills off the mini for a Mac Neo, and brings in a slightly lower spec’d Studio to replace the higher end mini. Thoughts?

The Neo has been introduced as a low cost device with an A-series chip. Apple are not going to replace the Mini with something of a lower perceived value.

But I could see Apple adding a Mac Neo as an even cheaper desktop with the same chips as the Macbook Neo and a smaller case than the Mini because it won't have a fan.

 

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

@Corefile "Mac OS 1 through 9 == junk."

Not. That's a junk viewpoint, about something you appear to know nothing about. 🙁
It was what it was, which was streets ahead of the various DOSs and Windows 1 to 3.1.
The better-OS high end, Sun, SGI, DEC were $30,000 up (and up).

So that left MacOS having total dominance in the first world's DTP, Printing and Pre-Press landscape, and owning the high ground in anything requiring photographic excellence, and later, creative visual interactivity and video.

Like everything else, it was 1980s code - cleverly written Pascal, and like everything else, needed to be superseded by the mid 1990s.
Windows did NT, and Unix became Linux, and we all know how it worked out for Apple... 🙂

Agreed.
At the time, the only user-level OS that was better than Classic Mac OS (up to and including 9) was AmigaDOS.

 

[ivnj]

@Corefile "Mac OS 1 through 9 == junk."

Not. That's a junk viewpoint, about something you appear to know nothing about. 🙁
It was what it was, which was streets ahead of the various DOSs and Windows 1 to 3.1.
The better-OS high end, Sun, SGI, DEC were $30,000 up (and up).

So that left MacOS having total dominance in the first world's DTP, Printing and Pre-Press landscape, and owning the high ground in anything requiring photographic excellence, and later, creative visual interactivity and video.

Like everything else, it was 1980s code - cleverly written Pascal, and like everything else, needed to be superseded by the mid 1990s.
Windows did NT, and Unix became Linux, and we all know how it worked out for Apple... 🙂

Early mac were slightly lacking. But not junk.

 

[theluggage]

Mac OS 1 through 9 == junk.

Early mac were slightly lacking. But not junk.

Mac OS 1-7 were what they were - revolutionary for the time, but designed for 80s microcomputer hardware. Crucially, they didn't offer true pre-emptive multitasking or multi-user facilities (Multifinder and System 7 multi-tasking was "collaborative" i.e. relied on tasks regularly handing control back to the OS).

It all went runny with Mac OS 8.

Mac OS 8 was supposed to be an all-new, modern OS codenamed Copeland - but that project turned into a horror story that software developers tell their children at night if they want them to grow up to be chicken farmers. So MacOS 8 and MacOS 9 were warmed-over versions of System 7 with some multitasking kludged in & were way past their sell-by date.

At the time, the only user-level OS that was better than Classic Mac OS (up to and including 9) was AmigaDOS.

Yup, Amiga was something else. I think AmigaOS was the first OS to offer preemptive multitasking on a mass-market personal computer (not counting Unix workstations that cost as much as a small house)... Not sure it had Mac-level UI design, though. There was also Acorn RISC-OS which offered some interesting UI features (like pre-TruType anti-aliased, outline fonts) and, of course, ran like the clappers on ARM, but that was a bit kludgey - and single-tasking - under the hood (again, a lash-up introduced when an ambitious, next-generation OS project failed).

Unix became Linux

Well, not really. Back in the early 1970s there was briefly a distinct operating system called Unix that quickly schismed into System V and BSD and continued to fragment, until "Unix" became a set of standards & design principles linked to a licensable brand name.

Paradoxically, MacOS 10+ is Unix and Linux is not Unix - in fact it uses the GNU toolchain and userland and GNU stands for "GNU is not Unix"!

The Register of UNIX® Certified Products

Considering that MacOS is by far the best known product on that list outside of commercial niche, it's tempting to say that Unix became MacOS.

...of course that's purely because getting Linux certified as Unix(tm) doesn't sit well with Linux's "copyleft" open source license.

NextStep/MacOS X is BSD userland on top of a modified Mach kernel as opposed to a traditional UNIX kernel, somewhat the same way QNX has a UNIX compatible userland with a micro-kernel. This doesn't make MacOS X or QNX bad, but they are subtly different than traditional UNIX.

I think the idea of a "traditional UNIX" has passed into history - it's been pick'n'mix with a multitude of kernels (monolithic, micro, hybrid) and at least 3 "userlands" (SysV, BSD, GNU) and different "init" systems.

Really, the interesting thing about NextStep is not whether or not it is Unix (if Apple had wanted Unix they already had A/UX) but that it had a proprietary and very forward-looking object oriented application framework and Postscipt-based GUI that is nothing like the various X Window-descended UIs seen on "traditional" Unix & Linux. That's why half the library functions in MacOS still start with "NS"...

ISTR MacOS wasn't registered as "Unix" until about Tiger, and, before that, the "BSD Subsystem" that gave you the "traditional" Unix tools and terminal was an optionsl add-on.

 

[redjar597]

The Neo has been introduced as a low cost device with an A-series chip. Apple are not going to replace the Mini with something of a lower perceived value.

But I could see Apple adding a Mac Neo as an even cheaper desktop with the same chips as the Macbook Neo and a smaller case than the Mini because it won't have a fan.

Been thinking the same. Could be pretty cool. A series desktop Neo. Maybe retailing at 299, it's just a last year's SoC and case.

The product categories just about fit this too:

Neo Desktop --> Mac mini --> Studio (Pro)

Neo laptop --> MBA --> MBP

iPhone --> iPhone Air --> iPhone Pro

iPad --> iPad Air --> iPad Pro

Something at every entry point. While remaining logical and easy to understand. Who knows, the base iPad might come iPad Neo even, given it's colour scheme and target market.

 

[theluggage]

But I could see Apple adding a Mac Neo as an even cheaper desktop with the same chips as the Macbook Neo and a smaller case than the Mini because it won't have a fan.

Yeah, an Apple TV-sized A18/A19 "Mac Neo" - would fill a much-needed gap in the Apple line-up...

But, seriously, yes it might be a cool addition but I can't see a strong business case for Apple doing it. They needed a sub-$1000 MacBook offering for the current belt-tightening economy, but, for a desktop, the Mac Mini is relatively affordable at $600 and you can always plug it into an existing HDMI TV and get a cheap keyboard and mouse.

The original G4 Mini was introduced as a low-cost Mac and there was much talk of avoiding "sticker shock" and "bring your own keyboard snd mouse" rather than the total cost if you added an Apple keyboard, mouse and display.

What would make most sense with this scenario is limiting the Mac Neo to the base Mx processors and starting the Studio line with the Mx Pro processors. The cooling in the smaller Mini enclosure is a bit marginal for the M4 Pro processors.

If the M5 Max will run in an ultra-thin 14" MBP (which it has to) I suspect the Pro will probably survive in a Mini enclosure which already has more space above the processor for cooling, and the M5 Max should be fine in a Studio (at worst, with the copper heatsink currently used in the Ultra). We'll see what happens with the next "Ultra" processor - which is what I suspect determines the size/thermals of the Mac Studio - and whether it's still two complete M4/M5 Max dies or something more intermediate using the new "modular" chip construction.

A "sensible" lineup might be:

M5 "Mac Mini" (existing Mini design)
M5 Pro/Max "Mac Studio" (existing Studio design)
Mx Ultra "Mac Pro*" (anything from existing Studio design in Space Grey to a taller version if it needs more cooling).

(* Or Mac Super-Ultra-Whizzbang-Quadra-wossname-XL if they don't want to re-use Mac Pro so soon - point is, it no longer needs a name that distinguishes it from the Mac Pro).

 

[neilw]

Yeah, an Apple TV-sized A18/A19 "Mac Neo" - would fill a much-needed gap in the Apple line-up...

An A18-based Mac mini would almost literally be an AppleTV with a couple of extra USB ports.

 

[neilw]

Yup, Amiga was something else. I think AmigaOS was the first OS to offer preemptive multitasking on a mass-market personal computer (not counting Unix workstations that cost as much as a small house)... Not sure it had Mac-level UI design, though.

It certainly did not... but then nothing else did.

The Amiga vs. Mac vs. whatever else wars of the 80's and 90's were the perfect illustration of the weird human tendency to value what they do have, and downplay the importance of what they don't (or can't) have.

The Amiga had amazingly efficient preemptive multitasking, but no protected memory. The Mac had cooperative multitasking and... I don't think it had protected memory at that point either. The Unix guys of course had both.

The forums and Usenet of the time were replete with messages from Mac users poo-pooing the value of preemptive multitasking, Amiga users poo-pooing the value of protected memory, and Unix users exasperatedly trying to explain why you really need *both*.

Of course, once the Mac *got* these features, no one could even imagine the bad old days of being without them.

Going further back, same dynamic with command line vs. GUI, color vs. monochrome. Nowadays it plays out in the iOS vs. Android wars (foldables!), and the evergreen Mac vs. Windows competition (touchscreens!). It's never fails to amuse.

 

[theluggage]

It certainly did not... but then nothing else did.

Well, GEM was a pretty flagrant copy of the Mac UI (ISTR the Windows version got banned but the Atari ST implementation survived for a while) - but under the hood it was pretty primitive collaborative multitasking, sitting in top of some sort of DOS or CP/M derivative.

With the Mac it was not just the software, but all of the "style guide" documentation that covered everything up to the correct wording to put on buttons and how to choose the shape of application icons. Plus, the Mac developers' inclination to actually stick to that.

The forums and Usenet of the time were replete with messages from Mac users poo-pooing the value of preemptive multitasking, Amiga users poo-pooing the value of protected memory, and Unix users exasperatedly trying to explain why you really need *both*.

True, but (and I'm deliberately exaggerating and generalising) Unix users just don't get the idea of "user friendly" & think a GUI is there to let you have 6 side-by-side instances of vi running at the same time, Amiga users somehow thought it was useful that their game still kept running when they slid the desktop down over it (while not caring that it took 2 minutes to read the directory off a floppy), and Mac users would struggle to operate AmigaOS, let alone Unix.

Thing is, people had systems that "worked for them", and would have needed more powerful, more expensive systems to handle the overheads of something like Unix. For someone using a personal computer, context switching between (say) WP and spreadsheet was more important than having processes running in the background & you wouldn't necessarily notice whether it was pre-emptive or collaborative. If you're running stable, off-the-shelf software then occasional crashes that may (or may not) have been prevented by memory protection aren't necessarily the dealbreaker. Pre-emptive multi-tasking became far more important once personal computers with muti-core processors started to become mainstream ~2005.

 

[Boil]

A "sensible" lineup might be:

M5 "Mac Mini" (existing Mini design)
M5 Pro/Max "Mac Studio" (existing Studio design)
Mx Ultra "Mac Pro*" (anything from existing Studio design in Space Grey to a taller version if it needs more cooling).

(* Or Mac Super-Ultra-Whizzbang-Quadra-wossname-XL if they don't want to re-use Mac Pro so soon - point is, it no longer needs a name that distinguishes it from the Mac Pro).

Introducing the all-new Mac Pro Cube, featuring the all-new M6 Extreme; we think you're going to love it...! ;^p

...and Unix users exasperatedly trying to explain why you really need *both*.

To be fair, it was hard to hear them, what with their being so high up in their ivory towers...!

 

[IvyKing]

With the Mac it was not just the software, but all of the "style guide" documentation that covered everything up to the correct wording to put on buttons and how to choose the shape of application icons. Plus, the Mac developers' inclination to actually stick to that.

HP followed in Apple's footsteps when it developed the Visual User Environment (VUE) and the Motif library VUE was built on. This was later combined with a few of Sun's OpenLook desktop to produce the Common Desktop Environment.

The 80286 used in the PC-AT did have a very powerful memory management hardware. When used properly it prevented a lot of the buffer overflow attacks as an any attempt to read or write outside of the assigned memory allocation would trigger an exception. As far as I know, only OS/2 1.x made use of this functionality.

 

[JohnnyGo]

HP followed in Apple's footsteps when it developed the Visual User Environment (VUE) and the Motif library VUE was built on. This was later combined with a few of Sun's OpenLook desktop to produce the Common Desktop Environment.

The 80286 used in the PC-AT did have a very powerful memory management hardware. When used properly it prevented a lot of the buffer overflow attacks as an any attempt to read or write outside of the assigned memory allocation would trigger an exception. As far as I know, only OS/2 1.x made use of this functionality.

Nice stroll down memory lane... 80286... it has been a minute !

 

[BSDnostalgia]

Michael Dell wasn't wrong when he made his comments about Apple in the mid-90s. It was a garbage company filled with useless people.

Compared to -- Microsoft?

At the time, we all hoped that one or more *nix workstation companies would break through and lower the cost of Unix systems to consumer levels. But, various "intellectual property" and industry issues prevented that from happening with companies like Sun. Then, NeXT, the NeXT -> MacOS transition happened. Well, it didn't just "happen".

November 25th, 1996 ...

 

[PaulD-UK]

@IvyKing ”The 80286 used in the PC-AT did have a very powerful memory management hardware.”

Ah yes… ‘640K RAM was enough for anyone’ 😳, so all the rest had to be ‘protected’. Those were the days. Not. 😉

 

[PBG4 Dude]

Compared to -- Microsoft?

At the time, we all hoped that one or more *nix workstation companies would break through and lower the cost of Unix systems to consumer levels. But, various "intellectual property" and industry issues prevented that from happening with companies like Sun. Then, NeXT, the NeXT -> MacOS transition happened. Well, it didn't just "happen".

November 25th, 1996 ...

Mac OS X; because making UNIX user friendly was easier than fixing Windows.

 

[neilw]

True, but (and I'm deliberately exaggerating and generalising) Unix users just don't get the idea of "user friendly" & think a GUI is there to let you have 6 side-by-side instances of vi running at the same time,

[...]

Thing is, people had systems that "worked for them", and would have needed more powerful, more expensive systems to handle the overheads of something like Unix.

To be fair, it was hard to hear them, what with their being so high up in their ivory towers...!

I was not suggesting that the Unix folks were "right" or "better", just that they had those particular features and recognized their importance. I'm sure that the Unix folks were poo-pooing stuff that the other systems had that they lacked.

The point is, the stuff the *other* guys have is unimportant frippery, until I have it and then it's essential.

 

[IvyKing]

@IvyKing ”The 80286 used in the PC-AT did have a very powerful memory management hardware.”

Ah yes… ‘640K RAM was enough for anyone’ 😳, so all the rest had to be ‘protected’. Those were the days. Not. 😉

The 80286 had a 16MB physical address space, the same as the 68000 used in the Lisa and early Mac's. One limiting factor with the 80286 was the maximum segment size was 64KB, where the 68000 could directly address the whole 16MB. The protected memory mode of the 80286 was not compatible with "DOS", hence the poor take-up of software that would make use of it - the exceptions were various extended memory managers.

The original MacOS had an easier time of making use of features in the 68K family as the 16MB limit was accomplished by ignoring the top 8 bits of the 32 bit address. Apple had instructed software developers on what not to do to ease transition to full 32 bit addressing - but Microsoft chose to ignore those rules.

MacOS X does have a limitation from the 32 bit days in that the maximum size for a static allocation of memory is 2GB.

Looking forward to the days we can get a Mini with 128 or 256 GB of RAM.

 

[batman75]

Status of my order placed March 27, 2026

 

[Boil]

Looking forward to the days we can get a Mini with 128 or 256 GB of RAM.

Or an all-new Mac Pro Cube, featuring the all-new M6 Extreme, with 2TB ECC RAM...! ;^p

 

[IvyKing]

If the M5 Max will run in an ultra-thin 14" MBP (which it has to) I suspect the Pro will probably survive in a Mini enclosure which already has more space above the processor for cooling, and the M5 Max should be fine in a Studio (at worst, with the copper heatsink currently used in the Ultra). We'll see what happens with the next "Ultra" processor - which is what I suspect determines the size/thermals of the Mac Studio - and whether it's still two complete M4/M5 Max dies or something more intermediate using the new "modular" chip construction.

I was writing from experience hearing the fans on my M4 Pro spool up when installing software from MacPorts. Apparently one application needed a Rust compiler for a dependency and most of the cores were going full tilt during the build process. Room temperature at the time was 70 - 72F, and my guess is a significantly warmer room would have led to thermal throttling.