Steve Troughton-Smith, a very active developer in the Apple community, has just made a small discovery while going through the firmware code for Apple’s latest screen, the Studio Display. He found a reference to a “mysterious machine” not yet referenced, a “new generation of Mac mini model”he explains in a tweet.
The rumor mill is a little unclear as to what new Macs are imminent; for what it’s worth, there is one concrete clue: the shipping Studio Display firmware references one unaccounted-for mystery machine — a new model generation of Mac mini (“Macmini10,1”). My guess: M2, not M1 Pro
—Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 12, 2022
In this first tweet, he makes a prognosis, indicating that this Mac mini should, according to him, work with an M2, the new generation of Apple Silicon SoCs, and not with an M1 Pro. However, in a second tweet, he goes back to his first prediction, and instead expects an M1 Pro and M1 Max.
The Mac minis were among the first Apple PCs to go under the Apple Silicon flag, with the M1s, in November 2020. It therefore seems logical, as the migration of Apple computers to ARM chips progresses, that a new generation Mac mini is approaching.
Two good reasons for this. The first: there is still a Mac mini with an Intel processor at the moment, which will also have to transhume. The second: the M1 range is now complete, which means that if Apple intends to integrate a mid-range (M1 Pro) or high-end (M1 Max) SoC into its Mac mini, it can – the M1 Ultra would undoubtedly remain reserved to the Mac Studio for a question of gamut consistency and heat dissipation.
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Nevertheless, the small desktop PC could again be a vector for the introduction of a new Apple Silicon chip, with the M2 generation, which we await with some impatience given what the M1s have defined as the level of requirement.
We can also consider a solution in between, but which would involve the M2 being really more powerful than its elder. Indeed, the entry-level Mac mini could be updated to M1 Pro or Max, while the high-end model would opt for the M2… Unless Apple introduces an M2 and an M2 Pro at the same time, of course.
In short, for the moment, as many possibilities as conjectures. But the good news is that new Mac minis are coming. However, it is quite unlikely that they will arrive alone. The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro were updated along with the compact Macs…