Report Says Apple Has A More Powerful Mac Mini With Extra Ports In The Works

In a wide-reaching report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is developing a more powerful Mac mini with extra port. As claimed in the report , the advanced Mac mini will be powered by the company’s same Silicon chip, which will also power the next gen Mac Book Pro. Also, the Mac mini model is claimed to be furnished with extra Thunderbolt connectivity ports.

The more powerful Mac mini being developed has the code name ‘J374’, and is  reportedly being developed as a high-end M1 chip model. It would have an improved M1 chip with a 10-core CPU out of which 8 would be high-performance cores and 2 would be the energy-efficient cores. This is the same chip that is said to power the next generation MacBook Pro. As claimed by the report, the new powerful M1 chip could support up to 64GB of memory, compared to the present version that can support only up to 16GB.

The new Mac mini is expected to have a total of four Thunderbolt ports. The high-end ‌Mac mini‌ will thereby feature four Thunderbolt ports on its rear, rather than the two that are available on the rear of the current ‌Mac mini‌ with an ‌M1‌ chip. This is also a change supported by the next-generation Apple silicon chip.

With the new, high-end Mac mini, another product line up of Apple would have totally embraced the M1 chip. If Apple starts to rely completely on the M1 chip, there’s a high chance that production of the Intel-powered Mac will be put to a halt in the coming future. Right now, the company has an entry-level Mac mini with the M1 chip with an octa‑core CPU and an octa‑core GPU in two SSD storage variants: 256GB and 512GB. Plus, it has a high-end model powered by a 3.0GHz Intel Core i5 hexa-core Processor with Intel UHD Graphics 630 and 512GB storage.

Comparing to past events, there is a tendency that Apple could delay or cancel the new mini’s launch, but eventually the company will likely replace the Intel-equipped version it is selling currently.