All this week’s M4 Mac news: iMac confirmed, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini rumors

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Mac Week is in full swing and Apple is busy giving its desktops and laptops an M4 turbocharger. So far we’ve seen the launch of the iMac M4 and M4 Mac Mini, but rumors and leaks also point to a new M4 MacBook Pro.

If you’ve seen how the M4 chip in the iPad Pro performed, you know why there’s a lot to be excited about. The performance gains seem hugely impressive (especially at single-core performance) and the Cupertino team has seriously beefed up the Neural Engine to support the full breadth of what Apple Intelligence has to offer.

When the iPad launched, we all waited with bated breath to discover what the M4 would be capable of in a more powerful Mac, and we’ll find out in the coming days. Please keep this page in your favorites as we will update it with any new announcement as it occurs.

When will M4 Macs launch?

The M4 iMac has a release date of November 8. Whatever else happens, I think it’s a safe bet to say they’ll also be released on the same date.

Where can I pre-order M4 Macs?

iMac M4

At kickoff on Monday, Apple dropped a mini-keynote video of sorts to celebrate the iMac gets an M4 spec bomb. Normally an update like this might be a minor update, but there’s a lot more going on here that we need to talk about (as you may have seen when I compared the M4 iMac with the M3 iMac).

These are the differences:

• The base model now comes with 16 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB (finally!)

• You have seven new colors to choose from: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue and silver

• The number of Thunderbolt 4 ports is now 4. In the past, if you configured your iMac with 4 ports, you would have 2x Thunderbolt 4 and 2x USB-C

• M4 now unlocks support for up to two external displays at 6K 60Hz, or a single 8K 120Hz panel

• The display panel can be upgraded with a $200 nano-textured glass option, significantly reducing reflections and glare on the screen

See below for a spec table of everything we know, but other than the above this is business as usual. Except for one thing: the Magic Keyboard, Magic TrackPad, and Magic Mouse are now equipped with USB-C ports.

It took Apple a while to finally kill Lightning, but here we are, although the port placement on the bottom of the Magic Mouse remains (much to my chagrin). My recommendation would be to get one Logitech MXMaster 3S – easily the best mouse we tested.

M4 Mac Mini

Tuesday, October 29th brought us something big from Apple – and by ‘big’ we actually mean incredibly small. The Mac Mini has gotten a huge redesign with its M4 (or M4 Pro) spec bump, making the best mini PC you can buy even more mini-er.

How mini are we talking? Well, the smaller puck is now only 5×5 inches! That’s just 1.3 inches larger than the Apple TV 4K. That smaller size also helped make the Mac Mini the company’s first carbon-neutral computer, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from materials, manufacturing, transportation and customer use by more than 80%.

So what else does it bring to the table? These are the big differences:

• The rumor about ‘only 5 USB-C ports’ turned out to be untrue: you have 3x Thunderbolt 4 (M4) or Thunderbolt 5 (M4 Pro) ports, in addition to HDMI 2.1 and a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back (expandable to 10 Gigabit) and 2x USB-C ports with a 3.5mm headphone jack on the front

• The M4 Mac Mini offers 1.8x faster CPU performance and 2.2x faster GPU performance than the M1 Mac Mini

• Meanwhile, M4 Pro also brings vastly improved graphics with 2x faster ray-tracing than M3 Pro, and a 2x faster Neural Engine for Apple Intelligence

You can pre-order today with the M4 Mac Mini starting at $599 and the M4 Pro model for $1,399. It will be fully launched on November 8, just like the iMac.

Apple Intelligence is here

Another major announcement Apple has dropped is the launch of iOS 18.1, macOS Sequoia 15.1, and iPadOS 18.1 software updates that bring Apple Intelligence to the world!

This is really a first wave of announcements, and it looks like iOS 18.2 in December is where we’ll see AI hitting full speed. But with this update, you now have features like Rewrite and Proofreading, as well as a Siri that’s more talkative, the ability to record phone calls, transcribe and summarize audio recordings, and improved intelligence in the Photos app that lets you search for photos with natural language.

Oh, and the Clean Up tool is here to remove unwanted objects or photobombers from the background of your photos.

M4 MacBook Pro

It’s a Mac week after all, and we’re deep into the time you’d normally expect from new MacBook Pros. And thanks to a Russian YouTuber, it seems more certain that we’ll see M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max MacBooks.

The major upgrades we’re expecting are the all-important chipset upgrade, Space Black being available across the range, the third Thunderbolt 4 port coming to the standard M4 MacBook Pro, and at least 16GB of RAM (after the iMac).

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