20 years of the Mac mini: When Apple shrunk the Macintosh
On January 11, 2005, Steve Jobs presented the smallest desktop Mac of all time at Macworld in San Francisco. After that came many highs, but also lows.
Mac mini G4 from 2005: The first Mac mini of all.
(Image: Apple)
I was actually planning to add a long series of pictures to this article, as I once did for the Macintosh anniversary. Then I remembered that Apple has been surprisingly restrained when it comes to the Mac mini form factor over the past 20 years. Because if you think about it, the smallest desktop Mac of all time – - a title it is still entitled to – has only ever had three optical incarnations: there was the original Mac mini, which you can see in the article image above, then the unibody Mac mini and finally, just last year, the Mac mini M4. Even the built-in chip technology was more diverse than the exterior design! But more on that later.
40 GB hard disk, but 1.25 GHz G4
It all started exactly 20 years ago today, on January 11, 2005, when Apple hosted one of its typical live keynotes during a major trade fair that still existed at the time –, in this case Macworld Expo in San Francisco. And of course it was Steve Jobs himself who presented the new compact computer, as usual with dry humor. "Why doesn't Apple offer a slimmed-down Mac that's more affordable?" Jobs projected on the wall. Then he said: "I wish I had a 5-cent coin for every time someone asks me that." And then the time had come: the first model was shown to great applause, which grew even bigger when Jobs picked up the little thing.
There were two versions with the G4 chip – because Apple had not yet switched to Intel at that time –: one with 1.25 GHz, 256 MB RAM, combo slot-in drive (DVD reader with CD burner) and a whopping 40 GB hard disk, and a 1.42 GHz model with 80 GB RAM, which some people have today. With prices of 499 and 599 US dollars, the machines were inexpensive by Apple standards, "the cheapest Macs ever". The interface selection: FireWire, Ethernet, DVI and VGA monitor, USB 2 and even a modem.
You will still have a keyboard, won't you?
The Mac mini was "BYODKM" from the start: bring your own display, keyboard and mouse. Initially, the power supply was not built-in, but an annoying power brick, later only a power plug came out of the machine. The Mac mini quickly sold well, partly because some users considered buying it as a second or third Mac. "Most of you have screens, keyboards and mice," said Jobs – and that was true. And the "slimmed down" wasn't even that slimmed down, you could run normal applications just fine.
Over the next few years, Apple pursued a course of steady progress with the Mac mini. In 2006, the first Intel version of the "Polycarbonate" housing was released, so called because the lid was made of plastic in addition to the aluminum machine base. These were not entirely uncontroversial, as Apple also installed the lame Core Solo chips here. The real revolution followed in 2010 with a new form factor called the unibody. This flattened the Mac mini, removed the power supply unit and made the machine even more elegant. There was even a server version.
Unibody collects dust
Apple remained true to the unibody housing with minimal changes until no less than 2024, only once offering a "space gray" version instead of the silver one. For eight years, until 2018, Intel Mac Minis of different speed gradations and hardware features were repeatedly launched on the market, which even passed as professional devices. The last hurrah for the unibody design came in 2020, when the Apple Silicon transition with ARM SoCs began. The Mac mini added a performance boost and Apple continued to use the old housing with minimal adjustments.
The real Mac mini revolution of the modern era had to wait until October 2024, when Apple introduced the Mac mini M4 and Mac mini M4 Pro. These computers are essentially shrunken Mac Studio machines, which in turn could themselves be unibody Mac minis stacked on top of each other in terms of form factor. With the Mac mini M4 and especially the M4 Pro with Thunderbolt 5, Apple showed that compact can also be fast. The small and positively received rebirth of the Mac mini showed that Apple has by no means given up on the series. Here's to another 20 years. At least.
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