These days, the Mac mini is one of the best Macs money can buy, and arguably THE the best in terms of quality/price ratio. It packs enormous power into its tiny chassis, blowing away its rivals and rightfully taking its place as the best mini-PC on the market. If you’re looking for performance, features, and build quality at a reasonable price, it’s hard to beat.
Much of this depends on the Apple silicon chips on offer. But the Mac mini hasn’t always been equipped with Apple’s own silicon. For almost 15 years, it was powered by Intel processors, and those were long considered the better option – until Apple silicon came along, of course.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first-ever Mac mini powered by an Intel chip, and its introduction was almost as significant as the unveiling of the first Apple Silicon Mac mini in 2020. Here, we look back at that first Intel Mac mini and the influence it had on the market and on Apple itself. It’s an impact that’s hard to overstate.
The PowerPC era
Before the arrival of the Intel Mac mini, Apple used all of its computers on PowerPC chips. These were carried out by a consortium of companies – mainly Apple, IBM and Motorola – known as AIM, after their initials. The idea was to counter the dominance of Microsoft and Intel while giving the AIM companies the opportunity to work more closely together.
Apple began using PowerPC chips in 1994, but grew tired of the platform’s limitations by the early 2000s. PowerPC processors burned and consumed power at a rapid rate, significantly limiting their potential in desktop computers. At the same time, Motorola and IBM were getting out of the chip manufacturing business, leaving Apple in a tough spot.
As Apple searched for an alternative, the company found its answer in the form of Intel and announced in 2005 that it would begin transitioning to that company’s chips. The first Intel Macs were the iMac and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, arriving in January 2006 and replacing the iMac G4 and PowerBook, respectively. A month later, the Intel Mac mini arrived on the scene and changed the world of small PCs in an instant.
The first Intel Mac mini
When Apple introduced Intel chips in the Mac mini, expectations were low. Apple had only released one PowerPC Mac mini – it came out in January 2005 – and it was met with a mixed reaction. While its compact frame, low noise, and affordable price have drawn praise, its slow storage speeds and difficulty upgrading its components have drawn criticism. This meant that Apple had the opportunity to effectively relaunch the Mac mini when the Intel model arrived a year later, in February 2006.
If that was Apple’s goal, it largely succeeded. The major improvement brought by the Mac mini Intel is found in its performance. Apple boasted that the new model offered up to four times the performance of its PowerPC predecessor, an incredible step forward and a remarkable statement of intent.
It also brought other new features not found in the PowerPC model, including Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, DVI, and VGA outputs, two additional USB-A ports, and much more. Apple increased the starting price by $100, from $499 for the PowerPC edition to $599 for the Intel version, but given its significant performance improvements, that wasn’t too surprising.
By packing such a performance boost into an incredibly compact desktop computer, Apple demonstrated – to the world and, perhaps, to itself – that it was right to move from PowerPC to Intel. Perhaps more than any other Mac, the Mac mini was the symbol of the new computing world that was then emerging, and it wasn’t until the 2010s that things began to change.
Why did Apple abandon Intel?
By the late 2010s, Intel chips were starting to suffer from the exact same problems that PowerPCs had in the early 2000s. They were hot and inefficient, often causing them to throttle when under load. This was particularly problematic in Apple’s laptops, as the company moved toward designs that were ever thinner and had much less internal space for active cooling.
This was clearly seen in the 12-inch MacBook from 2015: Intel’s chips were so inefficient that Apple had to resort to Intel’s M-series mobile processors for the fanless laptop. Compare that to today’s fanless MacBook Air, which packs a desktop-class processor that was unimaginable in Intel’s days.
The inefficiency of Intel chips also meant that Apple computers had to frequently spin their fans, making the experience noisy and distracting for users. Steve Jobs, of course, hated it.
In the past, Jobs often insisted on removing the fan from his computers to allow customers to work in complete silence – this was the case with the iconic iMac G3, for example, as well as the Apple III, the Macintosh 128K and the attractive Power Mac G4 Cube. Selling hot, noisy laptops was the antithesis of what Jobs wanted for Apple products. And if you know anything about Steve Jobs, you know that this was a situation that couldn’t survive for long.
At the same time, Apple was already having notable success with its own chips. After all, the iPhone was powered by an Apple-designed chip from the start in 2007. These chips had long been shown to be capable of delivering both high performance and high efficiency, and it was this factor that made them a leading candidate for Apple’s computers.
Like the transition to Intel chips, the first Apple Silicon Mac mini marked the start of a step change in performance compared to its predecessor. Apple said the new M1 chip offers three times the processor power of the previous Intel Mac mini and up to six times the graphics power. Machine learning, on the other hand, has seen a staggering 15x improvement.
The entry-level model with an eight-core M1 chip was priced at $699, which Apple said was $100 less than Intel’s previous edition, although that product came with a processor carrying half the number of cores. Overall, this is a major breakthrough after years of stagnation.
Nothing lasts forever, and it was clear by the late 2010s that the Intel Mac mini’s golden goose was cooked and that Apple had made the right decision to move to its own chips. But that shouldn’t take away from what the first Intel Mac mini meant when it arrived in 2006. Although it was far from a perfect computer, it showed what a mini-PC could do when equipped with a newer, capable processor.
On its 20th anniversary, it’s worth reflecting on the parallels with the introduction of Apple silicon – and what the future might hold for Apple’s smallest computer.
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