Apple’s new Mac mini, powered by the company’s in-house M4 processor, is a technological marvel that provides clues to the future of computing.
The M4 Mac mini is just 50mm tall and 127mm along its edges, meaning you can hold it comfortably in the palm of your hand.
It weighs 670g, only three times as much as an iPhone 16 Pro Max, yet outperforms most (much larger) Windows PCs — while using a fraction of the power. On a performance-per-watt basis, it’s difficult to find anything that can beat it in 2024.
PC makers, including Microsoft — Apple’s decades-long nemesis — aren’t standing still. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference last week, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a miniature PC called Windows 365 Link, a “cloud PC” that has a form factor similar to the Mac mini.
Except, in Microsoft’s case, the machine is more like a “dumb terminal” from the mainframe era of computing: instead of running Windows on-device (like the Mac mini runs macOS), Windows 365 Link users will have the operating system “streamed” to them over a high-speed internet connection from Microsoft’s Azure data centres.
It’s akin to the way people stream Netflix or Showmax, except we’re talking about an operating system. A big downside: the machine won’t work if the internet is on the fritz.
Which model will win? Both are likely to have a place.
Apple’s decision to ditch Intel — the once dominant US chip giant that has fallen on hard times — and design its own silicon chips was a masterstroke. It modelled the M-series chips in its Macs on the power-efficient silicon it designed for the iPhone.
The PC industry has been trying to catch up for years. Despite good progress (thanks to new chips from Qualcomm that use an architecture similar to that of Apple silicon), Windows computers still haven’t fully caught up. Indeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to switch from Intel and design its own computer chips was hugely consequential. Cook, hand-picked by the late Steve Jobs to succeed him at Apple, will be remembered for Apple silicon and its impact on the entire computer industry.
But what does the race to build smaller and smaller computers tell us about where computing is headed?
Computers themselves are largely going to “vanish” and become part of an emerging “information fabric” that surrounds us at home, in the car, in the office or at the mall. It even has a name: ubiquitous computing, a term coined in 1988 by the late Mark Weiser, a computer scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, which pioneered the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, later “borrowed” by Apple and Microsoft.
Ubiquitous computing promises a seamless, adaptive environment where data flows effortlessly across various devices, systems and users
Ubiquitous computing means advanced silicon will be embedded into everyday objects, from the TV in your lounge (which will become significantly smarter in coming years), to wearables such as smart glasses that will augment your everyday reality. This will be the precursor to electronic implants that will ultimately challenge what it means to be human.
The widespread medical use of molecular-scale robots in the bloodstream that repair damaged cells and deliver targeted drugs is still decades away, but the information fabric that ubiquitous computing promises is already being built. Smart homes and the internet of things (networks of low-power interconnected devices) are the foundation of a new computing era in which tech will be infused into anything and everything, at low cost.
Smart cities are a good example: millions of distributed sensors will form an information fabric that will ensure urban systems run like clockwork — the moment a traffic light goes on the blink, for example, a municipal team will be notified of the problem, along with a diagnostic report of what caused it and what equipment might be required to complete the repair (Joburg residents can only dream of this).
Eventually, ubiquitous computing promises a seamless, adaptive environment where data flows effortlessly across various devices, systems and users. Advances in silicon, including the development of “neuromorphic” chips that are modelled on the human brain, and which promise a new model of computing beyond the classical paradigm, may usher in an era of tiny, energy-efficient AI systems that permeate our towns and cities.
The M4 Mac mini, as impressive as it is, is still a classical computer. But this sort of rapid miniaturisation points to where computing is headed: computers are going to become tinier, cheaper and increasingly ubiquitous, and will fuel wave after wave of disruptive innovation.
*McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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