Apple Software Leaks New Mac Mini With Five USB-C Ports Ahead of Alleged Event

Apple’s latest iPhones and Apple Watch won’t be released until later this week, but rumors already suggest that Apple is planning to make a product announcement in October to update some of the products that weren’t mentioned at the iPhone event. Apple set its release calendar similarly last year, when it announced and launched new iPhones in September and then released the first wave of M3 Macs around Halloween.

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg He believes He said the event will focus primarily on the first wave of M4-powered Macs, following the introduction of the standard M4 chip in the iPad Pro earlier this year. As previously noted, he expects new MacBook Pro models with the M4 and “M4 pro chip options,” presumably the M4 Pro and M4 Max. He also expects an M4 version of the 24-inch iMac.

But the most interesting of the new Macs will still be the redesigned Mac mini, which never got the M3 update and has been using the same basic exterior design since 2010. This Mac mini is said to be closer in size to an Apple TV than the current mini, but it still uses an internal power supply so owners don’t have to fiddle with a power supply. At least some of the current machine’s ports will be replaced with USB-C and/or Thunderbolt, which could still happen in the future. This was confirmed by MacRumors earlier today. When they found a reference to “Apple silicon Mac mini (5 ports)” in an Apple software update (some of these ports are said to be on the front of the machine, which is a great upgrade in Mac Studio design and I’d love to see it on a new Mac mini).

The “five-port” description suggests there will be another model with more or fewer ports — Apple used similar terminology to differentiate between dual- and quad-port versions of some MacBook Pro models back in the Intel days. Current M2 Mac mini models have fewer ports than models with the M2 Pro chip, because the more powerful processor also has more input and output capabilities — assuming we get one Mac mini with the M4 chip and an upgraded model with the M4 Pro chip, we’d expect the Pro version to have more ports.

Gurman says other Mac models, including the Mac Studio, Mac Pro, and MacBook Air, will see M4 series updates throughout 2025. Of those, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro have gone the longest without an update — they still use M2 series chips.

Apple is also said to be planning to launch some new, lower-cost iPads at an October event — and it wouldn’t be the first time Macs and iPads have shared billing for one of these late-fall product announcements. The $349 iPad 10 and iPad mini have gone more than a year without any kind of hardware update; both seem likely to get newer chips, if not significantly updated designs.