5 Updates You Likely Missed to Apple Macs This Week

Apple made good on its tease of a week of Mac announcements. Four new Macs running on Apple’s latest M4 chips arrived alongside MacOS Sequoia 15.1 and Apple Intelligence. The rollout started on Monday with a refresh to the iMac, followed by an entirely new — and incredibly small — Mac mini the next day and updated 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models on Wednesday. These are the first Macs to get the M4 (the new silicon first showed up in an iPad Pro), including the new M4 Pro and M4 Max variants. 

As always seems to be the case with Apple announcements, there are some details or other hardware updates that don’t immediately surface until Mac fans really dig into the designs and specs. Here are five that may have escaped your attention. 

Also read: I Got to Play With Apple’s New M4 Mac Mini, iMac and MacBook Pro

Watch this: Apple’s New M4 Macs Up Close: 2024 MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, iMac Details

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Mac Mini now supports up to three displays

The Mini starts at the incredible price of $599 for a base configuration that will likely be powerful enough for most people looking for a tiny home office or school desktop. But for $1,399, you can get an M4 Pro model that features Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, which delivers transfer speeds of up to 120Gbps and the ability to connect up to three displays up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or its HDMI out. The M4 can also do three displays, but only two are up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt. The third can have a resolution of up to 5K at 60Hz via Thunderbolt or 4K at 60Hz over HDMI out.

MacBook Air starts with 16GB of memory at 8GB price

All MacBook models, including the M2 and M3 MacBook Air (with an expected M4 upgrade early next year), will now have a minimum of 16GB of memory. That used to be a $200 price bump, but no more: The M3 MacBook Air will continue to start at $1,099 (£1,099, AU$1,799). To be clear, the memory increase is in service of Apple Intelligence as it’s really necessary for good AI performance without a more powerful graphics chip. 

Magic accessories updated from Lightning to USB-C

With two new Mac desktops, you might have expected some new accessories, and there are some. Sort of. The Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad all got updated with USB-C charging ports (a change that was expected this year due to a European Union law). No other changes were made, including the Magic Mouse’s awkward port location on its underside. 

Apple put the Mac Mini’s power button where?

For all of Apple’s design prowess, every once in a while, it makes a choice that leaves us scratching our collective heads (see above). The new Mac Mini is remarkably small and certainly a design feat, especially given its high-performance potential. But for some reason, perhaps because of its compactness or simply to keep it hidden, Apple put the Mini’s power button on the bottom of the computer’s rear-left side. It’s not a huge hardship to lift the rear to power it on and off, but it’s nonetheless unusual placement and potentially a bit of a pain if it is connected to three displays. 

MacBook Pro gets the longest-ever battery life for a Mac

Apple’s MacBooks have long had impressive battery life, regularly outdoing its Windows counterparts. Now, though, Apple is claiming the M4 MacBook Pro will be able to reach a battery life of up to 24 hours. I have no reason to believe this won’t be possible, as the M3 MacBook Pro reached 21 hours on our battery drain test. Still, battery life will vary a lot depending on the internal components and what you’re doing. Also, the current leader in our tests is the Qualcomm SnapDragon X-powered HP OmniBook X 14, which topped 25 hours.