Macenstein is reporting that a hacker with access to a Core 2 Duo "Merom" CPU clocked at 2.16 GHz has successfully upgraded his Mac Mini. According to the hacker's benchmarks, the upgraded Mini beat out a Dual 2.5 GHz G5 in an iTunes encoding test by 15%. Note that these benchmarks could not be confirmed by MacRumors, but are placed on Page 1 for interest's sake.
Both the Mac Mini and the iMac have socketed CPU's, which make them suitable for swapping with Intel's imminent Core 2 Duo chips, which are conveniently socket-compatible with Intel's current Core Duo chips. The MacBook and MacBook Pro however have their CPUs soldered to the motherboard, making upgradeability impractical.
Thursday April 30, 2026 2:59 pm PDT by Juli Clover
During today's earnings call for the second fiscal quarter of 2026, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the Mac mini and Mac Studio could be hard to get for months to come.
"We think, looking forward, that the Mac mini and Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply demand balance," Cook said.
Apple underestimated demand for the Mac mini and the Mac Studio. "Both of these are amazing...
For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with Astropad to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a Mac mini to use with Astropad's new Workbench app. For those unfamiliar with Astropad, it is the company behind Astropad Studio and Luna Display. Astropad Studio lets you use an iPad as a drawing tablet connected to a Mac and Luna Display turns an iPad into a secondary display for a Mac, so...
Apple this week stopped offering a 256GB storage option for the Mac mini worldwide. As a result, the desktop computer now has a higher starting price.
In the U.S., for example, the Mac mini now starts at $799 with the M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, whereas it previously started at $599 with the M4 chip, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage.
While the 512GB configuration always...
