Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has revised his forecast for the next Mac mini refresh.
The Mac mini 2022 was conspicuously absent from Apple’s Peek Performance event this week, but that’s not to say that the company’s slew of new goods is disappointing.
This year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman predicted that Apple’s cheapest desktop, the Mac mini 2020, will get two updates, thus at least one of them was expected to be unveiled on Tuesday. However, it was a no-show in the end, likely to provide some breathing room to the new Mac Studio.
For Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst with a 70.4 percent accuracy rate on AppleTrack, that breathing room might be an entire year.
Apple is expected to unveil a “more powerful Mac mini and more inexpensive external display” in 2022, according to Kuo’s tweet before to this week’s presentation. However, he’s changed his mind and now expects the Mac mini to arrive in 2023 instead:
Apple insiders said yesterday that two Mac mini models were in development, one with M2 and the other with M2 Pro. The first of them, according to the insiders, should come later this year.
The fact that this doesn’t exactly match Gurman’s forecasts from last week, when he expected the Mac mini to get M1 Max and M2, only adds to the confusion. It’s possible that the former was axed in order to give the Mac Studio more time, so 9to5Mac’s sources aren’t totally contradicting.
Who can you trust?
It’s hard to tell who is more likely to be right in this situation. While Kuo has a good track record of being accurate, the fact that he changed his prior prognosis might signal that he has learned something new. If 9to5Mac’s sources are correct, then this information must be quite recent indeed.
On top of this, a refresh with newer CPUs would be pretty simple for the Mac mini, which has been around for a while now. In order for the new Mac Studio product line to have a chance to shine, Apple may have decided that the Mac mini must seem appropriately inferior.
That would mean that a release in 2023 wouldn’t be out of the question, particularly if the stop-gap M1 Max model is indeed doomed.