Hartley Charlton
Developers now have access to cloud-ready M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini devices through MacWeb, a Silicon Valley-based cloud services provider.
The company has released three configurations of the new Mac mini, powered by Apple’s M4 and M4 Pro chips. Developers and IT departments can lease the machines for workloads ranging from basic development to advanced AI modeling, providing an efficient and scalable infrastructure option without having to purchase expensive hardware outright. The new Mac mini can range from $599 for the base M4 model to $1,999 for the high-end M4 Pro model with 64GB of unified memory.
The three configurations include the MacWeb Base M4 for $99 per month, MacWeb Power M4 Pro for $199 per month, and MacWeb Ultimate M4 Pro for $299 per month. The Base M4, equipped with a standard M4 chip, is designed for virtual desktops and smaller workloads. The Power M4 Pro includes a 12-core processor and 24GB of unified memory, making it suitable for app development and testing. The Ultimate M4 Pro, MacWeb’s most advanced tier, offers a 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, and 64GB of unified memory capable of handling intensive workloads like training AI models and mission-critical apps.
MacWeb touts the potential of its M4 Pro configurations to support advanced networking capabilities using Thunderbolt 5. According to the company, Thunderbolt 5 delivers 80Gbps of bidirectional throughput, a performance leap described as up to 800 percent faster than 10G Ethernet. This apparently enables seamless clustering of Mac minis, allowing users to pool resources for distributed computing tasks including video editing and large-scale software testing.
Companies like AWS have offered similar services in recent years, but MacWeb’s integration with Apple’s latest Mac hardware puts it at the forefront of the market, along with MacStadium. MacWeb has kept its M2-based offerings for developers with less demanding performance needs.
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