Because good things come in incredibly tiny packages

The Mac mini represents the best value in Apple's lineup, and delivers in an impressively small design with few compromises

- Tushar Kanwar

Ever since it started life alongside the iPod shuffle at Macworld 2005, billed as the "cheapest, most affordable Mac ever," the Mac mini has occupied a special (if very little) space in Apple's portfolio. It's been the tip of the company's arrow, aimed squarely at PC "switchers" looking for the most reasonably priced entry point into the Mac ecosystem, as long as you were willing to BYOKDM—bring your own keyboard, display, and mouse. The thing was, that entry-level price point that made the mini so attractive, it came with a caveat—8 gigabytes of non-upgradeable memory—which left very little headroom for future growth.

That changes with the M4 Mac mini (₹59,900 onwards), now with a new form factor and enough memory to handle anything most consumers will want to throw at it for the foreseeable future. This is easily the most capable Mac Apple has sold for the price and is by far the best value Mac in a long while.

You'd never call the 7.75x7.75-inch dimensions of the previous minis bulky, but the almost-ground-up redesign of the M4 mini, now in a 5x5-inch avatar, looks practically tiny in comparison. Images don't do the size of the new mini justice. It's just a bit bigger and taller than an Apple TV box and can now fit in smaller spaces on your desk or your entertainment lounge…or your palm, for that matter. At a shade under 700 grams, you could be tempted to pick it up and throw it into a backpack for a hybrid work setup, as long as your workplace has the monitor and peripherals handy.