As the year in tech slowly winds up, here’s a thought: The new Mac Mini may become the biggest winner of the year among video game enthusiasts. Apple has always dreamt of making a mark in the gaming industry and the M4 chip can help deliver just that.

Mac Mini with M4 or M4 Pro chips offers formidable processing power, besides the ability to easily connect it to a living room TV setup.

When compared to the best-selling PC desktop in its price range, Mac Mini is up to 6x faster at one-twentieth the size. Mac Mini with M4 features a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, and now starts with 16GB of unified memory. And if you move into M4 Pro zone, the chip has the world’s fastest CPU core with lightning-fast single-threaded performance. With up to 14 cores, including 10 performance cores and four efficiency cores, M4 Pro also provides excellent multithreaded performance. With up to 20 cores, the M4 Pro GPU is up to twice as powerful as the GPU in M4, and both chips bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the Mac mini for the first time. The Neural Engine in M4 Pro is also over 3x faster than in Mac mini with M1, so on-device Apple Intelligence models run at blazing speed. M4 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory and 273GB/s of memory bandwidth — twice as much bandwidth as any AI PC chip — for accelerating AI workloads.

Besides excellent pricing, this is top-drawer hardware. On the software side, the company recently upgraded its Metal graphics software. Bundle that with macOS graphics technologies, a well-integrated App Store, new software for porting games and support for third-party controllers.

As Mark Gurman recently pointed out, the company’s first meaningful attempt was the Pippin, a home game console co-developed in the 1990s… before Steve Jobs returned to Apple to save it from bankruptcy. The new Mac Mini can help Apple achieve a new milestone.