The Morning After: Our verdict on Apple’s M4 Mac mini

Apple’s even tinier Mac mini is here — with M4 power. It’s also more affordable than ever and better value. It won’t shock you to hear the M4 Pro is very fast, but the Mac mini comes with 16 gigs of RAM as standard too.

The base Mac mini has an M4 chip sports a 10-core CPU (four high-performance cores and six high efficiency), a 10-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. For $1,399, you can bump up to the dramatically more powerful M4 Pro chip (like our review unit), featuring a 14-core CPU (10 high-performance and four high efficiency) and 20-core GPU. (But that’s a pricey upgrade.)

Its Geekbench 6 and Cinebench scores still beat most of the computers we’ve tested this year, and its GPU is fast enough for solid 1080p 60 fps gameplay. And it’s that small!

— Mat Smith

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Google’s Vids AI video maker is rolling out to more users

It’s available on most Workspace tiers.

Google Vids runs on Google’s AI model, Gemini, to create workplace and marketing videos from Google Drive files and descriptions. You can either start a video from scratch or use a pre-made template to get a first draft going. There’s even a Help me create option.

Google Vids doesn’t make videos from the ground up, like the mostly creepy creations of Runway’s Gen-2 or OpenAI’s Sora. Google uses different media and compiles them based on your suggestions and the content of the source documents.

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Amazon’s next video game TV project? Mass Effect

Paragon or renegade?

Variety reports that Amazon MGM Studios is developing a TV series based on the sci-fi universe of Mass Effect. Daniel Casey will be the series writer and executive producer. He has action credits on the screenplay for F9: The Fast Saga and made contributions to sci-fi films Kin and 10 Cloverfield Lane. The Mass Effect series includes a critically acclaimed trilogy of titles and a critically panned sequel, Andromeda. There’s also another game in the works, which I assume would dovetail into this show somehow. Corporate synergy, baby.

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