It’s here! The rumours of Xiaomi making its own version of the Mac Mini has now come to fruition as the company unveils their brand new Mini PC. Now, I’m not 100% sure if it’s called the Xiaomi Mini PC because I’ve only seen it on the Chinese site, and the name there translates to Xiaomi Mini Host or Xiaomi Mini Mainframe (迷你主机). But for simplicity’s sake, I’ll just call it the Mini PC.
The design similarities between this and the Mac Mini are unmistakable, and it was probably done intentionally especially when the product page’s header image looks like it was ripped right out of a “can I copy your homework, but don’t make it obvious” meme template. But, if there’s one thing Apple does well, I’d say it’s design.
Xiaomi’s Mini PC is an absolutely tiny small form factor PC (SFF) with just 0.444 litres of capacity. Xiaomi says that this case only takes up 3% of the space that a “traditional tower case” will take up, which I definitely believe. The main body weighs 437g, which is about what an iPad weighs, so it’s super light too.
Its guts, however, are very different to that of a Mac Mini. It features a 12th gen Intel Core i5-1240P processor with 16GB of 3200MHz DDR4 memory and 512GB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage. Raymond describes this i5 processor as “fine” stating that the P suffix means it has a little more “oomph” than its U counterpart. That said, he was gobsmacked at the fact that they didn’t include a H-series chip, adding that you should “just buy a laptop then” since you don’t need the battery saving benefits of a P-series processor.
Obviously, there are a number of reasons why you’d want a less powerful chip even on a device that doesn’t require battery life. Cooling is one, because more powerful chips tend to run hot, and this tiny chassis has only that much cooling to go around. Xiaomi says that they’ve worked closely with Intel during the development process of this Mini PC, basing it on Intel’s NUC next-generation computing solution.
How that fares in the real world, remains to be seen but Xiaomi has big plans for it. On their website, they showcase a bunch of different scenarios users might want to put the Mini PC in, like office work, designing, entertainment and even if you just want to push displays to a bunch of 4K screens.
Which brings me to the I/O on this thing because it’s quite impressive. There’s a whole host of ports in the front and the back, including two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, two HDMI 2.1 ports, one 2.5G Ethernet port, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, a USB 2.0 port and a headphone jack to boot. One of the front USB ports even supports power-off charging, which is a nice touch.
With these ports, Xiaomi also shows compatibility with a bunch of different setups including running multiple monitors, interfacing with a NAS server and even supercharging performance with an external GPU. Though I’m not sure how well the system will run on intensive tasks, or if it will be bottlenecked by that processor.
In any case, we don’t have any information on the pricing for this device just yet, or whether it will ever make its way out of China. It even comes pre-installed with Windows 11 Home Chinese edition which I only found out was a thing today. Would you be interested in a Mini PC like this? Let us know in the comments below.
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