“Mac Mini (Mid 2014)” briefly appears in Apple support document

An interesting development today for people watching for an update to Apple's Mac Mini desktop: Apple's support document for its Boot Camp drivers and software for Windows briefly listed a heretofore unannounced "Mac Mini (Mid 2014)." 9to5Mac first spotted the entry after it was added to the page yesterday, and we were able to grab our own screenshot to confirm before it was removed earlier today. If the entry points to a real system and is not simply mistyped, we could see a new Mac Mini any day between now and the end of August—Apple reserves the "mid" label for systems released in the late spring or in the summer. Macs released in September or later normally get the "late" label instead.

The Mac Mini is the only computer in Apple's lineup, vestigial non-Retina MacBook Pro aside, that hasn't gotten an upgrade to Intel's Haswell CPUs. Any mid-2014 refresh would be a significant upgrade, since new CPUs would give the Mini better CPU and GPU performance and reduced power consumption. Adding a better GPU and a Thunderbolt 2.0 port to the Mini could even make it a capable little 4K workstation, a useful capability given that OS X Yosemite has been "optimized" for high-density displays (Apple's words, backed up by our own observations).

The 10.9.3 update improved OS X's support for 4K displays, but the 15-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro and Mac Pro are the only systems that benefit from it as of this writing. So far this year, the only Mac hardware updates have involved minor CPU changes and price cuts. The MacBook Air and iMac lines were both shuffled around earlier this year, and the Retina MacBook Pro lineup just got a minor bump this morning. As we discussed in each of those articles, the lack of next-generation Broadwell CPUs from Intel is probably holding up more significant makeovers for those products, which all transitioned to Haswell last year. We've contacted Apple to see whether the new Mac Mini entry was a misprint, but as of this writing we have received no response. Apple rarely comments on things like this, but we'll update the article if it does. When (and if) Apple releases a new Mac Mini, we'll give it the full review treatment.