Apple seems to have plenty of hardware launches lined up for this year, including the iPhone 15 lineup. We've already heard of a few Macs being tested with the Apple M3 processor, and now, there's a new one in the form of the Mac Mini, which has reportedly started being tested within the company.

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg wrote in the Power On newsletter that Apple has been testing the base model of Mac Mini with the yet-to-be-launched M3 chip. The M3 chip will apparently be quite similar to its predecessor in terms of number of cores it has, meaning it will have 8 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. Gurman also claimed that the Mac Mini model the company was testing includes up to 24GB of RAM, similar to the 2023 Mac Mini.

However, what's expected to be different is the performance. The M3 chip is expected to be based on a 3nm process as against a 5nm process technology in M2, and it should bring some improvements to the CPU and GPU performance.

Reports have suggested that we'll see the M3 chip in 2023 Macs, with the first batch of M3 Mac models launching in October this year. As for the timing of the M3 Mac Mini release, it's unlikely to come out before 2024. But with the M3 chip making a debut in October, we will get a fair idea about how it performs with upcoming iMac, MacBook Air 13-inch, and MacBook Pro 13-inch models, which are expected to be revealed along with the new chip.

Apple's current Mac Mini comes with M2 and M2 Pro chips, but the company is still selling the M1 variant, which came out almost three years ago. The company took a gap of two years to launch an updated Mac Mini with M2 Chips. But this time, it might not take that long to launch the M3-based Mac Mini. Regardless of when it comes out, Apple needs to make significant improvements to the upcoming Mac Mini to appeal to the user to buy the latest model with the M3 processor.