I will believe Apple when I am on the order page, sorting out BTO options and delivery times. Until that happens, anything and everything is possible, including nothing.
From a certain point of view the Mac mini is important to Apple. However, it is a sliding scale and relative to the iPhone, the iPad and now the Watch, it is definitely at or near the bottom of the list. Many posters on this forum would rate the Mac mini a #1 or a #2 and do not give one whit about iPhone, iPad, Watches, et al. Unfortunately, the reality is that the Mac mini simply is not where Apple makes its money and where the opportunities lie, Apple has to capitalize on it.
That being said...why they could not have spared a small team to update the Mini in late 2016 once Skylake supplies stabilized does frustrate me just a bit. I am sure dual-core i5 and i7 CPUs and maybe a BTO option to the 6770HQ along with TB3 would have been appreciated. But I do not run Apple, nor do I have any special insight into their day to day, so I must reluctantly defer to the executive suite. It is what it is.
I don't think they could spare the people. I get the feeling that the 2016 MacBook Pros needed the full engineering resources to launch and they still had to make compromises - the battery failing the key test being one. The contentious keyboard another and the touch bar was self inflicted damage which raised the price greatly but also served to allow the addition of the T1/T2 CPU into the Pro lineup.
You can argue the toss over whether Apple shouldn't have a bigger engineering department but I think part of the issue is down to maintaining secrecy too and a huge engineering team might be leaky too.
New minis will support 4K displays just fine and they are relatively cheap at this point. If you want to hang on to your investment in your existing monitors, you can, but the flip side is that the fonts may not look as sharp. There are some workarounds for this right now. I do not think it was an easy decision for Apple, but I am pretty sure it was a necessary one.
Apple has wanted to get rid of non-Retina displays for years, which is one reason why I think they have let the Mac mini and the Mac Pro languish, hoping they could quietly discontinue them. The non-Retina 21.5" iMac was a bone thrown to those looking at a price tag and to school districts want to cut costs as much as possible. I suspect it will disappear in any 2018 iMac update.
Apple could have alleviated all of this had it kept the products updated and made sure it released its own monitors, which would be fine for Pro users, but not for value conscious mini buyers.
Apple will have to move the Mini upmarket if they want to add the price of the T2 CPU into the mix. Higher average selling price also means more profits but they also bring expectations. The semi-pro buyers at the higher price ranges may want more horsepower as well as the famed silence and small form factor that the mini has brought to the table.
If Apple have decided that achieving decent graphics performance with 4k can't be achieved with a $499 computer and that the iPad is now mature enough to take up the slack from enough users at those kinds of price points they can design for a higher price point and be able to make a profit from a headless Mac aimed at a higher market segment - mining those professional users who aren't interested in a 2013 Mac Pro and who may probably not be served by a 2019 Mac Pro in terms of price.
The issue could therefore be thus:
1. What CPU is going to be considered to be decent enough to fulfil expectations without overlapping with the iMac? A 15w CPU in a $999 Mini is going to be seen as paltry without a discrete GPU. Going up the power scale could see it
2. Is Iris Graphics acceptable in a computer which could get connected to a 4k display (given that Mojave prefers those kinds of resolutions now) and even into a 5k display? If not then would a discrete GPU be a good spec choice or would Apple expect Mini buyers to buy expensive eGPU solutions or actively not want dGPU if they are using it for a server? It seems certain that the 21.5" non retina iMac will be discontinued after watching the non retina iMacs disappear generation by generation so Apple can declare that the entire range has gone retina (or capable of driving 4k retina displays with acceptable performance where headless) when they replace the MacBook Air too.
3. Going upmarket may bring the question of removable storage and RAM back onto the table. For a change of design direction do Apple therefore adopt a more 'Pro' approach and simply be more generous with their SKUs to start with? Get the user to buy the 'overpriced' RAM and storage from the start if they want to engineer their own way up to 64Gb?
4. Apple should have had enough time (including with the iMac) to determine that extra cores means more heat - over and above the nominal TDP figures quoted for the CPUs - when they are being caned. Professional users will be looking to export music and video for example. This could mean using the iMac Pro cooling system in the 2018 27" iMac or reducing the power output from the 21.5" iMac. It could also mean a new form factor for the Mini especially if more powerful CPUs are on the cards.
5. If the Mini has to go upmarket but with a higher basic spec across the SKUs could we see generous specs overhauling the 2013 Mac Pro on benchmarks? I think we'll see at least one SKU with a dGPU, while server buyers would be happy with a configuration with a strong CPU.
