SpaceX Introduces Starlink Mini - A Look at Its Specs and Potential for Tesla Integration

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Elon Musk introduced the Starlink Mini on X recently, and showed off a few of its unique new features.

We’ve updated this article with additional Starlink information such as pricing and mobile data plan.

SpaceX has now officially begun sales of the Starlink Mini to select early customers.

Specs

The Starlink Mini is about the size of a 14” laptop or Macbook, which means it is ultra-portable and can fit inside a backpack for easy carry. While it doesn’t appear to support power over USB-C, it does come with a 12V barrel jack and RJ45 Ethernet jack, as well as built-in Wi-Fi support. As for the Wi-Fi support, expect Wi-Fi 6 with 802.11ax and 3x3 MiMO support on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands. It has also been confirmed to have mesh support, which means you can link multiple Starlink Minis or Starlinks together to create a mesh Wi-Fi network.

The Starlink Mini will be 63% lighter than the standard Starlink dish, and about the size of a piece standard-sized paper.

Price

The most interesting part of this is the fact that it is expected to cost half of what current Starlink dishes cost – so within the $250 to $300 USD price range. Elon Musk, while unclear, also implied that the subscription price would also be lower for the Starlink Mini, enabling more affordable internet access.

For now, the United States limited offering places the price at $599.

SpaceX’s goal is to reduce the forward-looking price of the Mini, especially for regions around the world where connectivity is unaffordable or unavailable. However, in regions with high Starlink saturation - like North America, Starlink Mini places additional demand on the satellite network.

Roam Data Service

The Starlink Mini features a “Mini Roam” service, which is an additional $30/mo for 50GB of Mobile data that can be used anywhere in the United States, and is $1/GB for additional data. The Mini Roam service requires you to continue your regular Residential Starlink Service, even while roaming.

Speed

Of course, with a loss in size also comes a loss in speed – even if it’s still blazing fast. The Starlink Mini seemed to cap out at around 100 Mbps at a latency of 23ms, which is about half as fast as the top speeds for a regular Starlink dish, but with similar latency.

Even with the loss of speed, this is still more than fast enough to play video games and stream 4K video. Perhaps not at the same time, but the Mini is clearly designed for a single user.

Update: The Starlink Mini is indeed capped to 100Mbps max download speeds.

Starlink for Tesla?

The Mini is a good first step for possibly bringing Starlink capabilities to Tesla cars, which Elon Musk confirmed in 2022. Some enterprising users have either suction-cupped or mounted their starlinks to their glass Tesla roofs, or with special mounts for the Cybertruck already. The Mini will be a key item for going camping in your Tesla in the future - perhaps with the new Model Y Air Mattress!

Tesla could one day offer Starlink connectivity in Teslas, either as a backup to cellular connectivity or as a main source. However, Starlink connectivity requires line-of-sight, which likely means that Tesla would still require a cellular connection in their vehicles for times when vehicles don’t have a clear view of the sky. Using Starlink could help lower Tesla’s bandwidth costs and improve connectivity in remote areas.

Interestingly enough, some Superchargers already have Starlink functionality, with a transparent experience of vehicles automatically connecting to Supercharger Wi-Fi for data, including for Software Updates!

Release Dates

Musk mentioned that while the Starlink Mini isn’t available just yet, it will be rolling out to select areas in the next few months. Nothing further has emerged on where these areas are, but we could expect them to be in North America, where Starlink has done most of the new dish testing, such as with the more recent Starlink Flat High-Performance dishes.

Update: Starlink Mini has begun rolling out to early Starlink customers in the United States. No word yet on other regions.

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Is Tesla Planning to Add Steam Support to All Vehicles?

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Yesterday, we reported that Tesla updated their Steam integration on Model S and Model X vehicles. The update was part of their 2024 Holiday Update, but it looks like there may be more to this than a simple update.

Steam, a video game library app, makes it easy for users to buy or launch games on their computers. However, a couple of years ago, Valve, who created Steam, launched their own standalone device, the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs a custom OS based on Linux.

Steam Launch

When Tesla launched the redesigned Model S and Model X, Tesla introduced a dedicated gaming GPU with 16GB of RAM and touted the ability to play top-tier PC games in Tesla vehicles.

In 2022, Tesla finally launched the Steam app for the Model S and Model X as part of its 2022 Holiday Update. The Steam app runs Steam OS, the same OS as the Steam Deck in a virtual environment.

However, earlier this year, Tesla stopped including the GPU and Steam (Beta) in their vehicles, and we haven’t seen any updates to the Steam in quite some time. In fact, we thought Tesla was axing their gaming-on-the-go dreams.

SteamOS Update

The Steam app, which is still in Beta, is getting an interesting update for the Model S and Model X vehicles with the discrete GPU.

Those vehicles received an update to SteamOS 3.6 - the same version of SteamOS that runs on the Steam Deck. While nothing has visually changed, there’s a long list of performance optimizations under the hood to get things running smoother.

Comparing Steam Deck to Tesla Vehicles

Let’s take a look at the Steam Deck - according to Valve, its onboard Zen4 CPU and GPU combined push a total of 2 TFlops of data, which is fairly respectable, but much lower than today’s home consoles. The Steam Deck is capable of 720p gaming fairly seamlessly on low-to-medium settings on the go and is also built on the AMD platform.

AMD-equipped Teslas, including the Model 3 and Model Y, are packing an older Zen+ (Zen 1.5) APU (processor with a combined CPU and GPU). AMD claims that the V1000 - the same embedded chip as on AMD Tesla vehicles (YE1807C3T4MFB), brings up to 3.6 TFLops of processing power with it, including 4K encoding and decoding with the integrated GPU on board.

While that’s not enough for 4K gaming or comparable to a full-blown console or desktop GPU, that’s enough raw horsepower for light gaming and is currently more powerful than the Steam Deck.

The Model S and Model X’s GPU brings that up to about 10TFlops of power - comparable to modern consoles like the Xbox Series X at 12 TFlops.

Steam Gaming for All Vehicles?

The fact that Tesla is updating SteamOS even though the feature is no longer available in any new vehicles could indicate that Tesla is not only bringing Steam back to Teslas but that it’s going to play a much bigger role.

While SteamOS is run in a virtual environment on top of Tesla’s own OS, we could see Tesla bring SteamOS to all of its current vehicles, including the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. Steam in these vehicles would likely support any game that’s capable of running on the Steam Deck.

We think this Steam update, which includes performance improvements and a variety of fixes, has quietly passed under most people’s radars. This could be a very exciting update for those who enjoy gaming, especially for those who love to do it in their Tesla.

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Tesla Holiday Update Weather Features: All the Small Details

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As part of Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, Tesla included two awesome new features - Weather at Destination and the long-awaited Weather Radar Overlay. These two features are big upgrades built upon the weather feature that was added in update 2024.26. The original weather feature added an hourly forecast, as well as the chance of precipitation, UV index, Air Quality Index, and other data.

However, this update also added some smaller weather touches, such as the vehicle alerting you if the weather at the destination will be drastically different from the current weather.

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Weather At Destination

When you’re navigating to a destination and viewing the full navigation direction list, the text under the arrival time will show you the expected weather next to your destination. You can also tap this, and the full weather pop-up will show up, showing your destination's full set of weather information.

Note the weather under the arrival time

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You can also tap the weather icon at the top of the interface at any time and tap Destination to switch between the weather at your current location and the weather at your destination.

You’re probably considering that the weather at your destination doesn’t matter when you’re three hours away - but that’s all taken into account by the trip planner. It will add in both charge time and travel time and show you the weather at your destination at your expected arrival time.

And if the weather is drastically different or inclement, such as rain or snow, while you’ve got sunshine and rainbows - the weather will be shown above the destination ETA for a few moments before it tucks itself away.

Tesla also recently introduced a new voice command. Asking, “What’s the weather?” or something similar will now bring up Tesla’s weather popup.

The weather pop-up above the ETA

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One limitation, though—if you’re planning a long road trip that is more than a day of driving, the weather at destination feature won’t be available until you get closer.

Weather Radar Overlay

As part of the improvements to weather, Tesla has also added a radar overlay for precipitation. You can access the new radar overlay by tapping the map and then tapping the weather icon on the right side of the map. It’ll bring up a radar overlay centered on your vehicle. It’ll animate through the radar data over the last 3 hours so that you can see the direction of the storm, but you can also pause it at any point.

You’re able to scroll around in this view and see the weather anywhere, even if you zoom out. It also works while you’re driving, although it can be a little confusing if you’re trying to pay attention to the navigation system. If you like to have Points of Interest enabled on your map, the weather overlay will hide POIs except for Charging POIs.

Requirements / Data

Unfortunately, you’ll need Premium Connectivity for any of the weather features to work, and being on WiFi or using a hotspot will not be enough to get the data to show up. The data, including the weather radar, is provided by The Weather Channel.

As for supported models, weather and weather at destination are available on all vehicles except for the 2012-2020 Model S and Model X. The weather radar has more strict requirements and requires the newer AMD Ryzen-powered infotainment center available on the 2021+ Model S and Model X and more recent Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

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