So, today Apple unveiled the new M4 Mac mini, which seems like a perfect upgrade for me! Except… they did something really asinine:
They put the power button underneath.
This means that you have to physically pick up the machine to turn it on, or to force-reboot it. Those are rare occurrences, but they’re enough of one that this becomes a problem.
Why’s this a problem? Well, part of it is that the mini’s maximum storage configuration is pretty small, and upgrading the storage is stupid expensive, so pretty much everyone who’s using these for doing, say, audio and video work is going to need an external drive enclosure. And external drive enclosures tend to have very short, fixed Thunderbolt cables, and managing those cables can become very tricky even when you don’t need to move your device around.
This will also be a big problem for people who want to rackmount or monitor-mount their devices; as far as I can tell from various photos, there isn’t really much of a gap/lip under which you can place a finger. Maybe people will start making custom button-pressing tools or something, I dunno. I guess that wouldn’t be too hard.
But still, it’s annoying that Apple would make this change.
(Hopefully they at least put it under the front corner, which would at least be livable! None of the photos I’m finding show which corner it’s under though.)
Another annoying thing is that while there are now five USB-C ports (three of which are Thunderbolt), there are no longer USB-A ports, so at least for my setup I’d need to run everything through a Thunderbolt dock, and finding one of those that’s both reliable and provides the ports I need is troublesome at best. Also, in my experience, you really want a dedicated port (rather than a docking station) for an external monitor, a storage enclosure, and an audio interface… and that’s all three Thunderbolt ports right there. So then my keyboard and mouse would have to plug into one of the USB-C ports in front, and that gets really messy really fast.
So anyway, power-wise the M4 mini would be a huge upgrade for me, but for the physical and connectivity requirements of my recording studio, it doesn’t seem like a good fit.
Maybe I’ll get an M4 mini for my home office and then move my M1 Max Mac studio into the recording studio. Or maybe I’m fine with the hardware I have already.
