Apple’s rumored Mac Mini redesign may ditch the USB-A port

Shrinking the Mac Mini to about the size of an Apple TV could bring connection compromises.

As The Verge reports, Apple’s next Mac Mini won’t have USB-A ports, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in today’s Power On newsletter that the new desktops will start to hit Apple’s warehouses in September. The higher-end variant with an Apple M4 Pro chip will ship in October, he writes.

The version with an M4 Pro will still cram a lot of ports, including five USB-C ports (two in the front and three in the back), an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack, according to Gurman’s sources. And the new Mac Mini will apparently have an internal power supply. That’s not too shabby for a computer that’s expected to be about the size of an Apple TV.

Is it time to say goodbye to USB-A? Maybe. Probably. But no matter how you feel about that, it’s absolutely time something new happened with the Mac Mini, the longest-in-the-tooth Apple computer design. As Chris Welch illustrated earlier this month, it looks the same in our 2012 and 2023 reviews.


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