It took some clever engineering to shrink the redesigned Mac mini’s footprint while equipping it with some incredibly powerful internals. Still, critics will be quick to point the finger at Apple when it comes to certain decisions, such as moving the power button to the bottom of the chassis. While it may be an inconvenience to power the machine, two Apple executives explain why this position exists and why it’s not that big of a deal to people who raised the issue in the first place.
Most Mac mini owners would never turn off their device and would rather put it into sleep mode; Apple executives say the power button placement on the bottom was also chosen because of its smaller size
A content creator on Bilibili with the machine-translated name “Film and Television Hurricane” spotted by ITHome spoke to Apple executives Greg Joswiak and John Ternus, who were asked why the Mac mini’s power button is on the bottom was present. They responded that the smaller size forced the company to switch positions, making it the ideal place. In a recent teardown video of the compact computer, which shows a spiral heatsink, we saw a separate small motherboard containing the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, probably because this would take up a lot of space on the rest of the chassis.
Considering that a second motherboard had to be added to the setup, it shows how focused Apple and its engineers were on making the Mac mini as compact as possible without sacrificing performance. Apple executives also said that despite the change in the position of the power button, it is easily accessible and users just need to dip their finger into it. Furthermore, given the way Apple’s software is designed, most Mac mini owners will choose to put their hardware to sleep rather than perform a complete shutdown.
Waking a Mac mini from sleep is much faster than power cycling, but most critics probably like to blow these things out of proportion. Fortunately, they can only blame Apple for one thing: the $599 price for the base M4 Mac mini, which comes with 16 GB of Unified RAM and 256 GB SSD. Even better is the deal on Amazon, which has shaved $50 off this configuration, which now starts from $549. The 512GB storage model is also discounted by $50 and is available for $749, while the top-end M4 Pro option is also cheaper at $1,355 instead of $1,399.
News source: Bilibili