Apple announced a new wave of product refreshes recently, and not only does the charging port for the Magic Mouse remain on the bottom of the device — the M4 Mac mini’s power button has been moved to the bottom, too. These design choices have riled up plenty of people, but it seems Apple stands by its new power button placement for the Mac mini.
In a video posted on Chinese social media platform Bilibili, Apple’s Greg Joswiak not only defends the decision but praises it. He calls it a “kind of optimal spot for a power button,” claiming that you just need to “kinda tuck your finger in there and hit the button.”
According to our M4 Mac mini review and many others, however, there isn’t enough room to reach the button without lifting the entire PC — and there’s no way to tell which side the button is even on. Things like that don’t just magically stick in everyone’s heads.
Joswiak also comments that “you pretty much never use the power button on your Mac,” so even if the button isn’t that easy to access, it seems Apple believes it doesn’t matter that much. Whether people should turn their computers off regularly or not is a topic of much debate — but at least we now know what Apple thinks. Who’s betting someone somewhere is now going to run a test to find out what happens when you turn a Mac mini off every night versus never turning it off at all.
In terms of the actual reason for the button placement, Joswiak implies that it’s due to the size reduction. If that’s true, it does seem like a decent trade-off — but some people are pretty convinced that Apple likes to sacrifice practicality just to achieve the most minimal design possible.
If you can deal with the power button, it’s worth noting that the power the M4 Mac mini provides is fairly amazing for the price.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.