Ports remain the same. Two forward-facing USB-C 3 ports (up to 10 gigabytes per second), as well as a headphone jack and a power indicator light. On the back, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, an Ethernet jack, and the power adapter port. Using the available USB-C ports and HDMI on the back, you can connect up to two 5K 120-Hz external displays (such as the Studio Display XDR or BenQ 5K MA270S) or three 4K displays.

One controversial design is that the power button is still hidden underneath the back left corner of the computer. If you know where it is, just tilt the Mac Mini to the side and reach your finger back—easy. If you don’t know (or keep forgetting, as I do), it means having to flip the thing over entirely, with all your cables attached. It remains a silly design decision in my view, but it’s nowhere near as egregious as the Magic Mouse it pairs with (sold separately), which still infamously charges from the bottom. But I digress.

I still wish it had an SD card slot (forward-facing, like the Mac Studio) though. Plenty of photographers and videographers would be well suited for the Mac Mini, and yet they’ll need to buy an additional dock or adapter. And yes, some color options, like the iMac, would be nice. But from the outside, it’s the same well-built, compact mini PC it’s always been. It’s the performance under the hood where you’ll need to dig in to see the extra value in this latest generation.

AI Gains

Right off the bat, I was eager to test a couple of new components in the M6 Mac Mini. First, there are the advances in the M6 chip itself. This is our first glimpse of the next generation of Apple Silicon, and the first built on a 2-nm process node. It represents a significant step up in transistor count on the die—46 billion in this case. That’s around a 35 percent increase in transistor density, which translates to higher efficiency and more performance. In theory.

The M6 Mac Mini also adds two more CPU cores than the M4 model, for a total of 12. That’s a 21 percent increase in single-thread performance and a 36 percent improvement in a multi-threaded run. Those numbers sound impressive, but compared to the M5 in the MacBook Air, they’re not as substantial. It’s only around 10 percent faster than the M5 Pro chip in the MacBook Pro in single-threaded performance (and unsurprisingly, much further behind in multi-threaded). Those two extra CPU cores, though, do prop up the multi-threaded performance, even compared to the base M5 chip. It’s hard to do apples-to-apples comparisons to only a laptop.

Like previous Mac Minis, it has a fan inside. And when you get to work on something heavy, you’ll definitely hear it start to make some noise. It’s not terrible, but if you’re coming from a MacBook, you’ll definitely notice. That active cooling ensures you get stronger performance from that M6 chip than you would in a MacBook Air (though I won’t be able to do a side-by-side comparison until the M6 MacBook Air comes out, presumably in 2027).