The power switch for the new Mac mini — image courtesy of Ivan Kuleshov
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After news broke that the new Mac mini has a power button on the bottom, fans with 3D printers have come up with ideas on how to make it more accessible.
The first of what could be a wave of Mac mini power button tools have started to circulate on social media, but perhaps the archetype of them all is engineer Ivan Kuleshov. He previously redesigned the Magic Mouse to have a charging port on the front.
I think this will work pic.twitter.com/dZkYFAPDik
— Ivan Kuleshov (@Merocle) October 30, 2024
Kuleshov’s idea is a clever fulcrum, where pressing one end causes the other to rise and therefore depress the relatively inaccessible power button. He even 3D printed it with an Apple-style power icon on the end.
Of course, there’s a small problem: Kuleshov doesn’t have a new Mac mini. They’re available to pre-order now, but won’t ship until November 8, 2024.
Kuleshov says he “modeled the Mac mini based on available photos and dimensions,” and he believes his lever will work. But he notes that it will ultimately depend on “the weight of the Mac mini and the force required to press the button.”
But there’s one more snag that Kuleshov’s lever design won’t fix. His lever has to stick out from one side of the new Mac mini, meaning that despite its small size, it takes up a lot of real estate on your desk.
If you’re the type to leave your Mac on all the time, you won’t be bothered by the power button. And you won’t be bothered by the planet, either.
Macs can reboot themselves after a power outage, so there are use cases where that awkward power button might only be pressed once. In that case, it might be pressed the first time you put your Mac mini down on your desk.
But whenever you need to press that button, you have to lift your Mac to reach it. Depending on the space you have and the number of cables you have connected, that could be awkward.
However, this harks back to the days of Steve Jobs, who famously didn’t like power buttons at all.
That didn’t stop Apple from putting one on every Mac mini, starting with the very first one in 2005. From then until now, the power button has been on the back — so it could have been more accessible even back then.
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