I’m just curious, why would the new Mac Mini not come with USB-A ports on the back?
Because the new Mac Mini suffers from a bunch of form-over-function/cost-cutting design decisions - but it looks really small and cute and is very fast, so that's alright then... even if you have to cover all of the deskspace you saved with extra hubs (which you can't stack on top because you need to lift the thing up to turn it on) and cables trailing the ports that have been moved to the front.
In fact the base M4 Mac Mini isn't so bad in the USB ports respect - it's actually
gained a TB4 port c.f. the M2 Mini so you've now got 5 (potentially) USB ports rather than 4, and using a USB-C to USB-A adapter really shouldn't cause any problems. You shouldn't need a USB hub if you didn't need one with the old Mini. (Now, the M4 Pro Mini has
lost a TB4/USB port c.f. the old M2 Pro Mini - but nobody seems to be talking about that...) - although you'll be stuck with cables trailing from the front ports (
extra front ports for thumb drives etc. = good,
moving ports to the front to superficially save space = bad).
But, yeah, a couple of USB-A ports (along with rear audio) would have been very useful to a lot of people and
needn't have come at the expense of high-bandwidth ports... but remember, smaller is better!!!
I want to upgrade from my old Mac Mini to a new one and now I have to go out and get not only a USB hub, but one that is powered because my little mobile scanner that I use on my desktop needs a powered USB-A port.
A USB-C to A adapter will give you the same number of USB ports as you had on the old Mini - and should deliver the same power that you'd get from a USB-A port. You may be able to find a USB-C to USB-A
female cable for your scanner to help with the short lead.
A USB hub may be more convenient if you want to connect multiple devices - you might get away with an unpowered one if you only connect devices that have theirown power supply but it's probably better to get a powered one anyway
The Mac mini isn’t really a desktop computer though is it?
It's the external display, keyboard, pointing device and mains power supply that you need to use it that make it a (pointlessly small) desktop computer. If Apple intended it to be a portable then they should have made it USB-C powered
and put the power button somewhere you could get at.
Which brand dock and what cost? Thunderbolt docks with a lot of ports tend to by pricy. I hope to get one someday.
If you just want a load of ports for USB 2-3/3.1, there's no advantage to a pricey Thunderbolt dock over a regular USB 3.1 hub - with TB4 docks all the USB devices end up connected to a single USB controller via an internal hub anyway. If you shop around you
might find a TB3 device with multiple USB controllers (there's one StarTech TB3 to USB3 adapter with multiple controllers) but otherwise, you're just getting an expensive USB 3 hub.
TB/USB4 hubs/docks
are useful when you want to connect at least one display or TB/USB peripheral alongside any USB3 peripherals, in which case they do let you make efficient use of the bandwidth of a single host port.
Because USB-A has low bandwidth and is a waste of space.
compared to the the 120 Gb/s ports, or even 20 GB/s USB-C, that's pretty low bandwith
USB-A is low bandwidth. Apple leaving it out of a desktop computer in favor of much higher bandwidth ports is totally reasonable.
We're talking about the Mac Mini. It only has 3 high-bandwidth TB4/USB4 ports. The other two USB-C ports are USB3 only and don't offer one jot more bandwidth than the two USB-A ports on the old Mini that they've effectively replaced (Apple doesn't support USB 3.2x2 mode which would have been the only bandwidth advantage of a type C connector). Keeping at least one as USB-A would have been useful to a lot of people, and
you could always use a dongle to convert it back to USB-C.
For example, there are a whole bunch of ultra-low-profile wireless mouse/keyboard dongles and flash drives with the innards built into the shaft of the USB-A plug, which can be left permanently plugged in. Where USB-C equivalents exist they're actually
bigger because everything has to be in the "handle".
Recall the big uproar about a certain manufacturer eliminating the CD drive, and then before that the floppy disk drive. Uproar, wailing, gnashing of teeth, pillaging of villages, but within 18 months we couldn't even remember that stuff.
...but you've countered your own point... the fact that the wailing and gnashing of teeth over floppies and optical drives was over in a few months shows that Apple were correct about them being obsolete - certainly to the point where the bulky drives could ilve in a cupboard rather than be built-in to a laptop. It's now 8 years since Apple first tried to go all-USB-C and people are
still complaining because they have a genuine need for USB-A. The majority of peripherals in use are
at most USB 3.1g2 (which can run over USB-A) so at best there's little advantage to USB-C. Anyway, nobody is calling for the removal of all USB-C/TB ports - just for a few USB-A ports (which take up a fraction of the resources of a full TB/USB4 port) to be retained on desktop machines where space shouldn't be at a premium.
What's been happening instead is that USB-A ports are disappearing
without being replaced by USB-C - the M4 Mini is a happy exception, but the M4
Pro mini is a port down c.f. the M2 Pro - so even
with dongles/new cables/new peripherals, people need hubs where they didn't before.
It's only recently that USB-C hubs
with multiple downstream USB-C connections have started to appear - there's about
one affordable 4-way USB-C-to-4x-USB-C (USB 3.2 only) and everything else is (expensive) TB4 with only 3 downstream type C ports. Sell me a $100 8-port USB-C 3.2 hub and I might start thinking about swapping out my old cables for type C.
www.kensington.com
