The Great Port Panic: Notes from a Man Who Bought Two Mac Minis

My wife’s seven-year-old iMac has slowed to a crawl, spinning that cursed “wheel of death” like a medieval torture device. My own seven-year-old laptop, lashed to a monitor like a patient in an ICU, hasn’t exactly delivered the clarity and comfort I need at my desk. For years I procrastinated on upgrades for the usual reasons—data migration, password authentication, DPI settings, monitor heights, the question of whether the mouse goes left or right. Every new computer setup promises productivity but arrives with a Costco-sized migraine.

At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law delivered the slap: “Get off your butt and replace them. RAM prices are exploding. AI is eating the supply.” He said it with the urgency of a man who has watched a tech apocalypse montage on fast-forward.

I went back and forth between a Lenovo business mini PC and a Mac Mini, like a man choosing between two religions, neither of which he fully trusts. In the end I rolled the dice on Cupertino. I bought two identical Mac Minis—M4, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD. I’m either a pragmatic genius or the biggest sucker Apple has netted since the butterfly keyboard years.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in the dark obsessing over the only question that matters to men of a certain age: Does it have enough ports? I have a mechanical keyboard, a mouse, Edifier speakers, two 27-inch monitors, a printer, an SD reader for my Nikon Z30, and ethernet. Eight connections. The Mac Mini has two USB-A ports and some USB-C wizardry that feels like a riddle designed by a monk from the USB Consortium. So I bought an Anker multi-port hub. But of course the hub isn’t self-sufficient—you must also buy the 100W charger, and the 100W cable, like tech accessories sold separately from your dignity.

Then there’s the setup. I’ll have to dive into Apple System Settings and tell the machine who I am: configure the mechanical keyboard, calibrate the Dell and Asus monitors, coax the printer to speak in the dialect of Cupertino. I haven’t used macOS in years. My engineering friend—who worships his MacBook Pro like it’s Thor’s hammer—assures me, “The extra you pay for Apple is stupid tax.” I’m not sure whether I’m buying ease of use or a velvet rope to my own humiliation.

But the final boss isn’t the ports, or the migration, or the learning curve. It’s the aesthetics. I will have a quiet four-inch metal cube powering two gleaming monitors. I want the desk to look like a minimalist command station, not the back room of a RadioShack circa 1997. Every cable threatens the illusion. Every adapter is a serpent in Eden. The rat’s nest must not be allowed to encroach.

This is why I waited so long to replace the old machines. Not because I feared expense or inconvenience—but because I feared myself. The arrival of a new computer flips my OCD switch like a Vegas neon sign. For the next week, I’ll be pacing my office like an engineer at Cape Canaveral—sleepless, wiring my life together one USB-C at a time.