Apple‘s power button placement on the new Mac mini has been a punchline since the day it launched, and honestly, it deserved to be. When Apple redesigned the Mac mini in late 2024, shrinking it down to something roughly the size of a paperback book, the company also decided to tuck the power button underneath the machine, on the bottom-rear corner. For a company obsessed with usability, it was a genuinely puzzling call, and the internet let Apple know about it almost immediately.

If you’ve ever owned one of these, you know the drill. The Mac mini sits quietly on your desk, and the one time you actually need to press that button, you have to reach around the back and tip the whole thing forward just to get a finger underneath it. One frustrated user summed up the mood on social media pretty bluntly, calling it “the dumbest design ever” and asking who on earth approved it. It became such a meme that people started 3D-printing power button extenders and buying aftermarket stands just so they wouldn’t have to lift their computer every time they wanted to switch it on.

Apple, for its part, didn’t exactly rush to apologize. When journalists pressed the company’s hardware and marketing chiefs, John Ternus and Greg Joswiak, about the decision, they defended it as the “optimal spot” given how tiny the new mini’s footprint had become. Their reasoning boiled down to this: most people almost never touch the power button on a Mac. You put it to sleep, you leave it running, you restart through the software menu. The physical button becomes something you only touch during setup or the occasional troubleshooting reset. That’s a fair point on paper, but it didn’t do much to quiet the criticism, since the button being awkward at all still bugged people who just wanted a normal desktop experience.

Here’s the good news, though, and it’s the reason this whole saga is worth revisiting now. With macOS 26.5 Tahoe, which rolled out in mid-2026, Apple quietly fixed the problem without changing a single screw on the hardware. The fix lives entirely in software, buried inside System Settings. Head into the Energy section, and you’ll find a new option called “Start up when power is connected.” Flip that to Always, and your Mac mini will boot itself the instant it senses power, whether that’s plugging it into a wall outlet, flipping an external switch back on, or getting power restored after an outage.

In practice, that means once you’ve set this up, you may genuinely never need to hunt for that button on the bottom again. Want to restart your Mac mini remotely, or have it tied to a smart plug on a schedule? Now it just works, because the machine treats “receiving power” the same way it used to treat “someone pressed the button.” Apple even added a small caveat worth knowing: if your Mac mini stayed plugged in when you shut it down, give it about 30 seconds after you cut the power before restoring it, so the internal power supply has time to fully discharge. Skip that pause and the auto-start might not trigger properly.

It’s worth noting this isn’t exclusive to the Mac mini either. The same feature extends to the 2025 Mac Studio and the 2024 and later iMac, both of which technically ship with power buttons in slightly less annoying but still not ideal locations. So if you’ve been eyeing any of Apple’s compact desktops and the power button complaints have been nagging at the back of your mind, this update basically neutralizes the whole debate.

There’s also a neat accessibility angle here that got less attention. The same macOS update introduced a “Power Control” menu that lets you pair third-party switches to manage your Mac’s power state, which is aimed at users who have difficulty physically reaching or pressing small buttons. It’s a good reminder that Apple’s fix wasn’t just about quieting Twitter complaints; it also opened up a more inclusive way to control these machines.

Looking back at the original controversy, it’s almost funny how much noise a tiny button generated. Apple’s explanation at the time, that the compact new chassis simply didn’t leave room anywhere better, always felt slightly like an excuse rather than a design choice made from first principles. But nearly two years later, the company found a clever workaround that sidesteps the hardware limitation entirely. You still technically have a power button on the bottom of your Mac mini, and it’s still just as hard to reach as it ever was. The difference now is that you simply don’t have to bother with it most of the time.