Apple clearly laid out their primary chassis development objective. .... use less Aluminum.
They have gone from TWO down to one air vent. ( the input air shares a bottom vent with the output air). That means to move the same amount of air through the Mini chassis that it would need to move faster. Faster velocity air isn't likely going to produce more quiet.
The old mini had more capacity, but they are tossing low velocity flow capacity by 'halving' the air for air to flow through.
You don't know that.
You'd need to know the airflow capacity of the vents on each model, how inflow/outflow is segregated on the new Mini (you make a good point about the old nMP), etc. We don't even know if the fan is larger or smaller on the new mini. (Or if there are two?)
Chances are the new unit is slightly less capable than the old one, but the old one was probably significantly overengineered.
Most people here (probably not you) seem to think that having a big volume of dead space inside the box will improve cooling. They don't understand physics. You could build a Mini with no airspace at all with good cooling, and some have done something like that in the industrial PC arena (couple everything direct to the case, case is a big heatsink with fins).
Yes, we won't know for sure until it's out, but all this worrying is nuts. If there's one thing Apple's been 100% consistent about since they started making their own chips, it's that they care about power, heat, and noise.
How are the two front USB 3.2 Gen 2 being implemented?
Could be everything hangs off one of the TB controllers, but more likely a couple of PCIe4/5 lanes. One v4 lane is good for nominally 2GBps (16Gbps).
Honestly I've been a bit surprised that they haven't built their own mini-PCH-like chip, driving USB & Ethernet, already. Perhaps that's all waiting on the development of their in-house WiFi and Bluetooth.
