A great mini PC tosses in a USB Type-C and/or Thunderbolt port and an SD card reader.

Ports: A good mini PC comes with at least four USB ports.

Expect to pay between $600 and $800 for a mini PC capable enough to last you the next few years.

Price: Mini PCs are smaller than desktop PCs, but their size doesn’t make them cheaper-on the contrary, cramming everything into a small box is an engineering feat that you pay a small premium for.

Wireless features: Every mini PC should come with support for Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) wireless networking, as well as Bluetooth, so you don’t have to waste USB ports by adding dongles for Wi-Fi or your wireless keyboards and mice.

Budget picks usually come with less storage, but Chrome OS relies more on cloud storage than Windows and macOS do, so local storage isn’t as big a deal for a Chromebox. A 256 GB SSD should be available as a standard feature, and upgrading the storage or adding a second drive later should be easy.

Storage: A spinning hard drive can bog down an otherwise speedy computer, so a solid-state drive is a requirement here.

If you spend lots of time in heavy-duty apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere, or if you regularly edit several large spreadsheets or databases at a time, you may benefit from 16 GB aside from the Mac mini, any of our picks allow you to upgrade the RAM if you decide that you need more.

Memory: We recommend at least 8 GB of RAM for browsing the web and handling basic productivity tasks.With the exception of our budget contenders and the Mac mini, all the mini PCs in our test group have a midrange 12th-generation Intel processor. Processor: A mini PC needs a processor powerful enough to handle basic web browsing, light photo editing, and any office programs you use.

Thunderbolt 4 to hdmi 2.1 cable