After years of Mini DVI and Mini DisplayPort, will Apple really give us HDMI? A bucketful of rumors from AppleInisider say HDMI is replacing DVI in the next Mac minis, and reveals a long lost audio/video Mini DisplayPort adapter.

The new Mac mini, according to AppleInsider, will ditch its old DVI port for HDMI, which'll sit next to the Mini DP port. The reason Apple's interested in HDMI is that it delivers audio along with video over a single port, unlike the current MiniDP spec. The catch, though, is that these new Mac minis use Nvidia's MCP89 chipset, meaning they'll likely be Core 2 Duo machines still—not yet getting the upgrade to Core i3/i5/i7.

In terms of other Macs, the audio/video problem still exists, so what Apple had cooked up to go with those Blu-ray players that never happened in the latest iMacs is a proprietary DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter that carried audio and video through a customized Mini DisplayPort. We might see this revised Mini DP port in the next MacBook revision though, and the adapter that goes with it.

The updated Mini DisplayPort with audio sounds like the most logical option for Apple, rather than backtracking to HDMI after purposely shunning it. Just give me one port that carries both audio and video—I don't care what you call it—and some way to plug it into another display or plug other stuff into the Mac, and I'll be happy. [AppleInsider]