Water cooler talk from the tree of Apple seems to suggest that the company will finally give in and offer an HDMI connector in the next round of the Mac Mini. The HDMI connector is said to be replacing the DVI port in the yet-to-be-announced revision of the Mini.

The decision seems to go hand in hand with the whispers that the next Mini will use the Nvidia MCP89 chipset; and if this is true, this means that the Mini again will be a Core 2 Duo box and will not be supporting the new Core i3/i5/i7 chips that are the latest offerings from Intel.

In addition to the HDMI port, it is suggested by our friends in fruit land that the next Mini will also offer the Mini DisplayPort connector that still has not caught on as well as many would have liked. It has been said that some design wizardry has taken place so that you can get audio over one of those ports, as well.

We continue to hear suggestions of possible Blu-ray support, but we have to think that this is again doubtful. It is likely that Blu-ray support would have to appear in higher-end boxes before Apple would work down such support to the Mini. We have to tell you that we don’t expect it yet, but still we strongly believe that you will see it in the near future in other products as an option.