New Mac Mini shows 142 power cycles??

Not necessarily. I suggest you contact the developer of that software or research its documentation to determine its meaning.

Contact a third-party vendor - Apple Support

Apple sells new as well as refurbished Macs. If you bought it from Apple then it was new when you bought it. If you bought it from any vendor other than Apple it may not be new.

Also, if you bought it from Apple (new or refurbished notwithstanding) you have 14 days to return it.

Was it DriveDX?

I get ridiculous Power Cycle counts.

My M4 is 3 weeks old and was completely new (sealed etc) but now it has 1,711 Power Cycle counts so I wouldn't worry . . . it's obviously not what you think.

👍

So you can rest assured your machine was a completely new one.

It's nothing to do with booting up the Mac.

While SMART is supposedly an industry "standard", manufacturers are not required to follow them to a tee nor required to report all supported SMART data and can sometimes change the values reported to suit their particular needs.

This is a common practice with many so called "standards".

ben87nz wrote:

Apparently it's an old machine. right?

No it is the SSD cycle counts, not the Mac mini.

The power cycles means it's been turned off and on for 142 times, right?

No that does not mean that the Mac mini was turned on 142 times.

The SSD was probably cycled and tested in the factory a 100 time before going to Apple.

Then it was probably cycled and tested another 40 times by Apple during assembly and macOS installation.

Correct but it's the drive I have booted the mini from since day one.

The internal which has only been booted once to set up the Mac shows 124 Power Cycles.

It's good that DriveDX, I used the trial version you can try for free. Shows the temperature of my External NVMe...