And using a Mac mini (with battery) on a couch when it’s connected to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor would be comfortable?
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Add a battery to Mini
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And using a Mac mini (with battery) on a couch when it’s connected to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor would be comfortable?
Thanks for the entertaining read.
The Mini would be on the desk, connected to peripherals, monitor, and wireless keyboard and mouse, but you could get up and use it from the couch with your Air using AirPlay, with no wires, loud fans, or heat.
This is a great idea, but where I live, some solutions have already been provided by a PC shop.
The mod this shop is offering is:
1. Remove the original PSU and power the Mac mini with a common USB-C adapter. Any decent display with USB-C power distribution function can provide enough power to run the Mac mini.
2. Make a new smaller aluminum case for the Mac Mini. as the original PSU was removed, the modified Mac Mini case is now half of its original size.
Another shop is offering the M1 Macbook Air or Macbook pro with the broken LCD panel removed (they call it i-mam). This half Macbook is basically the MacMini with a battery as you wish.... And they come with a similar price tag as a 2nd Mac Mini. No need to worry about modding.
The mod this shop is offering is:
1. Remove the original PSU and power the Mac mini with a common USB-C adapter. Any decent display with USB-C power distribution function can provide enough power to run the Mac mini.
2. Make a new smaller aluminum case for the Mac Mini. as the original PSU was removed, the modified Mac Mini case is now half of its original size.
Another shop is offering the M1 Macbook Air or Macbook pro with the broken LCD panel removed (they call it i-mam). This half Macbook is basically the MacMini with a battery as you wish.... And they come with a similar price tag as a 2nd Mac Mini. No need to worry about modding.
in which case the mini doesn't need a battery, it's sitting on the desk.
which is already the situation as it is today: the Air has no wires, loud fans, or heat. Turn screen sharing on the Mini and login using your Air and you'll control the Mini from the Air remotely.
Haha. It needs the battery to be able to move it without accidentally ceashing it, to bring it with you to work easily without having to shut down, to use it on the train, bring out to backyard, etc.
Yes, that would work today.
But that's the whole point. The Mini doesn't need to move. It stays stationary. The Air which you've already marked even in your scenario as the unit you're actually working on goes those places and screen shares into the Mini. In your proposal, you're now having to take multiple disconnected pieces of equipment altogether and still relying on the Air to act as dumb terminal. But why is the Mini along for the ride at all? That's incredibly awkward and I just can't see the use case. If I'm using my laptop as quiet, light dumb terminal and running remote jobs on a desktop, that desktop doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't have to and in fact it would be worse if it did. By itself, Air + remote desktop covers the use cases you've proposed without the hassle of having to lug both the desktop and the Air around. Lastly if the whole point is to run high intensity jobs that the Air would run hot on or run out of battery power too quickly well ... that last part would still be a concern while mobile for the Mini unless you added a really big battery, which would make the Mini heavier and even more unattractive as a mobile solution.
I feel like you have a very specific idea of something you want to do that truthfully I can't figure out. Explain what scenario it is that you actually need to move the Mini or even want to if you're still going to use the Air as the primary interface? And if you aren't using the Air and are instead moving the Mini from work desk to work desk, it's going to have power both places. The cost of shut down and start up is minimal (about 30 seconds?) compared to travel time. And if you're looking to do work on the Mini during that travel time, again leave the Mini where it is, and RDP into it from an Air. Anything else and you're adding both physical and mental encumbrance while having to track not one but two battery life and health statuses.
I might have a display and keyboard at work and a display and keyboard at home, and just bring the mini back and forth.
The Mini is the expensive processor, storing the session files I’m working on, and it won’t be awkward to carry in pocket when it’s a little bit smaller.
I would normally use the Air by itself as an Air, and use the Mini at the desk with a display. It would be easy to pull the cables out of the Mini to bring with me, and could use the Air as dumb terminal.
I’d like to be able to move the mini to access the ports on the back, or dust the desk, and not worry about pulling out the power cord, crashing it. Battery could just be a UPS that also protects against unplugging, which a UPS doesn’t protect against.
That’s long enough and annoying enough to be a pain. (Shutting down might require saving an untitled session, which means thinking of a name, and that takes time and I might not have time for that, I want to grab the thing and pop in pocket and go.
I would need to bring it with me to connect it to the audio interface at each location, or use without an interface with Bluetooth headphones or bring a small bus powered interface to places I want to work that don’t have power.
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Have to say I always assumed that this "did what it said on the tin" and no more - which isn't quite the same as "hibernate" mode where the RAM contents gets saved to disc and restored.
Let me be blunt, the idea that there are “laptop” chips and “desktop” chips and that’s what makes the computer a laptop or a desktop is completely false. Laptop or desktop is a matter of form-factor and where you use it. If you use it on a desktop connected to power, it is a desktop, even if it’s a Raspberry Pi. A “laptop processor” is just a processor oriented towards power efficiency (which includes heat management) over CPU cycles or raw computational performance. This idea that anything with a chip that you’ve dubbed a “laptop chip” should have a battery is daft.
I have absolutely no need for a battery inside my Mac mini. For most people this would be a waste of time and a cost that we would have to absorb. Macs are expensive as they are so adding unnecessary components would drive the price up as well as adding complexity that no one needs. What you are looking for is called a laptop. Apple sell several different varieties.
And you can do that now ...
The base mini has the same processor as the Air and carrying the Mini in your pocket ... you wanted to add a battery to it, right? Which would make making the Mini smaller difficult. I don' think you realize how big batteries are. And removing fans will negatively impact performance, especially in multicore which you've said you want the mini to be the performance processor so this is contradictory (and even for single core Geekerwan gets an extra 10% performance out of the M4 iPad pro by pouring liquid nitrogen on it), and all the other things you talked about removing just add weight somewhere else like the internal power supply. Check something like the Cinebench benchmark which takes about 10 minutes to complete running on the Mini vs an Air, both base M2s. The Air takes a 10-30% loss in such endurance benchmarks. And the Mini Pro is heavier, because it requires more cooling and would require even more battery power to be useful in the context of actually running it while on battery.
So with all that ... I'm assuming it's not your pants pocket you're referring to here, but I'm not actually sure. You do realize that this is still an M-series chip right? Even fanless designs are not that small.
Edit: I see you are serious about it being phone sized ... huh ... you've taken that the M-series chips are super efficient to an extreme that physics cannot accommodate.
If the Air is being used as a dumb terminal then don't bring the Mini with you. Much, much easier all around.
I'll be blunt. I don't think that's common enough of a problem to warrant a drastic change in design.
Since fear of accidentally unplugging it is less of a worry for most people, I'd say for people who experience frequent power outages or electrical storms would do better with a good external UPS - not only powers the Mini but everything else too and it's safer. Or get a laptop. But yes, a slightly stronger case can be made there. The rest of these scenarios don't make sense. And that would just need to be a very small battery, just enough to let the desktop shut down safely and commit SSD changes and so forth - that would be very short, maybe a minute or so? less? External UPS is still better though.
Nope. You can shutdown without doing that. Try it. Just check reopen windows as @MacCheetah3 suggested. Unsaved windows will be reopened. I do it all the time. Just tried it myself while typing this and it took about 20 seconds from start to finish all unsaved work was back up. So yes, workspace to workspace is perfectly doable. Again, pocket? Edit: Indeed he means pocket.
It still works actually - unless you are talk about saving and restarting running processes? But unsaved work in windows is fine.
Again, that's what the Air is for.
Look I respect that you feel strongly about this but I just wanted to clarify to you that the reason people are pushing back isn't because we're "Apple apologists for the status quo" but simply because your idea makes no sense to most of the rest of us. The scenarios as presented are either better served with the current solutions or are so ... unique that to expect them to be catered to by an at-scale solution is perhaps unreasonable especially since it would increase the cost of the device for everyone else. Some of them are even self-contradictory or are contradictory with the realities of physics.
That said, there are others who share your desires and when I looked online there were resources ranging from what portable power supply to strap to your Mini to even how to modify your Mini with an internal battery. If you Google, you'll find lots of resources. I'm signing off from this conversation, but I hope these resources help you.
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Forever... The original G4 Mini used a PPC 7447a which was the same chip used in PowerBooks at the time.
The 2014 Mini used the i5-4278U - again, described as a mobile chip by Intel - part of the same U-prefix (indicating power consumption) series used in many MacBooks at the time.
The 2018 Mac Mini (everymac.com) used the i3-8100B (intel.com) (or i5-8500B, or i7-8700B) which Intel marketed as a mobile chip (look under "vertical segment" in the Intel specs) - not to be confused with the i3-8100 which they list as a desktop chip - but if you look at the comparison the 8100B is virtually identical, actually very slightly more powerful (supports faster memory) and lists the same 65W TDP - and the "mobile" bit seems to come from the fact that it is surface-mount only, not socketed...
The take home from this should be that the "class" of processor can be pretty arbitrary, and not what distinguishes a laptop from a desktop - "mobile" processors get used in desktops (especially quiet/small-form-factor machines) all the time - and vice-versa in some "mobile workstation" PCs. The biggest disadvantage of Intel Minis were that they were knobbled by the very limited Intel
The major selling point of Apple Silicon was that - whiie it certainly grew out of mobile technology - it offered low/mid-range "desktop" CPU and GPU performance on a single chip with mobile-friendly power consumption and didn't need separate desktop and mobile versions. All of the desktop Macs got a significant performance boost when they moved to Apple Silicon (even the Mac Pro got a CPU boost, although the inability to take $5000+ workstation GPU cards and 1.5TB of RAM was an issue there).
...that wasn't just a desktop chip, it was a workstation class Xeon space heater.
However, if you look up the iMac processors on the Intel website, you'll see many of them listed as "desktop" (e.g. the 2020 i9-10900 or the 2017 i7-7700). Life's to short to look them all up and it wouldn't prove/disprove anything if some of them were "mobile class".
What the iMacs did have was - mainly - mobile-class discrete GPUs - which is why the integrated GPUs in Apple Silicon can compete until you get into Mac Pro/Workstation-class GPU territory.
A distinction without a difference - power consumption (Joules/sec) = rate of heat output (Joules/sec). Computers are basically just room heaters with useful side-effects.
Use a Mac Mini on a train? Seriously? ...this sort of thing is the reason you are attracting so much ridicule here. I mean, you could get one of those portable, battery-powered displays, hook up a HDMI cable and somehow juggle that and a keyboard, but there is a proper tool for that sort of thing and it is called a laptop.
You're basically asking for a heavier screwdriver so you can use it as a hammer.
(...and even with a laptop I'd make sure everything was saved, discs properly dismounted etc. before transporting it - I don't recall ever pulling the power plug out of a desktop, but I've certainly had laptops crash when I've plugged/unplugged an external display).
...unless the puddle of spilled coffee was gradually seeping towards the fan intake just as you were adding the final semicolon to your revolutionary algorithm for factorising large prime numbers*
But seriously, the one defensible (though hardly essential) argument for having a battery (or maybe a super-capacitor) in a desktop would be to perform hibernate-to-disc and graceful shutdown if the power failed... *
printf("%d,%d\n",1,n); // The cryptography world will tremble in fear!
So… I have fans in my Mac Studio (ultra max m1) but they aren’t loud and there rarely is any heat even when processing a lot of 61 MP files in Lightroom. Regardless, the secret sauce in the scenario you described is not a battery in a mini, which is what your title and survey call for, but the ability to control a Mac, could be any Mac including a laptop with a battery, with an iPad the same way I can log into one Mac from another. So i am missing your point on why you need a battery Mac in this scenario.
You seem prejudiced against the Mac’s that already have a battery, laptops, which are designed to be easily portable and fold up into one easy package, versus you want a portable mini, screen separate, keyboard separate, and input device, mouse or trackpad, separate. Tell me again why this is desirable for portability's sake? And I speak as someone that does pack up his mac studio set up from time to time to go to a vacation home. I have zero interest in a battery in my studio (or mini), it would not make my life easier, except for maybe maybe saving me two minutes on shutting down and powering up the computer. It’s a level of complexity i just don’t need or want for two minutes of convenience every few months.
how often do you move your mini?
This, and your lopsided survey, is why I don't think you have really thought this through. $150 for a 24 hour battery that would necessitate a total redesign of the hardware? We are talking about a company that charges more ($200) for a 8 Gb RAM upgrade that fits in with existing hardware. Yeah, I just don't think so. IF for some reason Apple went this route it would cost at lot more and people would rightfully ignore it to just get a laptop. I dare say Apple knows its market better than most, and their engineers are not dumb. Someone internal has considered this and probably gave his or her peers a good chuckle.
I picture the Mini running Logic project in my bag or pocket, controlled from a laptop or a iPhone. Or it could have a built in touch display on the top that could control it. But then it gets into iOS territory and the key difference between the Mini and an iPad is MacOS versus iOS, and no Touch Screen support in MacOS currently. So , what I want is a M4 Pro iPad, running MacOS, without the integrated screen, and with more ports, and smaller thicker form factor.
You forgot to add the 4th option: John needs to have his head examined.
I have an Intel Air, an Intel iMac at home, and (my friend has) an Intel Mini at our rehearsal space. Before I got my iMac, I tried to run Logic sessions on my Air, and gave up frustrated by loud fans, small screen, high heat, bad performance, and most annoying, all the USB cables and thick HDMI cable attached to a dongle that meant it had to stay precariously placed and was hard to move around or use like a laptop. I was happy it was easy to unplug the dongle from the Air to use it unencumbered for browsing and programming, but then can’t use the studio or display or charge when unplugged. So have to keep plugging back into dongle to charge, forcing my back to the desk, when I want to be on the couch. So even if the AS Air is fast enough to handle a big Logic session without heat, loud fans and throttling, it is still not good way to run my studio. So I got the iMac in 2020, which is much more robust, runs big sessions, doesn’t throttle, but still has a constant fan whooshing and is confined to the desk (I haven’t tried to run it from my Air using AirPlay or Remote Desktop, because it lives in a bedroom and is connected to speakers in there, and my couch is out here in living room, with different speakers.) And it’s a pain to transfer sessions from machine to machine so I don’t bother, the sessions get out of sync, so I can never work on sessions recorded at space at home or bring sessions started at home to our space. I just have separate, unfinished projects. This is the cost in productivity and creativity caused by current line up, that would be gone if I had one small thick phone sized Mini to bring back and forth (and even use on the commute or outside away from power).
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It could be the same designs and battery as a MacBook or iPad, just morph the form factor and leave out the screen and keyboard. It could be a cheaper smaller battery because it doesn’t have to also power a display, or cost same but last much longer. MacBook Pro batteries cost 150 to replace, Airs and iPad batteries cost less. I think they add far less than that to the cost when new.
So many commenters here seem to think Mini still needs more power than MacBook, but as someone informed me, it never used high TDP “desktop” class chips, it was always just running laptop low power chips and never needed 85 Watts of wall power (or if it did it was because it didn’t have the MacBook’s battery to smooth out power draw).
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Hardly ever. We have indeed pulled the cord out of the back when pulling it forward to plug a peripheral in (luckily not in middle of a session so nothing was lost). We occasionally rearrange the room, necessitating powering down. It is plugged into a UPS so we once did move the two together to clean up room, keeping it plugged in. But we normally power it down to move it. That will not be necessary with battery.
An Apple branded UPS, specifically calibrated for Apple Silicon Macs isn't a bad idea. But an integrated battery definitely is. It's hard and annoying enough to get batteries in portable Apple devices replaced as is. Adding that in as an internal element to a Mac mini would create added complexity with not enough benefit.