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High-End Mac Mini Said to Feature Thinner Design With 'Plexiglass' Top, Magnetic Power Port
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I’ll def trade my M1 Mini for this one. The M1 chip is speedier than my 2018 MBP but the jump isn’t QUITE as big as I hoped, so I’ll take the extra horsepower and TB4 ports.
Pretty sure that USB-C peripherals are max 15W as are USB-C ports. But USB-C charging e.g external adaptor to a MacBook or USB-C hubs can be up to 100w.
Thunderbolt 4 can be up to 100w, but at least 15w.
Exclusive look at new Apple Silicon Mac mini?
(This one had an external power brick too!)
(This one had an external power brick too!)
The usb4 hubs that exist seem to solve this somewhat, but they’re not cheap at all, and they’re currently all ac-powered. It’s unknown if we’ll realistically see bus powered ones.
the USB problem is a bit chicken/egg. While computers support type-a, devices used type-a; while devices use type-a, computers support type-a.
I’d guess when PCs start transitioning they’ll retain type-a usb2 ports like they did with ps2 ports, for low speed devices.
Could it be powered by USB-C if it doesn’t have to supply 200w? For full spec wattage, it could be plugged in to additional power.
Looks sharp. The rendering makes it look like the logo is three dimensional under the sheet of glass — that would be pretty neat, but unnecessary.
i'll take that one step further for you.
Out of existence, out of mind. My current mini is already small and has no power brick. Much easier to hide cables than it is hot plastic blocks.
Take a brick-style power supply. Add a neat clip arrangement so that it can attach solidly to a Mac mini.
Maybe it would have an in-built plug so it doesn’t need a cable? Or a way of safely coiling the metre or so excess cable? Or even a second, very short cable.
Then you have multiple options: Attach the brick to a Mac mini and it works like one with an internal power supply. Place the brick near the Mac Mini on your desk. Or put the brick on the floor, bottom of cabinet, whatever.
You could have fun coming up with designs which allow attachment either side, at the back, on top, stacking (if you have two or more Mac minis), etc. Even neater if one IEC cable could supply two or more bricks. And if the same Lego-like approach could also accommodate an iMac brick.
An advantage of a brick is that it can be replaced relatively simply. If power supplies are relatively the weak point – after all, they have to cope with mains electricity and all the spikes – then they make sense. If different designs are required in different territories, bricks make sense.
Maybe it would have an in-built plug so it doesn’t need a cable? Or a way of safely coiling the metre or so excess cable? Or even a second, very short cable.
Then you have multiple options: Attach the brick to a Mac mini and it works like one with an internal power supply. Place the brick near the Mac Mini on your desk. Or put the brick on the floor, bottom of cabinet, whatever.
You could have fun coming up with designs which allow attachment either side, at the back, on top, stacking (if you have two or more Mac minis), etc. Even neater if one IEC cable could supply two or more bricks. And if the same Lego-like approach could also accommodate an iMac brick.
An advantage of a brick is that it can be replaced relatively simply. If power supplies are relatively the weak point – after all, they have to cope with mains electricity and all the spikes – then they make sense. If different designs are required in different territories, bricks make sense.
Might be Apple's implicit way of avoiding an iPad Mini by having this high-end Mac Pro mini paired with a Pro Display XDR or a cheaper one for average joe users (24-27 with 218+ still so resolution at least 4.5K).
The Pro XDR isn't ridiculous at all; there are still no other sustained 1000nit 218+ppi 32" & up monitor for prosumers & creative professionals. Asus has failed to ship their 4K PA32UCG competitor. It has lead to invaluable pipeline changes for creative professionals.
Just because you're not the audience for a device obvious oriented for creative professionals, doesn't make it ridiculous. The device is extremely affordable by creative professionals & their benefactors working on the content it was specifically made to accommodate.
Nonetheless, Apple is trying very hard to ship the tech on iPad Pro & probably the Macbook Pro later this year to set-up creating a 24" & 27" version for people like you via the economy of scale gains shipping the tech on more of their devices.
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I’d still prefer it integrated.
Itd be easy enough to make the PSU an internal module that is simple to replace. Just my preference.
They look ugly and they are an annoyance when cleaning the room. Cables I can roll up and fix them beneath my desk, with the power brick this is harder. All in all for me they are just a sign of cheap and poor design.
I have two problems with the USB hubs. First, as you mentioned, an other power supply which has to be placed somewhere and has stand by losses. The second problem ist the paar quality of these hubs. The renowned German magazine Ct regularly tests USB hubs and until now I have not seen a single one that has not a problem of some kind.
A third problem is, that most of the hubs are ugly and add cables an my desk...
Yep. There is absolutely no reason or need to make it smaller. I'd argue it's bigger overall if you take into account the hassle and space required of the bulky power brick. I guess I'll begrudgingly buy one still...
Firstly, I don't think I've ever seen a review of any product from any manufacturer - renowned magazine or not - that hasn't had a problem of some kind. Literally every product on the planet has trade-offs and compromises. There is no such thing as a perfect anything.
Secondly, If a hub is ugly because it adds cables to your desk, those same cables are still going to be ugly if they're plugged into the Mac directly.
Fourthly, there are USB hubs that don't require power supplies, there just aren't any USB4 hubs that don't require one (yet). If you need USB type-a ports, there are literally thousands of choices available without the need for an external power supply.
But they can only work if the power requirements of everything plugged in are low enough.
You can probably read a solid state memory device and operate a mouse, but nothing alongside a spinning hard drive.
Yeah no kidding, technology isn't magic, you need power from somewhere.
In other breaking news, water is wet.
I've never had a PSU failure in any Mac I've ever owned internal or external. Even with the really dodgy power where I'm at. They are pretty darn reliable.
There's also never been any issue cross territories either as Apple PSU's are Auto-voltage (bricks and internal). Just the removable plug changed.
However. Using Bricks may make sense for even lower thermals (less fan noise) and RF reduction which may help with audio noise and wireless interference.
Replacement internal PSU in the last couple gens of Mini (even off-brand/re-manufactured ones) are more expensive than the external ones anyhow. And a lot more labour than plugging in a replacement via MagSafe.
I'm a fan on internal PSU's to a point. At the end of the day though Apple do not intend you (or even their staff at this point) to service any of their Mac's so wishing for an easily replaceable internal PSU (or anything else) is really clutching at straws. If it dies for any reason, you can order a new one.
I'm in no way defending their decision, I'm on #TeamInternalPSU. However, I doubt the ethernet port will be on the mini itself like the render suggests. I would expect they would include it on the PSU the same way it's included in the new iMac.
As a side note, the render doesn't reflect the duotone color scheme this will likely have.
Funny how all that extra heat - which hasn't been an issue for the last 15 years - suddenly becomes an issue even though Apple Silicon consumes 2-3 times less power than the Intel chips it is replacing.
If the fan is roaring in your Mac Mini it is because the Intel i7 space-heater running it is putting out the thick end of 100W. The small fraction of that being wasted by the power supply is a drop in the ocean.
It's almost as if people are making stuff up to try and rationalise what is really a pure form-over-function (probably with a dash of cost-cutting) decision by Apple.
Even if the form-over-function was appropriate for the entry-level iMac, the worry is that it will bleed over to the higher-end machines.
The minimum power requirement for a Thunderbolt port is 15W and as far as I know, that's all the ports on any existing Mac will deliver. You can deduce from the power ratings of existing Macs that they don't provide 100W per port - e.g. the Intel Mac Mini (4 x TB3) is rated at 150W max (and the Intel i7 CPU was 60W average), the new 24" iMac (2xTB3, 2 x USB 3) at 143W. Doesn't add up - and remember the iMac has a fairly power-hungry display.
Consequently, the vast majority of USB-C/TB3 peripherals either run off 15W (or less if they are just warmed-over USB A devices) or require their own power bricks. The higher capacities are really only for powering/charging laptops.
So although Apple could decide to add TB charging capacity to new machines, they haven't done it to date, even with the new iMac, and while it would be cool to be able to power/charge your MacBook from your Mac Mini, it doesn't seem like a high priority.
What on earth for?
The internal power supply in the existing Intel and M1 Minis is already slightly more powerful than the iMac (150W vs 143W) - justified in the Intel version where the processor TDP (i.e. average) was 60W and probably only kept in the M1 version because Apple didn't bother to re-design the power supply for what is probably only a transitional machine.
Remember the iMac power brick has a large, bright display to drive, too.
If you really want to remove the PSU from the Mini, the next most sensible thing to do would be to make it TB3 powered so it could run off a TB display or a powered TB3/4 dock with your preferred selection of ports.
History lesson: USB on the iMac replaced a bunch of Apple proprietary ports like ADB and LocalTalk and the technically standard RS423 serial that was just different enough from the widely used RS232 to be a headache. It also replaced lower-end applications of SCSI (huge cables and connectors, termination issues, device-ID DIP switches, "enterprise"-level prices...) which was limiting the choice of affordable scanners, zip drives etc. to what were becoming effectively Mac-only products.
USB ports had already started appearing on PCs - where RS232 and Centronics were already past their sell-by date - MS just needed a nudge to fix the Windows drivers. A year or two after the iMac came out, there was a good choice of USB printers, scanners, mice, keyboards, hubs, modems, external drives etc. at attractive prices because they were no longer Mac-only. It was a major step forward. Which is probably why everybody stopped whining about it within a year or so.
(Oh, plus, at around the same time as the hermetically-sealed iMac, Apple released a G3 tower which set new standards of tool-free access to the innards, with space for user-replaceable drives and expansion cards... Jobs' Apple wasn't obsessed with sealed boxes: they just understood the difference between consumer "appliances" and professional tools, and designed each accordingly...)
Problem is, although the downstream Usb4 ports don't need to support 100W per port, they do need to support 7.5W per port (rising to 15W for TB4 branding) while being connected to a single 7.5W or 15W upstream port (which is all the vast majority of hosts support). So there's a niche for a totally bus-powered hub (or one with a smaller ~30W brick) - but for laptop users it probably makes more sense to use one with a beefy power brick that can also replace your laptop's charger.
...sure, but you've countered your own argument: you can already put a 27" iMac Pro in a flight case and wheel it round. The new 24" even more so - but it's still going to be a pain to carry around (given that you can now get almost the same performance out of an Apple Silicon laptop that fits in a manilla envelope) and making the body ~5mm thicker isn't going to be the straw that breaks that camel's back. Plus, d'oh! weight-wise you're still going to have to carry around the power supply and any other gubbins that Apple have made external to save weight.
...and needing a second rack for the power supplies (to which all the ethernet cables would be routed) would make it harder. Yes, if you are running several racks full of Macs then the power supply failure rate might be significant - but so will SSD and other failures so - given that Minis are relatively cheap - it will probably be more efficient to swap out the whole unit.
I suppose you could make a custom power/network distribution unit - if Apple will license the new proprietary connectors - but if you're going to go that far, why not crack open the Minis and extract the logic boards so you can build a dozen of them into a 3U rack case?
Of course, what would be far, far, far better would be for Apple to release a proper rackmount server - no, not a Mac Pro kludged into a massive rack case, but a proper rack-format 1-2U server (or blade system) with lights-out management, redundant power-supplies etc. I think the XServe died after the Intel switch because it offered too few advantages over generic PC kit to be worthwhile - with Apple Silicon, Apple have a unique offering again (and, frankly, sticking an Apple logic board in a generic server enclosure designed to power and cool much hotter processors ain't exactly the Manhattan project R&D wise...)
I hear ya I've never had power supply failure on any of my computers if memory serves. I do take the point about electrical noise though I'd suggest that it's absolutely minimal and that only audiophiles might insist on it?
I like things tidy so would prefer one box. Case in point - I never really 'needed' a Mac Pro, but I bought one because the idea was that I could hide all of my peripherals in one box. No eGPU, no USB hub, no separate EyeTV box etc etc......
Fair enough point. Considering how the teardown of the iMac shows lots of empty space, I imagine that after everything, the power supply ended up being the last obstacle keeping the iMac as thick as it was. Maybe it is a bit of form over function, if that really was the only thing preventing the iMac from getting any thinner, I say may as well move it out of the computer. I can shove that brick behind the desk, or hide it in a cable management box, or just tuck it out of the way.
At some point, rather than "why", I say "why not"?