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Mac Mini M4 upside down? Other methods to power on?

Bento.Box said:
There is no benefit to leave it running.
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Well, one obvious benefit is that you would stop being concerned about the position of the power button, and about the cooling when used upside down.
Add to it the time you would have saved by not writing this thread, and you have a clear win.

No need to mention the ability to carry out a number of tasks while in Power Nap, or the fact that you can access all of your files from any other device in your possession, such as your phone, iPad, laptop or Apple TV, using “wake for network access”.
Also let’s not talk about how one can schedule jobs overnight, that you don’t particularly want to run while you are using the Mac, such as CCC backups as I do on my Mac.

Apart from that, there is no benefit to leave it running.
 
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You lift it slightly and then press the button. This really isn’t the issue some people make it out to be.

If you need it daily just leave it on. It barely consumes any power. Of you use it twice a week just lift and press.
 
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If you do use Wake on LAN, how will you power on the device you use to send the magic packet?

It would be nice if Mac minis offered some sort of OOBM.
 
brofkand said:
The power button should only need to be pressed once in the Mac mini's lifetime - when it's powered on initially after unboxing. Never turn it off, and enable the power on after power failure in System Settings - and forget the thing ever had a power button to begin with.
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That's a bit of an exaggeration. What if the power goes out? What if going on vacation for a week? What if it freezes up? Sometimes a clean restart can help performance.
 
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My gosh, the number of people in this thread bleeting some version of "you're holding it wrong" would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. The truly loyal fanatics will do anything to distract themselves from acknowledging that Apple is still capable of making absolutely boneheaded design choices.

The bottom-facing power button is actually probably one of the most egregious design failures from the Apple design team in a very long time. Most of their blunders have been of the "Let's try something new... oh, that didn't work quite as well as we'd hoped" variety (think: Butterfly Keyboard, Touch Bar, G4 Cube, G4 Cube Reprisal Trashcan Mac Pro). This particular blunder is probably one of the first times I can say with confidence that Apple's design team just got lazy. There is really no other good explanation for the power button being on the bottom - certainly there is no technical explanation for this that can't be answered with "run two frickin' wires to a button".
 
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lhammer610 said:
It isn’t running. It is asleep.

Do you turn off your TV at night? Of course you don’t. If you did, the remote wouldn’t work.

Do you turn off the microwave? If you did, the clock would be wrong.

Do you have a door bell? If you turned it off, the door bell would not work.

When the Mac is ‘asleep’ it draws almost no power. Get over it.
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I know quite a lot of (old) folks who completely turn off their TV.

Also I know a lot of poeple who either don‘t have a microwave or one without a clock - why would I need a clock on a microwave anyway?

On a regular doorbell, the button closes the curcuit to a buzzer. So you turn it on and off everytime you press the button.

A lot of folks don‘t like wasting energy, even if it‘s just a little. I‘m pretty sure, millions of macs on idle do add up - but apple doesn‘t design for the environment.
 
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brofkand said:
The power button should only need to be pressed once in the Mac mini's lifetime - when it's powered on initially after unboxing. Never turn it off, and enable the power on after power failure in System Settings - and forget the thing ever had a power button to begin with.
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Unless you take your mac mini on the road. Or use it for powering something like a photo-box,… There are a lot of use-cases where having it powered on all the time would be impractical or at least a little wasteful. It‘s no big deal, you can just lift it up everytime or mount it in a way that the power button is easily reachable - but then you might ruin some cables/ports in the long run or have it not look as pretty as it is intended to. Either way, having the power-button at the bottom is just worse design than having it anywhere else.
 
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nathansz said:
If you think that you need constant access to the power button then you are absolutely using it wrong.
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Whether "constant access" is needed or not, having the power button on the bottom of the case is still a bad design choice.
 
nathansz said:
The case could be made that it is the best place for the power button. If it was on the front of the back one might engage it while grabbing the machine to insert or remove a cable.
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If accidentally engaging the power button was a common user complaint for the previous Mac Mini or the Mac Studio, then I might buy that such a case could be made. To my recollection, there haven't been many such complaints, at least among members of these forums or other Mac users I've conversed with. So at best it sounds like the only "case" that can "be made" is that Apple found a solution to a problem that only exists in hindsight.
 
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jakey rolling said:
If accidentally engaging the power button was a common user complaint for the previous Mac Mini or the Mac Studio, then I might buy that such a case could be made. To my recollection, there haven't been many such complaints, at least among members of these forums or other Mac users I've conversed with. So at best it sounds like the only "case" that can "be made" is that Apple found a solution to a problem that only exists in hindsight.
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I don't recall a apple previously releasing a computer the size and form factor of the current Mac mini with a power button on the front or back to inadvertently press

I'm fairly confident that if they had made on it would happen all the time given it's size
 
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nathansz said:
If you think that you need constant access to the power button then you are absolutely using it wrong.
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I think you are conflating how you use the computer for your use cases versus other people's. People can use a computer differently than you and not be wrong.

Also should add that at best this assumes the OS, etc always works perfectly. When it doesn't someone might find it simpler just to turn off their computer at night instead of debugging it like in this contemporary thread:

Then regardless the suggestion has been made and OP can either take or leave it. If OP still wants to do it their way, people can offer ideas how to do it or move on.
 
bzgnyc2 said:
I think you are conflating how you use the computer for your use cases versus other people's. People can use a computer differently than you and not be wrong.
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macOS is designed for the machine to always be "on"
it performs many synchronization and diagnostic tasks while in sleep mode
 
Simple solution. Also added a (self sticking drawer bumper) to the button to make it easer to find.
IMG_1355 Small.jpeg
IMG_1356 Small.jpeg
 
nathansz said:
macOS is designed for the machine to always be "on"
it performs many synchronization and diagnostic tasks while in sleep mode
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Perhaps that is how it has evolved in the latest OS but it certainly wasn't always that way. All the options and capabilities to "pmset" weren't created for situations that would break the system.

Also if one is not using iCloud, etc, there shouldn't be any need for ongoing synchronization. Then since diagnostics are always done on boot, I wouldn't be worried about those not happening at night either.

On the other hand, if all this stuff is happening at night the system isn't using the ~ 0% power so touted?

In any case, I leave my Macs in sleep all the time as I find that works for me. At the same time I don't believe its invalid for others to turn them off nightly. And as noted elsewhere there are other reasons to need the power button than just this style of use.
 
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nathansz said:
I don't recall a apple previously releasing a computer the size and form factor of the current Mac mini with a power button on the front or back to inadvertently press
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The last Mac Mini had its power button on the back corner of the case. From the look of the new Mac Mini, there would still have been room to place a button on the corner next to the power cable, and inadvertent presses would still not be any more frequent than before.

But just for argument's sake, let's say that you're right and the new form factor necessitated this power button design. All that would mean is that Apple, once again, chose form over function for the dubious benefit of saving you a whopping 1.25in of desk space on each side of it. Sure, you get a slightly smaller footprint and maybe you can envision one or two Hello-Kitty-adorned kids squeeling "that's. so. KEEWWT!" at your tiny little computer, but otherwise the trade-off seems kind of silly.
 
jakey rolling said:
The last Mac Mini had its power button on the back corner of the case. From the look of the new Mac Mini, there would still have been room to place a button on the corner next to the power cable, and inadvertent presses would still not be any more frequent than before.

But just for argument's sake, let's say that you're right and the new form factor necessitated this power button design. All that would mean is that Apple, once again, chose form over function for the dubious benefit of saving you a whopping 1.25in of desk space on each side of it. Sure, you get a slightly smaller footprint and maybe you can envision one or two Hello-Kitty-adorned kids squeeling "that's. so. KEEWWT!" at your tiny little computer, but otherwise the trade-off seems kind of silly.
Click to expand...

For a lot of people 1.25” of desk space on each side can be pretty significant!

Not everyone lives in big sprawling detached homes
 
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Often, I use the pmset command to shutdown / automatically power on, or sleep a machine. All these options are already builtin to macOS; and can be easily set in the following syntax via terminal:

to automate startup and shutdown, you can set a schedule in the form of pmset repeat type weekdays time.

So to schedule a repeating shutdown to occur each day, Tuesday through Saturday, at 11AM. pmset repeat shutdown TWRFS 11:00:00

to power on every day at 730:

pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 07:30:00

in this way you can automate startup and shutdown making the power button location or the location of the machine irrelevant.

print the current settings with pmset -g

hope that helps
 
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jakey rolling said:
From the look of the new Mac Mini, there would still have been room to place a button on the corner next to the power cable, and inadvertent presses would still not be any more frequent than before.
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The smaller dimensions would make inadvertent presses much more likely

If you haven’t actually touched one id encourage you to go to a shop and put your hands on it. It will become immediately obvious to you that it would be pretty easy to hit a power button mounted anywhere on the vertical walls of the box doing any sort of plugging/unplugging
 
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nathansz said:
For a lot of people 1.25” of desk space on each side can be pretty significant!
Not everyone lives in big sprawling detached homes
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You know, this time of year is normally meant for visions of sugarplums, but pretzels and taffy suit me just fine.
 
nathansz said:
It will become immediately obvious to you that it would be pretty easy to hit a power button mounted anywhere on the vertical walls of the box doing any sort of plugging/unplugging
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Okay, sure. Even so, we're talking about a desktop computer. As occasional as it may be for the typical desktop user to press the power button on their desktop, it is even less frequent that the typical desktop user would be plugging and unplugging cables from the back of their computer.
 
jakey rolling said:
Okay, sure. Even so, we're talking about a desktop computer. As occasional as it may be for the typical desktop user to press the power button on their desktop, it is even less frequent that the typical desktop user would be plugging and unplugging cables from the back of their computer.
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I completely reject this premise

I am much more likely to plug/unplug cables or thumb drives from any desktop computer I have than I am to power it down

cables and drives easily get plugged/unplugged multiple times a day

needing to power on from a shut down is rare
 
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