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Comment by fckgw | Hacker News Reader

Having a fully fledged computer this small without an external power brick is pretty impressive.

Not making it VESA mountable is a missed opportunity, but I suppose they want you to buy an iMac instead of doing that.

There's currently plenty of 3rd party VESA mounts for Mac Mini, I'm sure they'll have some for this new Mac Mini as well. They slide down into a "clamp" style bracket. They run about $15 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Mount-Under-Black-BK-MABM/dp/...

You can get 'sandwich' enclosures that put the mini between the monitor arm and the monitor itself, or off to the side. That's what I do with an M1 Mac Mini sitting next to me. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise since you can get these cheaper than what Apple would sell them for :)

A box that small can be mounted with double-sided tape or velcro.

No surprise there; even their monitors’ VESA mounts are optional :D

a small 3d print can solve that for ya

apple wanna 'show it off'

Honestly, I wish they'd go with an external USB-C power brick.

The only reason they might not is that they want to keep everything across the entire line, and the highest end Mac Studio probably needs more power than USB can offer.

Why would you prefer an external power brick?

The internal power supplies in Mac minis have been extremely reliable and the fewer cables the better, in my opinion.

There can be advantages to an external brick, but I see parent's comment mostly centered on having USB-C as input.

That gives a lot more options IMHO on how to handle power for this machine, including portability, even if it's supposed to be a desktop machine.

I thought the same for the minisforum machines which would be competitive to this, they have a 19V input that really should be USB-C at this point.

I bought a portable AC battery for my Mac mini for $65. Hard agree though that it would be a lot cooler if the conversion was in the cable so I could just do dc in.

The thing is, M chips run so efficiently that even with the power loss from conversion, it’s still pulling less power than a lot of PCs.

But yeah it running on a sleek dc battery would be a lot cooler

could you share the link to the portable AC battery?

Plus you would lose a USB-C port to power

They can surely add another USB-C port, it would take the space of the current power socket so space wise it shouldn't be an issue either.

USB-PD as of its last revision can deliver up to 240W.

How could you supply enough power on one input USBc to source sufficient power on 3xTB5 + 2xUSBc ?

The Apple tech specs page says "Maximum continuous power: 155W" and USB-C PD supports up to 240 W these days, so technically it's doable, although it would be a nightmare with people trying to run it off the far more common lower power supplies (which it would have to reject because it doesn't have a battery to handle if someone suddenly plugs in some high-draw device)

Is it? This seems pretty average mini pc size and much larger than small ones, e.g.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/6/b/csm_...

Also just connecting the mini pc to a monitor with PD and not using any extra power brick at all seems like the much more relevant comparison.

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