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Comment by henryfjordan | Hacker News Reader

It's a way of signaling how the product should be used. Plug it in, hit the power button, put it down, and never turn it off again. For many users that's probably the only time they will ever interact with that button (or want to).

I actually think it's a really good choice and shows Apple really understands design. And with the relatively low power consumption it makes sense. It's not like it's drawing a ton of power on idle

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I have a Mac Mini and can't remember the last time I had to manually press the button. IIRC it even reboots on its own after a power outage.

I think I shut it down once for an extended vacation just to make sure appliances weren't on while I was gone and when I switched apartments. Otherwise I'd check and post my uptime from the command line.

It's a launch M1 mini so I'd wager less times pressing the power button than I have fingers on one hand.

Apple Silicon devices turn on automatically from IO, even after shut down, so the power button is only useful to: force shutdown if unresponsive or execute some sort of boot key combo to enter a recovery mode.

And if you use bluetooth IO (non-apple). I do on my Mac Mini M2, and yet I have maybe pressed that button 3 times in the year that I am using it as my main machine as I never power it off.

I'd never thought about it before reading this comment but I now realise I don't even know where the power button on my Mac Studio is. I used it once when I first set it up and haven't touched it since.

IIRC it even reboots on its own after a power outage.

While macOS presents a "Start up automatically after a power failure" option, and it works, the reality is…complicated.

Intel Macs require a model-specific hardware register to be set after each reboot:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230218203824/http://www.macfre...

The analogous setting on Apple Silicon Macs appears to be nonvolatile:

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/blob/de1c5a8be0ee99602e4...

> I actually think it's a really good choice and shows Apple really understands design. And with the relatively low power consumption it makes sense. It's not like it's drawing a ton of power on idle

I use a Mac Mini (older model) in my music studio. It shares a surge protector with approx. $12k worth of audio gear (some of it nearly impossible to replace). I have all the gear + the surge protector switched off anytime I'm not using it. Which is most of the time.

While the weight and form factor would make powering the M4 Mini on a little more than a nuisance, I have a hard time lumping this into one of Apple's great design features.

M1 and newer Mac Minis automatically power on when plugged in/given power. If you're using an external power switch then that basically becomes the power button.

I'd still like the button to have been on the side or something over looks but it does seem like a pretty reasonable choice overall.

This is a setting in the control center, not sure what is the default though. You can make it auto-boot when external power switch is used, through that setting for sure.

Even if it is rarely used there is no benefit of making it hard to access. There is no harm in having an easy-to-access button that is rarely used.

I guess someone thinks the astetics are worth it, but even if the power button did notably harm astetics (which I doubt) I would take functionality over astetics any day.

If there were two models with different power button placements which one do you think people would buy?

Apple makes it difficult to access because they want to make sure you don't use it often, as they believe the experience of waking up the computer from sleep is better than starting it up.

It's a conscious decision based not on design, but on UX, as with the Magic Mouse USB port.

You can’t possibly bring up Magic Mouse as an example of good UX.

Apple doesn't want you to use it while charging. They succeeded.

Them succeeding at stopping users from doing a normal computing task does not make it good UX.

When a company’s products go from “helping user do what he wants” to “coercing the user to do what company wants” then the company has lost its way.

Apple fanboys are insane, no way around it.

They were successful in annoying every customer of this product and being the laughing stock of even their most die hard supporters. Like even across all the very Apple oriented publication, almost no one is recommending this mouse (even though the touch surface can be usefull).

I have the Magic Mouse and I had the previous version that just had battery swap. The experience on the newer one is much worse, previously you just had to spend 30 sec for a battery swap and you were on your way. Now you need to wait at least 5 min and you better not forget to put it to charge before leaving the computer, otherwise tomorrow the same problem await you. And this is compounded by the fact that it has terrible battery life to begin with, especially considering the extremely mediocre sensor they put in it. Logitech has mouseq with much better sensors that last much longer on battery and they don't even have the charge problem.

If anything, the last generation of Magic Mouse is a testament of Apple's utter disdain for its customer and the general lack of care they have around user experience today.

They have the best chips around but it can't be just that.

Aesthetics can be very important because attractive things work better:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202165712_Emotion_D...

Apple could have found a way to put the button somewhere else and make it nearly invisible, but that's expensive and the Mac mini is clearly designed with cost in mind.

If you want cheap and functional, you're in luck because that's pretty much all anybody makes.

Zero power draw is still less than a little power draw. A couple million of these babies running on idle is a considerable amount of power. Please, turn off devices when you're not using them.

Any modern computer system uses a lot of power for a few minutes after bootup. If you use the machine a few times per day you're wasting energy (and your own time) by turning it off instead of using sleep mode.

Completely agree! We just 3D printed a base switch that makes it easy to turn your Mini on and off. Here's a link: https://m4button.com/ (if you have a 3D printer, you don't need this).

> It's not like it's drawing a ton of power on idle

Probably even drawing less than a "normal" PC PSU would just burn to heat in losses, lol. 3 watts of total idle power consumption, that's nuts how low it is...

Your average PC PSU hits up to 95% efficiency, so even at maximum efficiency at full load it would burn like 30 watts.

The quote efficiency on most PSU would be around the half load (more or less). The total system draw does not include the power supply - it will have its own losses esp on low end, still likely in the 80s

This is actually how I've used my M1 Macbook Pro since I got it. I never fully turn it in. It's either sleeping when plugging into my Thunderbolt 3 dock, or its sleeping on my dining room table on battery power. The efficiency is so good it never dies even if I don't use it for a day.

My work machine is an M3 Macbook Pro. I put it to sleep on a Friday, and after a three-day weekend, it's still ready to go on Tuesday with 95% of battery left.

What's irritating is that a lot of Intel laptops used to be able to get pretty close to this, back when they supported legacy sleep states. I have yet to own a newer Intel laptop that can sleep for more than 24 hours without almost completely draining the battery.

I think it is really bad design. Perhaps necessary because of space restraints and in that case understandable. But that is entirely different to good design and I cannot really buy the "use case explanation".

Many leave their devices on their desk and Apple always had a problem with just letting devices turn of completely, there are regularly problems with it. And they do drain power on idle, which is a frequent complaint.

Yes, we are that insane to use a lot of Apple devices for business in some departments. MDM for phones and iPads is top for the baseline administration, but the devices are eccentric to say the least.

>It's not like it's drawing a ton of power on idle

The power supply connected to the mains for sure does that.

Exactly; it's more of a reset button. You should not need it a lot.

On a related note, the original Macintosh shipped with a physically inaccessible reset button, and the manual cautioned against installing the (bundled) switch that enabled access because "using it the wrong way could cause you to lose information":

https://archive.org/details/1984macintoshmanual/page/131/mod...

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