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Comment by msdz | Hacker News Reader

So I can somewhat speak to this, as I actually did this for a while c. 2021 and 2022.

The issue (apart from my Mac mini still having the old, bigger form factor back then) is that this requires a full shutdown (obviously), and that is more friction than opening a closed laptop lid. It just takes a moment for every app and background service etc. to settle back in after, and depending on how your brain works, you might not like that a whole lot.

It absolutely is a cool feeling to carry a pretty mighty desktop in the backpack, though.

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I think it's actually good to have a forced reboot from time to time, but then I'm not very disciplined in closing stuff I'm no-longer using! Especially like docker containers I was using months ago, that I forgot to shutdown.

Yeah, I agree (with the same unfortunate habit) – but up to twice a day of forced work full stop is overdoing it, too.

Is there no hibernation option ?

You don't get the option in the UI: there's just "Sleep", which on a desktop Mac seems to suspend to RAM only. At least, it seems to on mine, as I found out when I unplugged it.

(Apparently the laptops do a suspend to disk depending on battery remaining, so the OS does support it. It'd be nice to have it available! The disk space required could become annoying if you only bought the 1 TB SSD for your fancy 512 GB Mac though.)

Pretty sure hibernation is dead. Deep sleep states use such nominal power, I think they decided it wasn't worth it.

> that this requires a full shutdown

The mini sips a truly tiny amount of power. I wonder what the smallest/lightest UPS could could bundle it with would be.

But at this point.. you’ve got a shit laptop.

I did this for a few years, going further back in time.

The shutdown thing didn't bother me, and in fact the Mini was lighter than a Macbook Air at the time. So all in all it was pretty convenient.

Does macOS not have hibernate/suspend-to-disk?

What if you have some battery system working? Then technically, you could travel with it

And imagine plugging a small iPad screen into the thing with sidecar… Almost like a Macbook!

At that point you lose too much convenience. Maybe if someone built a mini UPS with at least 10000Ah capacity, USB-C 4 pass-through and the right form factor to permanently attach it on top of the mini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8okiCCZk7U8

Oh! The fact that touch and pencil is natively supported for macos is neat!

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