Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andreasley 602 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.