- 🤔 Apple has shared why the power button on the Mac Mini M4 is hidden
- 🤏 It’s mainly because of the Mac Mini’s compact size
- 🤷♂️ But also because users apparently never use the power button on a Mac
- 👉 Apple also says the button can be accessed easily, even though it’s underneath
Or the most obvious answer of all: Macs have a power button on the keyboard
Such a stupid thing to write about. Must be a really slow news day if they are writing about the location of the power button.
As someone in IT, I loathe non-standard the fuck is the power button designs.
Mac Mini doesn’t come with a keyboard. So unless you’ve owned an iMac or bought a keyboard separately, you won’t have that convenience.
That being said, I haven’t touched the power button on my Mac Mini since I got mine on the 8th.
Or some people like me prefer ergonomic keyboards and don’t use these miniature overpriced Apple keyboards.
The power button is one of the biggest non stories this year.
Who doesn’t just put their computers to sleep 99% of the time?
My work computer yes, but I always shutdown my home computer when I am done with it.
With NVMe SSDs, computers boot fast enough that sleep mode doesn’t matter.
With current hardware the power draw at sleep is negligible, so power off doesn’t matter.
You can spin this argument both ways. And sleep is more convenient, so that’s what most people choose.
My new laptop doesn’t support S3 sleep, it can drain the battery from 100% to 0% in less than 16 hours while supposedly “sleeping”.
Sure. But it is not a Mac. A MacBook can be put to sleep with 100% and one week later wake up with 90% left.
Yeah my friend left his MacBook Pro at airport security and when he was reunited 3 weeks later it still had like 50% charge with him tracking it using Find My the whole time
I don’t care about the power draw, I care about peace of mind.
I don’t want my computer running in the background constantly.
I get the convenience factor at work, but at home?
Nah, it is far nicer to have a fresh and ready computer rather than wake up to all your old crap that you have forgotten about.
I can’t remember where I watched it - but I saw some video a while ago now where (I think) the engineer was explaining that shutdown & power on does less of a cleanout than restart on Windows. Something to do with shutdown going through steps more similar to a sleep/suspend than restart. Made little sense to me but would be interesting to see if post restart or post power-on the computer was “fresher”
You are probably talking about fast startup, a stupid feature that I disable as soon as I can after installing Windows.
Fast startup is like a deep sleep state and causes way more issues than it would ever solve.
It is a feature that is looking for one specific problem to solve at the expense of long term stabillity and as an IT guy I hate it.
I don’t care if it draws 0.000001 watts when sleeping.
I power off all my devices when not in use.
Electronics components do not like to have power states change frequently. Turning devices on and off frequently will decrease lifespan of device. Sure, you are saving money on your electricity bill, but at some point, the savings and environmental impacts are outweighed by the cost of the device/parts and the impact during manufacturing.
Also, don’t forget phantom draws from the power supplier is a real thing, which will most likely exceed your 5 zeros threshold. So that microwave oven, and laundry dryer? Don’t forget to unplug those after each use.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the amount of power drawn overnight when a processor is in sleep mode ends up being less than the power it takes to boot the device.
Yeah. We came from a time of incandescent light bulbs taking 60W per bulb with fixtures needing 2-3 bulbs. Turning those off regularly mattered. The obsession people have with turning their modern electronics off in the name of power savings is silly if not outright insane.
My gaming pc is on a custom water loop, cpu and gpu. I don’t like leaving it on/asleep, when I’m done with it for the night. If it starts leaking while I’m there on the computer I’ll see or smell it. If it starts leaking while I’m asleep or at work, expensive components are fried.
I’ve been running a custom loop for 10 years at this point and have never once had a leak, bc I flow the loop without power to any components, and with paper towels under each fitting, for like 24 hours each time I change anything out. I’m still always paranoid that shit will just decide to leak on me one day though lol. Also I was having weird issues with wake from sleep and my kvm, to the point where I was having to reboot my pc when I’d sit down at it after work anyway, so why not just shut off and not deal with that frustration after work?
Either way it has nothing to do with power savings.
Seems like a non issue to me- the usb c placement on the mouse is way more annoying.
Charging port under the mouse is a non issue too, the battery lasts for weeks and even if you need to charge it in a pinch, you can plug it in for less than a minute and you’ll be good for a few hours.
It is however extremely good at making people talk about it, and that’s why they’ve been keeping it this way for 10 years
Yeah no. When that mouse dies in the middle of a project call, and you have to scramble to open your laptop lid to get to the track pad, and that flips your display layout while you’re sharing screen: no thanks, I’ll stick with any other mouse.
And yet the wireless keyboard charging port isn’t on the bottom of the keyboard, is it?
Because it has obvious room for it. The shape of the Magic Mouse doesn’t have any, and a hole at the front or back would look stupid.
Look, I get it, and I have one and I rarely need to charge it. But those few times I do? It’s stupid and infuriating. If the port was on the front of the mouse I still wouldn’t see it.
“Honestly, most people almost never use the power button a Mac,” one executive remarked.
Ford: Most people never open their hood so we put the lever under the back seat.
In the same train of thought, BMW and Tesla execs need to find courage and remove turn signals.
Total lazy design a power button is just a small button and some wires it could be anywhere
I’ve said it before on this; with this location, it’s much harder to accidently shut off your computer. The number of times I’ve accidently shut off my work laptop just by holding down the dock to plug in or unplug a cable is absurd…
Mac Minis are primarily used as home or small business servers. They get rebooted, but rarely turned off. It makes sense now that I know the button is accessible without lifting the Mac Mini.
So Apple is basically like:
We are lazy
We know what you want better than you
You are wrongDamn Lemmy, when did you all get so damn salty? In an Apple community no less.
But also because users apparently never use the power button on a Mac
Because people who can afford a Mac can also afford the energy bill for having a computer running or standbying 24/7?
*scnr*
My understanding is that M4 is very efficient, and I would imagine that its energy use on sleep is negligible.
And as for affordability, I think the M4 Mac mini is supposed to be a terrific deal, no? As long as you use the base specs.
Yep, from what I’ve seen the base model is actually great value, especially for an Apple product. But that value disappears very quickly if you want to boost any of the specs, because they still massively overcharge for upgrades.
