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Hirose-powered Mac Mini.


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Thanks for the link.

 

On 1/17/2018 at 10:54 AM, Patrick Farrell said:

In short, it's an easy way to run Metacorder or Boom Recorder on your cart while keeping the whole cart DC powered from a battery.

 

Curious what would make this a better solution for some people over a laptop.

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32 minutes ago, Daniel Ignacio said:

Thanks for the link.

 

 

Curious what would make this a better solution for some people over a laptop.

 

With a laptop, you'd have to rely on the internal battery which probably wouldn't last a full day. So therefore you'd need an AC inverter in order to plug in the laptop power supply.

You also get different monitor options, such as a rackmount display. It's smaller so you can build it into the cart rather than having a laptop hang on the side. Not to mention it's cheaper than a comparable Apple laptop and could potentially have more powerful specs.

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The 2012 Mac Mini is user upgradeable and fixable, unlike many newer machines. It has enough muscle for most audio tasks. You can fit 2 SSD's into one of these, and it runs whisper quiet. The case is almost free of holes and there are none on the top, so it would be more difficult for water to get inside in case of rain or spills. A laptop is very vulnerable because of the keyboard. I've got one as a post production machine and I love it.

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  • 2 months later...
On 1/19/2018 at 3:22 AM, Ilari Sivil said:

The 2012 Mac Mini is user upgradeable and fixable, unlike many newer machines. It has enough muscle for most audio tasks. You can fit 2 SSD's into one of these, and it runs whisper quiet. The case is almost free of holes and there are none on the top, so it would be more difficult for water to get inside in case of rain or spills. A laptop is very vulnerable because of the keyboard. I've got one as a post production machine and I love it.

+1

 

I keep a 2012 MacMini around for an eventual Johnny 5 mix cart build. 

On 1/18/2018 at 10:17 AM, codyman said:

One advantage of these new USB-C laptops though is the fact that you can get battery packs for them that run the machine straight over USB.

This is useful information. 

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A smart mod, but keep in mind that the Mac mini expects a supply voltage of 12V DC with possibly a quite narrow tolerance. So be very careful, if you want to run it directly on a battery supply, where the voltage can vary considerably.

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Running a computer based workflow on a cart with all the challenges of on set conditions? No thanks. Extremes in temperature, portable battery setups, rain, humidity, running your cart over rough terrain. There’s no chance in hell that I would trust a Mac computer to operate reliably in those conditions.

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  • 1 month later...
On 1/17/2018 at 4:51 PM, Daniel Ignacio said:

Stumbled upon this during my perusing of Gotham Sound’s used section: a Mac Mini modded by Gotham with Hirose power input.

 

 

Tempting to buy for my now and then musings on making up a cart around one, my on going thread:
 

 

But then I saw the price, hmmm... I'd rather just mod it myself!
 

You can find them secondhand for only US$300:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-mini-A1347-Desktop-MD387LL-A-October-2012/112981046825

On 1/20/2018 at 12:22 AM, Ilari Sivil said:

The 2012 Mac Mini is user upgradeable and fixable, unlike many newer machines. It has enough muscle for most audio tasks. You can fit 2 SSD's into one of these, and it runs whisper quiet. The case is almost free of holes and there are none on the top, so it would be more difficult for water to get inside in case of rain or spills. A laptop is very vulnerable because of the keyboard. I've got one as a post production machine and I love it.


What change happened with the 2014 Mac Mini that made it unsuitable?

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What change happened with the 2014 Mac Mini that made it unsuitable?

53 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

What change happened with the 2014 Mac Mini that made it unsuitable?


They switched from a quad-core processor to a dualcore processor and the performance dropped, understandably. Check out the GeekBench scores if you want verification: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?q=mac+mini The innards should still be OK for RAM and HD upgrades, but the 2014 performs significantly worse in multicore tasks and insignificantly better in single-core tasks.

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