Mac mini portable

For a while, I considered the Mac min as backpack-portable computer, but that solution would have involved separate sets of display, keyboard, and mouse both at the office and at home. This would have been cheaper than two complete systems, and you would just have connected your home peripherals into that "cookie box" to continue working on the same machine, settings, data, in the evening at home.

An added bonus for me - apart from the significantly smaller size - over a powerbook/ibook would have been the fact that you "only" had to worry about the "cookie box", i.e. the Mac mini in its case, but not any display, which typically is the first component that suffers in laptops from transport-derived wear&tear or direct damage, say from a bicycle crash. At the same time, the advantage of a full-sized desktop display and a standard keyboard were also weighing in on the decision.

On the other hand, such a 'dual-base system' would not have worked anywhere else than at work and at home.

Eventually, I settled for the more powerful iMac (and better value-for-money, compared to the Mac mini+studio display option) for the office and my good old (but heavily upgraded) wallstreet powerbook for the road and for surfing/writing/blogging at home.

But here is a concept I just found on the web, where a Mac mini had been rendered fully portable, with batteries, display, micro-keyboard and all:



More on this project, the how and why is available on PeterGreen's .mac website, here.

An excerpt:

"Why the Mac Mini Portable?

Well, in short I wanted a machine that was really dinky to just pop in my rucksack, and while the PowerBooks/iBooks are pretty small, they still take up a fair amount of space. I wanted something with a very small screen that was more or less hand-held, and mac just don't do that [yet].

I didn't need a completely fluid response of the controllers or a crystal clear screen as the MMP [MacMini Portable] would only be used in it's portable sense to quickly integrate into someone else's system, the rest of the time it'd have it's own dedicated screen, mouse & full sized keyboard being used in the traditional 'Mini' design.
Therefore, a micro-keyboard was perfectly acceptable, I was prepared to accept a naff mouse - but managed to get an old pc laptop trackpad which I actually got working very well.

So, there was nothing for it - I had to build my own!"