The interest given to articles about modifications to the Mac mini, such as moving it into a micro ATX case with some large IDE drives or overclocking it, suggests that there may be a market for a “docking station” of sorts that has the same dimensions as a typical audio/video component. The mini could be plugged into this station, then added into the rack of a typical home theater with ease, to act as a media center. It would have the added benefit of allowing the mini to be easily removed from the rack for more portable uses from time to time.
Let me stress that this product does not actually exist. I have the idea, but neither the time nor talent to see it to fruition. I present it here so that others might. It might look something like this:
I would only buy such a thing if it contained the following:
- Few or no external controls. All features should be controllable by software in the mini. Perhaps a power button (which would also power the mini), but that’s all.
- Port replication, as usually found in a docking station. This would include power (allowing you to ditch the power brick that came with the mini).
- In addition to replication of the DVI connector, the station would wire the mini to built-in adaptors for VGA, S-Video, composite video and (most importantly) component video (Y/Pb/Pr), with ports for each arrayed on the back of the dock. If it didn’t have the component video, I wouldn’t buy it. Ideally, it would send signal to all of these at once, but being able to pick one at a time with a software control panel would be acceptible.
- Video input of some kind wired into the firewire bus, smilar to a built-in EyeTV 500.
- Two (or more) large, fast harddrives would be built into the dock, wired to the firewire port. It should not be rocket science for the user to replace these drives. Possibly the dock would supply just the drive bays, and the user would supply their own drives. These drives should be on the quiet side. The addition of a quiet fan to cool the drives would be acceptible.
- One or both of the USB ports would not be direct pass-through ports,
but connected to an internal hub. This hub would offer four connections
on the back of the dock, two in the front, and several internal. It
would also be hooked up internally to a number of other components built
into the dock. I will describe these in reference to other, existing
products, but in actuality, they’d be built into the dock hardware, not
just third party products shoved into the case. The features of these
additions would be:
- Something like an iMic, with the RCA and other i/o connections coming out of the back of the machine.
- Something like the Transit, which supplies DTS, with several optical audio ports in the back to allow recording and playback of digital audio to/from multiple sources.
- Some sort of general purpose IR receiver, perhaps like the Keyspan Express Remote.
- Some kind of combination flash memory reader.
- A front panel display, showing:
- Temperature of drive bay
- State of firewire ports
- State of USB ports
- State of card reader
- If the audio modes (RCA vs. optical) need to be switchable/one-at-a-time, their current state
- If the video modes (DVI vs. component) need to be switchable/one-at-a-time, their current state
- Possibly some additional cooling for the mini. Maybe this would be additional airflow around the bottom and sides. Not sure how/if this would work.
- Size similar to a home theater DVD component: 17” wide, somewhere between 9-13” deep and just slightly taller than the mini’s 2”.
This post has been referenced by some other sites. From the comments here and on those sights, some extra commentary seems appropriate:
- Size: I guess I didn’t spell out the idea that this is meant to integrate (i.e. be the same size as) with standard audio/video components in a home theater rack, as many posters wondered why it was so large. Like many a/v components, it is likely that this one would contain a lot of empty space. People who don’t care about integration with a rack system may be interested in a sweet looking, more stack-like system mentioned in one of the comments on engadget.
- Non-stackability: Some mentioned that you cannot stack another component on top of this one, limiting its use in a rack. This is true, but intentional for reasons I didn’t mention. It turns out that items on top of a Mac mini interrupt the airport and bluetooth signals. I suspect they may also cause heat problems, but don’t know that for sure. Speaking of which…
- Heat: I mentioned heat breifly, but some commenters correctly point out that some serious thought would need to be put into heat management. This would need to include some path from the vent in the the back of the mini into the body of the dock.
- Cost: I didn’t think at all about cost, but if you add up the cost of buying similar components, it adds up pretty quickly. I guess the measure of affordability is if the dock costs less than it would to buy the similar components individually (which, right now, anyone who wants a Mac mini home theatre needs to do).