Portable Mac mini with an external battery pack
I found a battery pack with an AC outlet, strapped it to the Mac mini, and turned it into a portable, headless computer companion for Apple Vision Pro. Here’s how it went.
There was never any doubt that the new Mac mini could be turned into a tiny battery-powered Mac, but there were a lot of questions about the execution of such a project. Not all AC outlets are created equal, so I went shopping for the lowest-priced, smallest-sized battery pack that could still provide enough wattage to keep a Mac mini powered on.
I found a no-name Amazon product sold in the Paopaoyu Store, one of those odd brands that don’t seem to have a real website or presence outside of Amazon. Its SEO-optimized listing calls it the “Portable Laptop Power Bank 100W AC Outlet, 72Wh/20000mAh with 65W PD USB C Portable Laptop Charger, External Battery Pack for MacBook, Notebooks, Laptops.”
Yeah, it’s a mouthful. But it was only $60 and offered a 100W AC outlet and 20k mAh capacity. Good enough.
A portable Mac mini
Apple’s website says the M4 Mac mini, my model, has a maximum draw of 65W, which is well under the 100W limit of the battery’s AC outlet. If you’re going to repeat this experiment and have an M4 Pro-equipped Mac mini, you’ll need something that provides more than 140W.
A compact battery pack with AC outlet can keep the setup minimal
That said, general operations like browsing and listening to music won’t have the Mac drawing more than 12W to 20W. I never saw consumption above 25W even when tinkering with Whiskey to run Steam, so these peak load ratings are likely rare events caused by gaming or rendering.
The battery was perfectly sized to act as a little platform for the Mac mini to sit on, which was one of my unnecessary but aesthetically pleasing goals. However, the low price made more sense once I powered it on.
This battery in particular has an incredibly loud cooling fan and electrically noisy inverter. No, I’m not worried about fire, but if you’re sensitive to this kind of loud droning noise, you’ll want to look for a better battery.
That said, everything worked great. At 20,000mAh, the battery performed excellently running the Mac mini while powering the Apple Vision Pro battery. The battery died at about 2 hours with the Mac mini showing about 12W to 15W power draw the entire time.
Connect to the Mac mini for virtual display mode in Apple Vision Pro
I wanted to perform the test with the Apple Vision Pro connected first to see how long it would last powering both since the Apple Vision Pro will die after about 2 hours of use. When not powering the Apple Vision Pro, the battery lasts for several hours — more than I’d be using it without access to an AC outlet.
The M4 Mac mini doesn’t require any hardware workarounds to get the Apple Vision Pro virtual display mode to work, though it is tricky. Once the Mac mini is powered on, it needs to be logged in to become available as a virtual display, so connect a keyboard over Bluetooth or wire and type in the password, sight unseen.
After a moment, the Mac mini should show up as a target in the Apple Vision Pro, even without a Wi-Fi network. If it doesn’t appear, there’s a chance you mistyped the password, just type it again and hit return.
You could turn off requiring a passcode at login, but that’s a big security risk, especially for a portable Mac that will be leaving your home. The only other alternative is using a portable display, which defeats the purpose.
No, using SideCar to make an iPad an temporary monitor isn’t an option here, because SideCar does require the Mac to be connected to an external display before it’ll work. Though, you could use an HDMI dongle to trick the Mac if that’s the route you’d like to take.
There is a way to remote access a Mac via Shortcuts on iPad and enable SideCar, but that’s a tutorial for another day.
Seeking the perfect Mac mini battery
This isn’t a review and I’m not going to beat up too much on a $60 portable battery, but it did help me understand exactly what I’d want from such a product. Whoever made this one obviously wasn’t expecting it to act as a battery pack for a tiny Mac.
Someone needs to make a bespoke battery/UPS for the Mac mini
First, this battery doesn’t have power passthrough, which means you can’t charge the battery and power the Mac mini at the same time. If you plug in power to the USB-C port, the AC inverter is shut off.
Second, I’d love to see a UPS mode for the battery. My dream setup would be to have the Mac mini connected to the battery, the battery connected to AC power, and have it automatically switch to battery power if AC power is removed.
It would serve two purposes. Obviously, there’s good reason to keep the Mac mini powered on even during a power outage, but the secondary use case is to disconnect the charging cable and carry the Mac mini around.
If the UPS can switch quickly enough, the Mac mini won’t power down. Currently, after charging the battery, I have to start up the Mac mini from scratch every time.
For a bonus, I’d love to see a company make the battery specifically for the Mac mini. Meaning having a matching external aluminum housing similar to Satechi’s upcoming dock.
Portable Mac mini versus a MacBook
If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you’re wondering why someone wouldn’t just buy a MacBook of some kind. Simply put, a lot of the price in a Macbook is the display, and as an Apple Vision Pro user, I’m not going to make much use of the display.
A portable Mac mini and Apple Vision Pro make a good combo
I had the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and used it extensively for about a year. The resurgence of iPad into my workflow thanks to Stage Manager and other improvements literally shelved the MacBook Pro.
When the Apple Vision Pro launched, I used the Mac again, but via the virtual display mode. It seemed wasteful to have such an awesome display available and have no use for it, so I went for the Mac mini with M4 when it was announced.
Now, I have a headless Mac mini that can be used for podcast recording and other work-related tasks in a tiny package. However, the lack of an internal battery did change how I had to think of the Mac’s use case in m day to day.
By pairing a Mac mini with a portable battery, I was able to restore my former workflows without much fuss. Now I have a Mac mini that can be packed in a backpack with Apple Vision Pro for use anywhere I’d like. Plus, the backpack I use has only one laptop slot, and I’d prefer travel with the iPad Pro as my laptop.
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A decent proof of concept
For $60, ($800 Mac mini and $4,000 Apple Vision Pro not included), you can create an excellent little portable Mac mini setup with Apple Vision Pro acting as a virtual display. I highly recommend finding a better battery pack, not necessarily bigger capacity, just one with a quieter, if not silent, inverter.
I’ll be reaching out to different battery makers and testing other options and will report back with more once I’ve found the perfect battery companion for the Mac mini. For now, this proof of concept is good enough to get by.
