I could not grasp the “why” here, not for the life of me. A Mac mini/studio would have been so much straightforward for the actual cited problem of “needing to develop on Apple hardware”.<p>Sometimes we do things just for “the love of the game” and learn something along the way but I couldn’t help scratching my head the entire time while reading this
There's a lot of that with this guy... His comment about requiring a low power environment so he discards all laptop power bricks. Dude, unless you're powering things off a hand cranked dynamo a few laptops are not going to melt your fuse board.<p>My guess is that the "why" is largely just showing off, coupled with oddness.
I have to say I'm a bit perplexed as to why a person who is living in a small camping trailer would not want a normally functioning laptop <i>with</i> a screen.<p><a href="https://mm-dev.rocks/posts/my-working-environment/intro/" rel="nofollow">https://mm-dev.rocks/posts/my-working-environment/intro/</a><p>I could see something like a macbook laptop sans screen being useful if it was like, perma wired into the electronics enclosure in a cabinet on a boat and plugged into an existing monitor/keyboard/touchpad... Maybe a tiny two way HDMI KVM switch to toggle between it and an existing x86-64 small computer?
I have an M1 14" macbook with a broken screen. Would have cost $600+ to get it replaced so i just bought another refurbished one for $750. If i want to use the keyboard its kind of annoying to have to deal with the useless screen, so I would be open to just taking the dang thing off.
Their power needs must be absurdly strict, considering they didn’t want the 12v -> 220v -> 12v loss for an M1 chip.
There are people “deshelling” Mac Minis and driving them via other power supplies<p>Here’s an M1 and somewhere in this guys Insta are photos of an M2 which is even easier as the cable is easier<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CvP8FuLtzzr/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/CvP8FuLtzzr/</a><p>Edit: Here’s the M2 <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CxgRNuYrUyN/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/CxgRNuYrUyN/</a>
>I tried Virtual Machines, probably had half a dozen MacOS VMs over the years in VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM. Getting MacOS working in a VM is difficult, inconsistent and (at least on my machines) performance isn’t great. Apple strongly does not want you doing this, you’ll always be swimming upstream.<p>Idk. A year or two ago I wanted to test something on Mac. I searched a bit and found an image and probably copied a qemu config from somewhere, and it worked without any obvious problems. I'm sure there was a performance hit, but it wasn't unusable by any means, and I don't run the latest hardware.
I once bought an apple silicon macbook pro logic board to use with a kvm. It was a fun adventure. Things to notice:<p>-laptop lid closed/open sensor.<p>-no lid screen at first boot was a pain to fix to external monitor.<p>-logic board only on first boot requires macbook pro trackpad and keyboard(case), connecting external keyboard and mouse doesn't work at login screen due to security.<p>Once up and running though it is an excellent, cheap compiling/local llm machine i use over ssh from another mac
Why the hell would anyone live like this
> The battery bank from which I power my home is 12V (24V or 48V would be better and I’ll upgrade when the time is right). All my electricity comes from this battery bank.<p>> I have a power inverter, meaning I can use appliances with normal/household plugs, but the inverter wastes some power in the conversion process, stepping up from 12V to 220V. To then plug in a power brick, which will again throw away some power in converting 220V back down to whatever voltage a device uses, means double wastage, and a mess of plugs and wires.<p>Is this... a joke? How much freaking amps are you pulling? Average Canadian electricity consumption is 1270 watts. 1270 / 12 = 100+ Amps for one hour.<p>I'm guessing this is more of a third world situation and that electricity usage is much lower, but still...I fail to see how you would get to a setup like this. If you're fully off-grid then your generator or solar system could give you much higher voltage. If not, how are you charging the battery bank?<p>EDIT: From your CV, you are from the UK. I'm very confused.
Not the poster, but I live off-grid on a boat in the UK and pretty much everything (including the laptop I'm commenting from) runs off 12V DC.<p>I have 800W of solar panels and a 3.5kWh LFP battery bank.<p>I use approximately 2kWh per day in summer, 1kWh in winter, 500Wh when it's cold enough that I can turn the fridge off.<p>In the summer I dump any excess to an immersion water heater.<p>At that level the self-consumption power of an inverter, about 5-10W, is significant so I avoid relying on it for anything powered all day (but it's useful for appliances, power tools and other intermittent items).<p>Using incredibly wasteful amounts of energy isn't necessary, people just do it.
<a href="https://mm-dev.rocks/series/my-working-environment/" rel="nofollow">https://mm-dev.rocks/series/my-working-environment/</a><p>Lives in a caravan and avoids using mains power.
It sounds crazy but pulling >100A from low voltage battery is kinda normal for a 6kw solar inverter (in 220-250V countries). It needs a pair of 50mm2 wires which is thick as a rope though.
[dead]
[dead]