A Mac mini dock, anyone?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 7, 2005 at 6:00am
From all reports, the Mac mini is selling like hotcakes. With its laptop-like portability (and I’m talking weight and size here, obviously you still need a keyboard, mouse and display) how about a Mac mini dock? There are a variety of ways to implement this.
The most obvious one is a dock in the traditional sense, such as those made for laptops. It would just sit atop your desk, connected to a monitor and your peripherals. Come home from work with your Mac mini, plug the computer into the dock and – voila! – you’re up and running. Of course, you could have one at your home and at your office for real convenience.
Another idea is for a Mac mini plug-and-play chassis. We’ve seen them for years used with hard drives and other types of drives. A Mac mini dock could come in configurations of 1×2, 2×2, 2×4, 2×6, etc. For example a 1×2 configuration could be a “stacked” set-up with two Mac mini bays. By “stacked,” I mean one on top of the other. You could also have one where they are side-by-side. A 2×4 cofiguration could be two columns and four rows of Mac mini bays. Then again, in a horizontal set-up, it would be four columns and two rows of bays.
They could come in two varieties with different functions. For example, one style could be targeted at people who are using each computer separately, so it would have a built-in KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch. KVM switches are popular among users who have upgraded their home computer systems and want to still use their old computers, but don’t want to invest in a second keyboard, monitor and mouse. KVM switches are also used by business to save money when one person uses more than one computer and in server farms where it’s only necessary to periodically access each separate server in the farm one at a time.
Another Mac mini dock version might be targeted at the cluster computer audience. This one wouldn’t have the KVM. Instead, it would rather focus on a fast switching Ethernet backplane for treating the Mac mini as a cluster computer.
Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
