Intel Mac Mini soft power?

hello? Anybody even hazard a guess? I miss keyboard power buttons. Heck, on the pc side of things, it's pretty common to be able to turn on a computer with a mouse click, or a space bar. I've even got a machine that lets me type a password to turn on the computer through both usb and ps2. Anything similar available on macs?

bumpety bump.

the last machine to have soft power from the keyboard was the blue and white G3, it was removed from later macines to make the USB more standards compliant. The only way that I know of would therefore be to rig up a switch, the remote doesn't work to turn it on.

I think the Yikes! G4 had it to.

Yeah, it would make sense for the Yikes! to have soft power, it was just a B&W after all.

What I was saying though, there's NO other option to turn this thing on? That makes the PRIMARY function of a remote control useless, doesn't it?

Apple's attitude seems to be that these machines are to be left on all the time. A quick Google hasn't provided me with anything but uninformed banter as to sleep vs. shutdown power consumption & hardware longevity.

I have seen This (about half-way down) as a way of accessing the power button when a Mini is re-cased.

I just tryied a B/W keyboard with my sawtooth and it powers it on fine.

Thanks for the check, eeun, I spent a long time trying to figure this one out, which is a trick given I've not bought the beast yet. My gut tells me there has to be a way. Anybody familiar with the new EFI stuff yet? Like I said, many bioses allow keyboard on, and since this tech was developed for pc's to replace the bios, maybe there's a way to set it in EFI.
bb

Just another data point . . .

dan k

Ok,
roundup

dv imac yes

ibook g4 no

ibook dual usb no

clamshell ?

any other g4's?

as just tested:

400MHz DV iMac - yes, 600MHz iMac - no
400/500 TiBook - yes, DVI TiBook - no
iBooks of all flavors - no

dan k

I haven't had a chance to sit down with the EFI docs (my newest Intel stuff is at least a year old) but I'd imagine that it at least supports wake-on-LAN.

When I had my Lombard hooked up to my Rev B iMac's keyboard because I shipped the keyboard off to be replaced, the keyboard's power button didn't turn on the computer. Of course, this is all from memory, and I don't have that keyboard with me.

Unless it's already known whether USB power is controllable through EFI, perhaps one starting point would be to see if the Mini supplies 5V to USB when powered off.