This is ridiclous
As another IT guy at a university, having to manually turn on 30 computers in a classroom for updates or whatever is already a pain in the ass. Wake on LAN is not a reliable solution. Havin to manually flip over every box, then putting them down, and then fixing the cables that got yanked… I’d throw those fuckers in the trash.
The Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro’s form factor is perfectly tiny without compromising user comfort.
I have never bought an iPhone or a Mac and I agreed at first that this seems an extra step. But you surely wouldn’t have to flip it over? The device will be raised enough it appears that a finger could slide in the gap and hit that button. But maybe I don’t know shit or have slender fingers or something but feels like it could be operated without flipping.
What am I missing?
Still a daft design but yeah…
I have been using a MacBook trough work for 7 years now and I think I actually clicked shutdown once this year too keep the battery at ~80% during my 1 month holiday. Otherwise I maybe reboot it once every month or two to fix some weird homebrew upgrade issues. And that’s it. The thing is just “on” in deep sleep, forever.
If the Mac mini’s behave similarly to the MacBooks, the standby energy usage is so low it’s probably easier to just keep it in on/standby/sleep all the time and just wake it by keyboard or mouse. And because Apple develop their own hardware, standby and sleep actually work reliably. So they probably intend for you to only use that power button for a hard reset. Even shutting it down and moving it, plugging the power back in wil probably start it up again. Just like opening the lid on my shutdown MacBook also boots it before I even touch the power button. Even a keypress or mouseclick will probably turn the damn thing on.
Yes it’s an odd design choice, but in regular day to day use it probably won’t matter. Especially if you realise that its not a windows machine that needs to shutdown or reboot often.
Yeah my current Windows machine only gets rebooted upon updates, but previously I’ve noted needing to do it more frequently. My work laptop I shut down out of habit because they only supplied me with an 8gb ram device.
When I’m forced to move to Win 11 on my personal PC I’ll move to Linux instead.
You’re a Windows shop? Why don’t you deploy a policy that prevents users from shutting down computers?
Mainly because our students are idiots and will complain if the computer doesn’t turn off. Or worse, take independent action and hold the power button, or actually yank the power cable. Maybe I should just lean into it and convince them that the monitor is the computer.
Jokes aside, how could I implement such a policy? I’ve only found one that hides the power buttons from the start menu, but Windows still responds to ACPI.
Jokes aside, how could I implement such a policy?
The policy you’re looking for is in Computer Configuration->Policies->Windows Settings->Security Settings->Local Policies->User Rights Assignments->Shut down the system
This policy takes account or group names from your local or domain AD as its variable (like Domain Admins). After it’s successfully applied, only those users or groups will be able to shutdown the machine gracefully.
Create a new GPO or edit an existing one and apply it to the ADUC organizational unit containing the computer objects you need to target.
Why would they be idiots for wanting to turn these computers off?
If the computers aren’t running something important while not in use, I think they should turn them off as we’re already wasting far too much energy.
I might be missing something, but it sounds like leaving your car running or leaving lights on in your home the whole year.
