From the start, the Mac mini was seen as the perfect way to serve up video and audio to your home television. Trouble was, with the advent of high-definition pictures, your mini and HD sets had a bit of a failure to communicate. When Apple created the mini, it would interface with the world using the Mini DisplayPort standard – which was great if you had an Apple monitor, but for the rest of the planet, it was a bit like speaking only Klingon.
Kanex has introduced a bridge of sorts, an adapter which sits between your Mini DisplayPort output and your high-def television’s HDMI video and audio input. The upshot? The adapter will “turn a DisplayPort video signal into a 1080p signal over HDMI, and will even integrate either digital or analog audio into the mix,” Engadget writes.
The $70 unit grabs power from the USB port, eliminating the need for yet another power brick and associated cables for your HD entertainment setup.
Earlier this year Monoprice.com announced it would offer MacBook owners a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter for $14.25.
Kanex said its adapter works with Unibody MacBooks, MacBook Pros, the MacBook Air and iMac, along with the Mac Mini.
[Via iClarified, Engadget and Kanex]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
