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Thank you for the hint about getting better resolution options by holding down the Option key in the Display Prefs on the Mac Mini.

The hard drive on our network-only Mac died and it lost all of its settings and I couldn't get it back to nearly as large as it used to be. I also went ahead and upgraded from Sierra to Catalina in the process. We only use it for QuickBooks, which allows our CPA and Bookkeeper and my wife and I to log in remotely and we were lost when that HD failed.

My only remaining question is whether we still need to terminate the display port with Catalina, or perhaps they snuck a firmware update in there where the cursor doesn't slow down to a crawl? I bought a couple of those from OWC after failing to create my own and still have one plugged in. Does it still need it? I haven't had time to extensively test, but just thought I'd ask since I didn't notice a huge difference with it out.

Thanks again for the sharp minds here (Everett) who knew about this option trick. Saved me tons of eyestrain and annoyance!

grg
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Mick
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    Hi, I've edited your question to focus on the question within. Here questions need to be questions and we say thanks by upvoting the relevant post(s) to give reputation to the original authors. – grg Sep 01 '20 at 18:59

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You should not need to terminate the video port of your Mac mini as support for a headless machine is natively supported by macOS - Remote into Mac Mini after a reboot. I say “should” because while it is supposed to be supported, I’ve run into instances where it would simply fail without it - notably VNC.

Bottom line is that you shouldn’t need it. But, does it hurt to have it? No. It’s also sufficiently inexpensive that getting one so you don’t have to worry about any issues makes it quite feasible.

Allan
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  • Well, Apple did something kind of nasty with the Late 2012 Mac Mini and made these necessary. I'm not sure if they did that in the 2 iterations that followed, but they definitely did it for this model. I think it was OWC that sold me one of these hacked/terminated adapters. I think Apple did it to prevent people from using regular Mac Minis as servers when they could charge a lot more for. It was really kind of cheap of them to do that. We owned a Mac Mini server too and that obviously didn't need the termination. I'm just wondering if they removed that arbitrary limitation later. – Mick Sep 01 '20 at 20:17
  • Apple does a lot of things that make them look petty, some on purpose, some not. I don’t this is one of those times, just more not anticipating how customers would use their products. – Allan Sep 01 '20 at 21:14
  • I worked in the Apple EcoSystem for 20 years and developed a pretty good nose for their corporate culture and such. Because we also owned the Mac Mini server which had no such issues, I suspect they purposely hobbled the regular Mac mini so people couldn't substitute it for the Server. – Mick Sep 01 '20 at 22:36
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    I forgot about the Mac mini server so that changes things a bit. I do see them trying to maximize their market share but if they did that it is so short sighted. The worst thing you can do is cripple hardware to force you to buy something else. IBM tried this and then the data center was filled with Dell and HP. When Oracle closed down everything with the SPARC servers, those too were migrated to Intel boxes. – Allan Sep 01 '20 at 22:41
  • Totally agree, but if there is one thing that Apple has shown the world it can do, is make money! Any threat to their handsome profit margins of 30-40% they will deal with. Makes sense, but for the very few people who might want a headless Mac Mini, it just seemed overkill to me. They've pretty much killed Apple server anyway, so I'd imagine all of the Mac Minis made today don't have this restriction. – Mick Sep 02 '20 at 00:02