> laptop

His current setup doesn't look bad to me from an ergonomic standpoint. Displays are fully articulated in all directions and probably at eye level, and keyboard and mouse will be in a comfortable position, with th trackball helping it all.

I'd hate such small screens but to each their own, and the MacBook wouldn't help.

On the decapitation, he's mentioning buying a cheaper device with a damaged screen (I'd assume those are near junk price) and I guess he used it the same way he uses his other computer.

It all seem to make sense to me ?

That's actually a valid choice in an extremely watt-hour per day (or week, or month) constrained environment. Like a relatively small to mid sized sailboat crossing a whole ocean. If you have very limited solar power, for instance, and you have critical instruments/radios and stuff to power.

If you have a "house power" 12V battery bank, and a regular laptop which expects 110-240VAC input, 19VDC output (example, random Dell) power brick which is being fed from a small true sine wave inverter, like 12VDC-to-120VAC, you're losing energy to heat and the DC to AC conversion process.

You're converting DC to AC and then the laptop is converting that back into DC. Ideally you do something like wire up a small inline fuse and a tiny meanwell DC-DC converter that can take 12VDC input and output 19VDC natively.

He has basically replicated on a limited budget and in a very small space on land a setup that is not that different than economically built DC power systems are done on boats.

His logic is correct though. The native power of his grid is 12V. He has a 20V step-up circuit and an inverter. 12V -> Inverter -> 12V is only good for UPS. He can directly setup USB-PD up to 9V from the 12V circuit or full 12V PD from the 20V one.

Also, I believe he hoards the power bricks as he notes.

What he does is not ideal, and I don't share the same view with him, but I understand what he does.

It is odd but also fascinating. If he likes it that way then all the power to him. He's not exactly trying to convince others to do the same.

The idle cost of inverters can be quite high.

EcoFlow power stations draw somewhere around 30w with the inverter switched on with no load.

The idle power of a Mac Mini at the wall is a few watts total.

Yes it seems absurd optimizing to keep on 12v to save on the inverter overhead, but at the same time are running sealed lead acid batteries.

Switching to LFP would give them 5-6x the capacity for the same weight. Current rate for LFP is around $100/kWh.

I inferred it was primarily a psychological need

Are you implying that removing the display would therefore be more space and power efficient than the actual 3mm display specifically calibrated to be powered by the built-in battery lmao. OP is just stupidly contrarian.