Charge macbook air with mac mini

Not enough power available to charge a MacBook Air. The charger supplied with the M1 MacBook Air is 30 Watts. From experience, I use a power passthrough hub with my M1 MAcBook Air. It "steals" 15 Watts for its purposes leaving 15 Watts for my MBA. With even minimal workload., the MBA would start drawing power from the battery. So, 15 Watts is barely enough to run an MBA let alone charge it. Needed to get a 61 Watt power brick to solve the issue.

USB-C Power Delivery is a separate specification from USB device powering. The Mini has device powering ports which has a power limit of 4.5 Watt or perhaps 7.5 Watts if Apple designed them as USB device "charging Ports", though that is not mentioned anywhere in the spec. They are definitely not specified as "Power Delivery" ports, which could be as high as 100 Watts.

Bottomline, use a charger with the MacBook Air.

Good point. The iMac M1 manual, which comes with USB4, specifically mentions notebook charging but the the minis, both Intel and M1 (M1 also supports USB4) refer only to “devices”. I wouldn’t read too much into that, unless of course you’re seeing otherwise. Are you?

Interesting, thanks. USB4 mandates power delivery and also mandates it via a USB C connector - I believe that’s what you meant. So my gut feeling is that the M1 mini and the M1 iMac will both provide all the juice needed to charge MacBooks since they’re both USB4 equipped. The Intel mini will too, but at a slower rate. I have yet to own a MacBook (and probably never will) so all IMO. I do think posting over at the MacBook community will lead to meatier responses! Cheers

probably, but probably rather slowly there are limitations of how much current computers allow connected devices to draw from usb ports, my old imac could not even get my ipad to show it was charging

Yes.