I was thinking about getting a mac mini and have inevitably run into the question of how to make use of the thing that has integrated all the necessary IO devices, namely, the laptop. Googling "mac mini laptop as monitor" gives only application-level workarounds like VNC screen sharing, which requires a monitor for first setup, wifi for connection, passwords for verification, etc, while non of these hassles seem really necessary.
I would like to ask whether it is theoretically possible, or what the technical difficulties are, to setup my laptop as i/o device transparently for mac mini, so that mac mini's hardware sees the other side of the cable just as a normal keyboard and a normal monitor. In another word, I should be able to configure the BIOS of the mac mini with my laptop's keyboard and monitor. Application-level tricks like VNC or AirPlay are ruled out by this benchmark.
This seems vaguely possible for me because, theoretically, the laptop could give whatever input signals to and receive whatever output signals from mac mini, be it videos for monitor, audios for speaker, videos from camera, audio from mic, keyboard&mouse events, biometric data, whatever, through a large-bandwidth video-supporting channel like thunderbolts, and then manage and present the signals using a VM-like application. But of course I must be missing something here because no graceful solution exists as far as I know.
Thanks in advance.
-- EDIT --
A bit more research leads to the answer that it is theoretically possible but practically not (yet). See https://superuser.com/a/1354002/1238581, https://superuser.com/a/1353937/1238581
Further research gives KVM switch
And also Pi-KVM as well as TinyPilot.
Now the core question seems to have boiled down to: does laptop usb have OTG? (see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/593986) -- Answer: Linux has USB Gadget Mode
