The price seems pretty good. I don’t really know much about mini PCs. Do you think there is a better alternative?

Update: ok, not price efficient. Noted 👍

  • babybus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    1 年前

    What’s great about Mac minis is that they’re extremely power efficient since they’re ARM machines, so if you live somewhere like in Europe where power is expensive, it can save you a lot of money.

    I want to see numbers. How much is “a lot of money”?

    • tahoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 年前

      I’m no lab scientist but when I switched from a hackintosh to an M1 Mac mini a few years ago, my total electricity consumption went down by around 15-20%. This can mean a lot on the long run if you’re tight on budget.

    • stuner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 年前

      I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

      • Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
      • My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
      • A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

      If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

      It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 年前

        Would the Mac Mini actually idle at that wattage if it’s open for connections? I doubt it, it’s probably more like 10W, which is generally the range for those smaller AMD MiniPCs or NUCs.

        If it’s 10W, that’s a $20 savings from your NAS w/ a desktop CPU (and probably a discrete GPU, unless it’s running an APU). I can get 4% easily on savings, so I’d only need a $500 savings vs the Mac Mini to recoup that difference every year ($500 * 4% = $20). So if you already have an old PC, use that instead of buying a Mac Mini, and you also won’t have to fight macOS to do what you want.

        • stuner@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 年前

          I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).

          But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I’d also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)

    • suction@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 年前

      Cheap in Germany for example nowadays is 0,20 EUR / KWh + 15 EUR / month base fee. Most people have more expensive contracts though, 0,30 EUR / KWh and more