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.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 hours ago

    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”?

    • stuner@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      36 minutes ago

      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.

    • tahoe@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 hours ago

      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.