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