I just replaced a nuc 9 ghost canyon with a Mac mini.
The difference in power consumption is insane. Nuc was 67 watts. The mini is 4-10. I don’t have enough data for a long term average on the mini yet, but it’s ludicrously efficient.
The raspberry pi is great. Absolutely love them. Been running them as dev boards (robotics) and servers (at home) for 10+ years. Last time I truly, genuinely, felt excited about Christmas was when my SO gave one to me back in 2014 or so.
But I wouldn't compare the experience to a Mac Mini, and I wouldn't call a raspberry pi a "consumer computer". It solidly falls into the amateur dev board category. Heck, it doesn't even have a power button.
The claim was about efficiency, not just power draw.
In your comparison you talk about software compatibility, but the Mac can run Linux and many open source tools & apps found on it. So the Pi is only ahead if you arbitrarily limit the comparison to a specific distro that's not Asahi or an application like sxiv, and in addition are the kind of user who wants that software and doesn't care about Mac exclusive programs. Which is valid, but has nothing to do with a metric like power efficiency.
It works well. Quite why networking from VM is more reliable than networking from the host is a question I’d like to ask Apple. SMB does not reliably start at boot.
Imagine if you could turn on a Mac mini, have docker containers start and then have them access network shares reliably.
The Ubuntu VM on the same host can. That’s ridiculous.
The mini does 6.74 Gflops/W. At the default clock rate of 1200 MHz the Pi 3 can achieve 6.2 Gflops. However, without a heatsink the CPU will instantly throttle to half speed and average about 3.1 Gflops. So the mini is 3 to 6 times as efficient.
> A Mac Mini uses multiple times that, and can barely run any software I care about (i.e. linux).
You’re both right, and wrong.
The Mac uses 3-4W most the time. The reason mine is using more is that it has an Ubuntu VM running Pihole (so it is running Linux). This doubles/triples the power usage.
If I wasn’t such a chicken, I’d run it on the host in docker, but I’ve learned the pain of having Pihole on the same host as other services. Dead dns is not not good.
I really wish I could run Ubuntu on the metal. Something as simple as having docker containers run on boot is unreliable, and the god awful hack I have made to get it to work is so disgusting it’s shameful.
> It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer
Well, Apple doesn't sell 'em with RGB LEDs built-in, so I dunno.
...more seriously though: I don't know how you can say that with a straight-face. On paper, the Apple Silicon M3 and M4 seem comparable to NVIDIA's mid-tier offerings from 3-4 years ago... when rendering to a 1080p-sized display; assuming you'd like to render your games at native Retina or even 5K resolution (given that Apple would really rather you used their display hardware for the best experience, right?) then you'll have to limit yourself to games from the last decade (assuming they've even been ported to macOS in the first place) or convince yourself that this year's AAA titles are fully playable as a slideshow.
...and that's assuming your Mac doesn't start thermal-throttling itself too.
Also, you'll also need a very non-Apple mouse: I'm flabbergasted by how even still in 2025 you cannot independently left-click and right-click on Apple's Magic Mouse[1]; while, ergonomically a multitouch mouse is great for many things, but navigating a wheel-driven UI (e.g. weapon-wheels) is not one of them.
if all I can't play is 2025 AAA games..I'm not missing out on much. It ran BG3 solidly anyways! Obviously not maxed out but it was playable and enjoyable.
