It's a shame because a Mac Mini is a solid gaming computer.
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 good thing is that the Ryzen boards can be upgraded on RAM and Storage but that seems to be changing with soldered DDR5 on many mini PCs now.
My raspberry pi is sitting at 3 watts, and runs linux software just fine.
A Mac Mini uses multiple times that, and can barely run any software I care about (i.e. linux).
They're both consumer computers, and yes there's a massive difference in their capabilities, but "most efficient ever" is a really strong claim.
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.
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.
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.
Both are on 10gbe, and I suspect the card in the Nuc was a bit of a power draw.
I have a few bits of hardware on them so that I can force a hard reboot remotely if needed. Crude, but effective.
https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/smart-plug/hs110/
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.
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/188431/apples-magic-mouse-an...
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.
now i have a sudden urge to buy a mac mini and install a tiny case window with LEDs and an itty-bitty LCD display for power/thermal monitoring.