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 👍
You can get a Ryzen mini PC for less than $200. Depends on what is worth to you in cost.
What’s great about Mac minis is that they’re extremely power efficient since they’re ARM machines, so if you live somewhere like in Europe where power is expensive, it can save you a lot of money. They’re usually completely silent too.
Depending on their needs, I’d suggest OP to get a used M1 Mac mini, they’re great value for money.
You may want to check your specs again. The Ryzen APUs are very power efficient and run the same stretch as M3 (reported): 15W-45W
Though the more realistic at the wall measurements of the 2023 Mac Minis pretty much seem to have it pegged at a solid 15W-25W min under normal service workloads. The reported “idle” measurements of the M* chips being at 6W are literally just saying “if it has power”, and unrealistic considering you can’t even run them without a the GPU being engaged somewhat without a fully headless software configuration.
I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf
What’s great about Mac minis is that they’re extremely power efficient since they’re ARM machines, so if you live somewhere like in Europe where power is expensive, it can save you a lot of money.
I want to see numbers. How much is “a lot of money”?
I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.
- Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
- My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
- A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).
If you pay 0.30$/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.
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
Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.
On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.
I’d recommend against it. Apple’s software ecosystem isn’t as friendly for self hosting anything, storage is difficult to add, ram impossible, and you’ll be beholden to macOS running things inside containers until the good folks at Asahi or some other coummity startup add partial linux support.
And yes, I’ve tried this route. I ran an m1 mac mini as a home server for a while (running jellyfin and some other containers). It pretty consistently ran into software bugs (less maintained than x64 software) and every time I wanted to do an update instead of sudo whateveryourdistroships update, and a reboot, it was an entire process involving an apple account, logging into the bare metal device, and then finally running their 15-60 minute long update. Perfectly fine and acceptable for home computing, but not exactly a good experience when you’re hosting a service.
HP/Lenovo/Dell workstation tiny/mini/micro will be cheaper and better supported. Price-wise, I’ve set up 4-5 reasonably powerful t/m/m machines for the cost of my M2 Mac mini.
Which is nice for some of the development work I do, but for a server I personally won’t use anything other than Linux, and I wouldn’t recommend anything else either. Apple adds some funkiness that can be a complete pain (IMO) with some tools, Linux is the only server solution worth using.
So if you want a Mac, go for it, but if you want a server as the most important part, I’d say get an x86 based bit of hardware.
If the price is right for you, go for it. You will run containers and or VMs, so doesn’t really matter what your bare metal is.
I would choose something where I can install Linux easily and nice and I am sure at the Mac mini price point you can build yourself an assembled mini-pc with beefer specs, but indeed it’s more work and hassle.
YMMV
