Serious question here: if you turn off your Mac mini at night, what is the reason? Surely it cannot be for the power savings nor the money saved by doing so, especially not for small power-sipping computers like the Mac mini.
Taking the M4 Mac mini as an example, looking at the "
Mac mini Product Environmental Report" (PDF), on page 18 "Endnotes", there's a table that shows the following:
| Mode | 100V | 115V | 230V |
|---|
| Off | 0.08W | 0.10W | 0.11W |
| Sleep | 0.55W | 0.50W | 0.51W |
| Idle - Display on | 3.92W | 3.96W | 4.01W |
| Power supply efficiency | 91.3% | 91.8% | 92.6% |
Assuming the numbers shown above are
after the power conversion losses. Also assuming the average cost of 13 cents per kWh which I keep seeing everywhere when people talk about electricity prices in the USA. Using the 115V column of the table above, 13 cents lets you keep your M4 Mac mini in sleep mode for 1000Wh / 0.50W = 2000 hours, or 83 days and eight hours.
That's over two months and three weeks at idle for
13 cents.
Assuming someone working from home on their Mac mini for eight hours per day and two hours of personal use, that means a sleep state for 14 hours per day. That's 5110 hours per year in sleep, 2.555 kWh per year on idle for a cost of only 33 cents per year. Even if you triple that cost for your state, it's under a dollar per year.
Another scenario using an M4 Mac mini for an average of only four hours per week because it's the media center connected to a living room TV. That's 164 hours per week, 8528 hours per year in sleep mode. Using the same numbers as above, 4264 Wh per year at 13 cents per kWh equals 55 cents.
The potential damage done by turning your
expensive computer off/on/off all the time, which in turn does thermal cycling on all the components, versus the tiny electricity cost of your computer in sleep mode, means it makes no sense to ever power it off. In almost all scenarios, except for very extreme specific cases, I would suggest that you just power it on, and leave it on. While modern electronics are more rugged than decades ago and the power supplies components are more efficient than ever, physics is still physics.
Why would you risk damaging your 599$USD+ computer for barely half a dollar per year at the most?
In the same line of reasoning, always power your computer through a power bar equipped with a surge protector.
If you can afford it, an uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is even better. Some of the the newer power banks from Bluetti, Ecoflow and other brands have the ability to be used as a UPS.
