Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jbverschoor 1250 days ago
If you're looking only at idle power usage, the difference is around 20 watt compared to an idle pc. That's 0.5KWh. With the currency energy prices in NL (40ct/kwh, subsidized by the gov btw, because it's actually around 70ct now), this will save you €73 per year when idling, and even more when it's in use.

So the macmini essentially for free after a few years compared to your windows machine

1 comments

meh, only if you run it 24/7 and only if you live in Europe with very high energy prices. If the machine sleeps for 16 hours a day while the user goes to sleep or goes outside, you'll never break even. There's also no guarantee that next year will be as shitty as the last one regarding electricity.
If you're actually using it 8 hours a day then it's 30 watts for the mba, and 150 for the pc + 30 for the display. So the difference is 1.2kwh per day. For 200 days of work in europe, that's 2001.2.4 = 96 per year.

In the US that's 235 working days per year at around $0.20 (13 - 25ct), so about $50 per year.