He might have saved even more electricity had he gotten a laptop with the same specs as the mini. My Dell Inspiron 1525 has a 65W power supply, vs the similarly-equipped Mac Mini's 110W, and that 65W includes the screen. Adding an LCD to the Mac Mini adds another 30-50W.
Your power supply only documents an upper bound. It does not tell how much power your device actually uses.
Oddly, on laptops the power supply may not even be capable of satisfying the peak power consumption. There are laptops that can only go to full peak usage if they have their battery in and charged. The charger just covers average consumption plus charging current.
Is that the Mini's power supply max rating, or its average power draw?
I'm guessing the mini has a bit of extra power for USB devices and when the processors really kick it up. Would be fairly easy to test... where's my multimeter..
Your energy-star rated 20"+ screen (with an LCD backlight) typically consumes 20W when on and 0W when powered off by the computer.
So I believe the Mini would consume, on average under use, about 55W, which is a rather commendable figure for an official desktop and not a nettop. Adding peripherals will obviously effect this, a portable hard drive can pull up to 18W (maxing out the USB power supply). I'd definitely say opting for a bigger HDD on purchase is better than getting an external drive.
I do have a question for Mac Aficionado's, is the OS X Server akin to Windows Server 2008 or the Ultimate editions of windows? I was wondering if the Mini 1TB with OS X Server is as usable and accessible to a new user as any standard OS X (I'm rarely a Mac user, but my next purchase is likely to be Mac, so I definitely don't want to get my ass bitten by either losing out or screwing myself over by lack of knowledge when making a purchase).
We run a few Mac OS X Servers at work. Unfortunately, they are a few versions old (2 are Panther, 1 Tiger). They are probably closer to Windows Server 2008 than Ultimate editions of windows. But neither is probably a good comparison.
The core system is your standard Mac OS X. I feel odd when I log onto our servers and see an iTunes icon. So you won't miss anything by getting the Mac OSX Server.
The "server" part is more like having all of the capabilities of a Linux server, with a nice easy to use GUI to configure them. The newer versions include some Mac specific services, but for the most part, it's like having a Linux server and a Mac Desktop in one package.
I think the main benefit is licensing... with the "normal" version I think you are restricted as to how many people can connect (10?). But the server version is unlimited. This probably doesn't matter to you, but the Mini server would be nice for a department file server, or something like that.
If I were getting a Mini, I'd get the Server one just for the hard drives. Don't let the "server" part discourage you... it's still a Mac.
From my superficial experience with OSX Server, it's like Windows Server in the sense that it is OSX Plus. All the normal stuff is there, then server specific stuff is there. That includes both nice GUIs on top of open source stuff (Samba, etc), and nice GUIs on top of totally custom stuff (Calendar sharing, Wikis, etc).
If you have normal web-serving, open source using needs, regular OSX will be just fine. Be sure you really need server before buying, regular OSX can do any server type things that linux can.
I suppose.
I use our house's mini as a fileserver most days. No screen needed. The 6+ hard drives connected via USB and Firewire probably eat more than 35W however. Other days its a media center and we're using the projector for a screen (which certainly eats up a great deal of power).
While your suggestion is along the right lines, keep in mind that computer power supplies are not like lightbulbs. They are spec'd to rate the maximum power they can produce to the device (and thereby draw). So, your 110W power supply is not drawing a constant 110W in the way a 110W light bulb would always being drawing 2x the power of a 55W lightbulb (all else being equal).
That being said, it is reasonable to assume that a PC with a 65W supply will generally use less power than one with a 110W supply, but much would depend on the use.
Quite so, my Studio 1555 is a 65W unit and my LCD monitor is now aging. Even with my 60W Acer AL1916W drawing power I use less than the Mac Mini would. And when I don't need it I turn off the LCD.
Doing a little math based off my electrical bill, my laptop and LCD (together) cost me $112.57/yr USD. At roughly $240/yr for the Mac Mini alone ... I'd say that my Dell laptop wins out.
"The mini uses only 15W while idling in our tests, and a low 34W while running the CineBench benchmark test. This is the second lowest active score, after the 18W observed on the Asus Eee Box nettop."
Moral of the story: Don't judge power consumption by power supply capacity.
When running off battery power, the battery widget in KDE gives an estimate of current power consumption. With the screen at full brightness, my 17" notebook usually stays around 27W doing non-intensive tasks like surfing the web.
You could just as easily connect a 42" screen to the laptop, as I sometimes do using my laptop's HDMI out. It will still end up using less power than the Mac Mini.
