- 🤔 Apple has shared why the power button on the Mac Mini M4 is hidden
- 🤏 It’s mainly because of the Mac Mini’s compact size
- 🤷♂️ But also because users apparently never use the power button on a Mac
- 👉 Apple also says the button can be accessed easily, even though it’s underneath
The power button is one of the biggest non stories this year.
Who doesn’t just put their computers to sleep 99% of the time?
My work computer yes, but I always shutdown my home computer when I am done with it.
With NVMe SSDs, computers boot fast enough that sleep mode doesn’t matter.
With current hardware the power draw at sleep is negligible, so power off doesn’t matter.
You can spin this argument both ways. And sleep is more convenient, so that’s what most people choose.
I don’t care if it draws 0.000001 watts when sleeping.
I power off all my devices when not in use.
Electronics components do not like to have power states change frequently. Turning devices on and off frequently will decrease lifespan of device. Sure, you are saving money on your electricity bill, but at some point, the savings and environmental impacts are outweighed by the cost of the device/parts and the impact during manufacturing.
Also, don’t forget phantom draws from the power supplier is a real thing, which will most likely exceed your 5 zeros threshold. So that microwave oven, and laundry dryer? Don’t forget to unplug those after each use.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the amount of power drawn overnight when a processor is in sleep mode ends up being less than the power it takes to boot the device.
Yeah. We came from a time of incandescent light bulbs taking 60W per bulb with fixtures needing 2-3 bulbs. Turning those off regularly mattered. The obsession people have with turning their modern electronics off in the name of power savings is silly if not outright insane.
My gaming pc is on a custom water loop, cpu and gpu. I don’t like leaving it on/asleep, when I’m done with it for the night. If it starts leaking while I’m there on the computer I’ll see or smell it. If it starts leaking while I’m asleep or at work, expensive components are fried.
I’ve been running a custom loop for 10 years at this point and have never once had a leak, bc I flow the loop without power to any components, and with paper towels under each fitting, for like 24 hours each time I change anything out. I’m still always paranoid that shit will just decide to leak on me one day though lol. Also I was having weird issues with wake from sleep and my kvm, to the point where I was having to reboot my pc when I’d sit down at it after work anyway, so why not just shut off and not deal with that frustration after work?
Either way it has nothing to do with power savings.
That may be the case. But it isn’t for 95% of people.
I don’t care about the power draw, I care about peace of mind.
I don’t want my computer running in the background constantly.
I get the convenience factor at work, but at home?
Nah, it is far nicer to have a fresh and ready computer rather than wake up to all your old crap that you have forgotten about.
I can’t remember where I watched it - but I saw some video a while ago now where (I think) the engineer was explaining that shutdown & power on does less of a cleanout than restart on Windows. Something to do with shutdown going through steps more similar to a sleep/suspend than restart. Made little sense to me but would be interesting to see if post restart or post power-on the computer was “fresher”
You are probably talking about fast startup, a stupid feature that I disable as soon as I can after installing Windows.
Fast startup is like a deep sleep state and causes way more issues than it would ever solve.
It is a feature that is looking for one specific problem to solve at the expense of long term stabillity and as an IT guy I hate it.
My new laptop doesn’t support S3 sleep, it can drain the battery from 100% to 0% in less than 16 hours while supposedly “sleeping”.
Sure. But it is not a Mac. A MacBook can be put to sleep with 100% and one week later wake up with 90% left.
Yeah my friend left his MacBook Pro at airport security and when he was reunited 3 weeks later it still had like 50% charge with him tracking it using Find My the whole time
Not for you, but it’s an issue if you’re using Mac Minis as unattended service devices that are hard mounted and will occasionally need to be reset by hand (think kiosks and AV systems in conference room).
Then, you open it up and lead two wires to the rack front panel where your new accessible power button is mounted
Wouldn’t you just pull the power cord at that point? If the device has become completely unmanageable such that it needs a power reset i’d be surprised if there’s much more harm that way than holding down the power button until it turns off.