The raspberry pi is great. Absolutely love them. Been running them as dev boards (robotics) and servers (at home) for 10+ years. Last time I truly, genuinely, felt excited about Christmas was when my SO gave one to me back in 2014 or so.

But I wouldn't compare the experience to a Mac Mini, and I wouldn't call a raspberry pi a "consumer computer". It solidly falls into the amateur dev board category. Heck, it doesn't even have a power button.

The claim was about efficiency, not just power draw.

In your comparison you talk about software compatibility, but the Mac can run Linux and many open source tools & apps found on it. So the Pi is only ahead if you arbitrarily limit the comparison to a specific distro that's not Asahi or an application like sxiv, and in addition are the kind of user who wants that software and doesn't care about Mac exclusive programs. Which is valid, but has nothing to do with a metric like power efficiency.

The mini does 6.74 Gflops/W. At the default clock rate of 1200 MHz the Pi 3 can achieve 6.2 Gflops. However, without a heatsink the CPU will instantly throttle to half speed and average about 3.1 Gflops. So the mini is 3 to 6 times as efficient.

> A Mac Mini uses multiple times that, and can barely run any software I care about (i.e. linux).

You’re both right, and wrong.

The Mac uses 3-4W most the time. The reason mine is using more is that it has an Ubuntu VM running Pihole (so it is running Linux). This doubles/triples the power usage.

If I wasn’t such a chicken, I’d run it on the host in docker, but I’ve learned the pain of having Pihole on the same host as other services. Dead dns is not not good.

I really wish I could run Ubuntu on the metal. Something as simple as having docker containers run on boot is unreliable, and the god awful hack I have made to get it to work is so disgusting it’s shameful.