I’ve had the new Mini for a few months and can’t recall having to use the power button.

How often are you using the power button on your Mini? What is your use case?

It's a shared computer in a hospital used for research data management. Basically, every time I walk up to it to use it, it's turned off.

Maybe Apple should remove power off from the UI menus if they're claiming it uses less energy to leave it on.

(I'm dubious of that claim people are repeating here, but what the hell do I know I'm just a physicist. Reality distortion isn't my thing.)

If you have a laptop, do you turn it off or just close the lid?

The mini is probably less power hungry than the macbooks (less components). I have some wifi 5/ac routers that consume more power at idle (nothing connected to them) than apple laptops.

Get a label maker and print "LEAVE ON" on the monitor.

> How often are you using the power button on your Mini? What is your use case?

Every single day, not by choice but because it's constantly waking up in sleep mode to do maintenance task then overheating and shutting down again. Something about macOS and Bluetooth devices not playing nice.

How do you turn it on?

If you never turn off your computer, it makes sense that you never use the power button. But some people do turn their computers off, and for us, it's really useful to be able to turn them on again.

I'm still on a wired USB full sized keyboard from at least a decade ago, but didn't the newer keyboards see the return of the power button? Did I dream that?

I did some quick googling before answering, and from what I could find, people are generally saying that you can't power on the Mac Mini in other ways than by pushing its power button.

Even if you can power it on using a wired keyboard though, I'm certain that you can imagine people who prefer wireless keyboards but also turn their computer off.

I could have worded that more clearly. I wasn't disputing power button on the bottom is odd as much as thinking that Apple brought the keyboard power button back. Maybe it was the TouchID on the keyboard, but on their laptops that is also the power button, so possibly just an assumption on my part.

Oh, no I think you were clear enough, it's probably me that wasn't clear. I tried to find evidence that people were able to power on their Mac Mini in ways other than via the power button on the machine, such as a button on a keyboard. I couldn't find that, everyone just said that the physical power button on the machine is the only way.

Why? Sleep/suspend on macs is incredibly good, and power usage rounds to zero.

Because I like to turn off my desktop at night. I like to come back to a fresh start. I sometimes reboot just to get a clean slate.

> Because I like to turn off my desktop at night

Put simply, more people like the aesthetic of no visible power button than like the aesthetic of daily rebooting their computer.

If I were you, and I really couldn’t let go of that, I’d put the Mac in sleep and have it scripted to restart at e.g. 6AM each day. You get the best of both worlds. Feel like you have a “fresh” Mac every morning. Let it do its updates and whatnot behind the scenes.

The power button was already invisible when it was on the back.

An idle Mac doesn't use much power. Why are you turning it off?

I like my computer to be secure when I'm not using it. Powered down is secure.

I like to turn my desktop off at night. I don't need a better reason than that.

It's a lab computer. You can tell people not to shut it off, but it's still always turned off when I try to use it. Could be being shut down via ITs management tools/policies for all I know.