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Apple sets up Macs to sleep and save energy by default. Setting aside energy use, is it bad for me to run Mac mini for an extended period of 7 days by preventing sleep and without turning it off?

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No, that's not bad in any conventional manner.

I run Mac Minis for months and years without powering them off (except the occasional reset for security updates).

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    And for what it's worth: I've been using my Mac mini daily since 2009, multiple times a day, but not for long. I turn it on and off each time, and it's still working fine. N=2 isn't enough for a proper study, but both options seem to work. Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 18:43
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    Ofcourse - I hope no-one thought they wouldn't. You cannot make any meaningful difference for the lifetime of your hardware if you leave a Mac Mini powered on for a week versus turning it on/off several times a day during that week. Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 20:23
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We've been using about 15 Mac Minis as a production servers for 8-10 years.

They regularly kept 60-70% CPU for a good part of the workday and also ran maintenance/backup tasks at night.

None of them failed.

We did not use Mac OS, so I cannot vouch about it. But the hardware was OK.

edit:

p.s. now that I remember, the original disks quickly (2-3 years) filled up and were replaced with some third-party, reasonable-sized ones. None of the original disks (neither SSD, nor HDD) failed, one of the third-party disks did, but RAID1 does wonders. This goes to say that neither the thermal design, nor the power supply was borderline or dependent on the particular disk models.

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  • This is great to know. Thanks, @fraxinus. Commented Aug 17, 2022 at 7:06
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Probably the opposite; the boot processes usually involves a lot of CPU and memory and disk activity, moreso than a system idling or in sleep mode, so I would expect a system that is frequently powercycled to wear out sooner than one that is left running, on average. The system frequently powercycled would probably also consume more electricity, unless the boot process is somehow made quick and efficient, but it's hard to see how that would use less energy than idling or sleeping.

An electricity usage monitor on the power line to the computer would be one way to test this hypothesis, on the assumption that higher electricity use means more wear and tear (and a higher power bill).

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    I don't know if it's still a concern, but we used to leave equipment permanently on to avoid potential problems from expansion when the circuits heat up from room temperature to operating temperature. (E.g. 20°C to 50°C is about a 10% increase in absolute temperature). Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 15:44
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    @RayButterworth This is exactly what I do with my PC. Those rare times I need to turn it off, THAT is when I'm nervous it won't come back on ... Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 20:45
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    @RayButterworth drive stiction was a problem back in the day, when too-hot drives cooled down after being left on... don't think SSDs have that problem. Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 4:14
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    I think you are overestimating a few effects here. If we assume that booting takes a minute and the Mac Mini consumes 40W during boot and 7W during idle that’s the electricity consumption of 6 minutes of idling. So even after just 6 minutes of idling it would make sense (from a power consumption point of view) to turn it off. The temperature fluctuations during boot are also not really worse than during normal usage. In any case, most electronics are perfectly fine with power cycling and 24/7 usage (as long as you don’t write to an SSD too much). Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 7:26
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    @Michael exactly. The proposed hypothesis is quite simply wrong, and its easy to check. Simply compare time to boot (let's say 1 minute) to idle time (let's say 8 hours at night), which is a factor of 500, and multiply that by idle power (7W). Is your Mac Mini really using 3500W or more during boot? It would be too hot to touch. Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 18:53
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It depends on what you use it for.

I am using a 2014 Mac Mini as my backup server. The machine draws 2.0 watts of power while idling (with SSD, WiFi on, Bluetooth and Ethernet off).

2.0 watts of power during idle

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  • If the measurement is reliable, this is really impressive. Commented Aug 20, 2022 at 21:28
  • It is reliable. The official documentation mentions 5.5 W in idle, but most probably assumes that there are at least the essential peripherals like monitor, ethernet, keyboard and mouse connected. Commented Aug 21, 2022 at 21:37
  • Cool. I'll have to check it myself. Did you change anything compared to a base Mac mini? Is it running MacOS? Commented Aug 22, 2022 at 2:10
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    It is running macOS. Not the latest version, though. I did not not test whether that makes any difference, tough. Also I replaced the stock drive with a 4TB SSD from Samsung. I also did not check whether that made any difference. Commented Aug 23, 2022 at 8:06

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