A few days ago, I replaced my (3y old) MacBook Pro + (8y old) Cinema Display with a brand new 27″ iMac. Here’s the result:
That’s the total energy consumption of my work desk – i.e. computer, lights, and a some USB-powered stuff. The scale is in Watt-per-5-minutes, so if you multiply all figures by 12 you’ll get the normal Watt ratings.
There are many different operating modes here – night-time near off, full sleep, display sleep, display on, a few computing peaks, and in the evening also the lights on.
On Oct 30 both machines were active, while all the data from the old setup was being migrated to the new one.
The interesting parts are the low periods at night which more or less dropped to zero, even though the iMac is simply sleeping (with BlueTooth and USB still on), not turned off.
It’s also nice to see that even with this new dual-core 3.3 GHz monster, energy consumption is noticeably lower most of the time – not just in idle mode!
These readings were obtained with the ES-1 sensor described a while back + a central JeeNode + JeeMon.