- In this video, I'm going to be taking a look
at the absolutely incredible feat of engineering,
which is the Apple M1 Mac Mini which Apple released in 2020.
So if you are asking yourself things like,
is the M1 Mac Mini better than the old Mac Mini,
or should I get the M1 MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Pro,
or the M1 Mac Mini, or perhaps pushing the boat out
and asking a ridiculous question such as,
would this 1,500 pounds Mac Mini be better
than my 4,000 pounds, 16 inch, i9 MacBook Pro,
then this one is just for you as we're going to answer
all of those exact questions and more.
If this is your first time here,
hi, my name is Pete Matheson,
I am an owner of a few different businesses
and this YouTube channel is my bit of fun on the side.
And on this channel, you can find videos around tech,
business, financing, all of that good stuff in between,
so if any of that sounds great, then consider subscribing
and I'll massively appreciate it.
Like my last video which we linked up here
and down below that like button,
we're talking benchmarks and comparisons
with both my workhorse of a laptop, the 16 inch MacBook Pro
which has an i9 processor, 32 gig of memory,
two terabytes SSD and everything else
that comes with a 16-inch Macro-Pro.
And also comparing it against the brand new
M1 Mac Book Air, as well as super, super review,
the older Intel i5 Mac Mini,
because there are now just a tonne of options
in Apple's new lineup
and then you may be wondering what the catch is,
because the new M1 range of products are generally cheaper
than some of their Intel and Apple equivalents.
So in this video, I'm gonna run through the benchmarks,
covering all the areas I can and help you decide
which is best for you,
and after I've talked about all those benchmarks,
make sure to stay until the end
as I've been using this Mac Mini now
for a couple of weeks as my main workhorse,
so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that
and my real world use case.
Whilst you are watching, let me know two things,
which Apple machine do you want to buy right now,
and then, secondly,
which do you think will win the benchmarks,
this M1 Mac Mini, which is one of the cheaper machines
that Apple makes, or the top spec, over full grand,
16-inch, i9, thirsty giga memory
and two terabyte SSD machine right here,
let's see if you're right when we reach the end,
so let's firstly crack through the benchmarks
and we have Cinebench R23 up first,
which is a tool that just maxes out the CPU.
Now the base spec M1 MacBook Air scored 6479,
and then the 16 inch MacBook Pro scored 7302,
while the M1 Mac Mini scored the top score of 7711,
and then the Intel i5 Mac Mini scored 4614, ouch!
Now I mentioned this in my last video,
but what you can't hear is the fan noise.
When running Cinebench, this Mac Book Pro kicks the fans
right up to their max, 4,900 RPM,
CPU temperatures at 86 degrees, well, the Air has no noises,
there are no fans,
and this new Mac mini doesn't disappoint either,
so it does have an internal fan, but I'll be honest,
it was still absolutely silent when running this benchmark.
And even the i5 Mac Mini had its fan on,
but it was still quieter than the 16 inch MacBook Pro.
And then one ginormous thing to talk about here,
once again, the power consumption.
In previous tests, the 16 inch MacBook Pro
hits over 50 Watts, the M1 Air reached just 7.4 Watts,
which in itself is just a whopping 148% difference,
well, the M1 Mac Mini hit 12 Watts,
and then the Intel i5 Mac Mini hit a huge 55 Watts,
so long story short,
if you wanna save money on your electricity,
then M1 is the clear winner here, by far,
and also just an FYI, a general day-to-day use
and even with all of like my normal apps open,
the M1 Mac Mini is only really using
around one to two Watts, which is just insane.
Obviously use GFX metre to test out the gaming performance
because we all know how many people
buy a Mac to play games, low.
And the results here are very interesting.
With the 16-inch MacBook Pro,
which has a dedicated Radeon 5,300 GPU,
it gets 88 FPS on one of the specific tests that we picked
compared to 70 FPS of the M1 MacBook Air.
Well, the M1 Mac Mini reached 80 FPS,
and then the Intel i5 Mac Mini reached a,
wait for it, a whopping 12 FPS, woo-hoo!
So here, of course, the M1 Mac
isn't quite up to the graphical standards
of the dedicated Radeon 5300 M
of the 16 inch MacBook Pro, the standard is not far off,
and for something that consumes around 80% less power,
quite something.
Okay, let me move over to Geek Bench
where the 16-inch MacBook Pro hit 1113 for single core
and 6462 for multi-core versus 1726 and 7568 for the Air,
and which is yes, a significant difference
of 43% on single core and 15% on multi-core.
All right, over on the M1 Mac Mini,
we get 1736 and 7376, which is pretty on par
with the M1 from the MacBook Air,
and then just follows on the Intel i5 Mac Mini,
we get 945 and 4273, which I guess we should expect,
I mean, it's two years old and it's an i5.
For the GPU tests in GeekBench, we saw a 47%,
that's the result from the 16 inch MacBook Pro over the Air.
We saw 19285 on the Mac Mini,
and then 4763 on the i5 Mac Mini,
1/4 of what the M1 Mac Mini can do, pretty awesome.
Now graphics tests are nice and everything
but what about real world web browsing?
Well, using the Speedometer website, we can test
for how snappy general web browsing performance is,
the 16 inch MacBook Pro scored 128,
the M1 Air scored a 226.
The M1 Mini was 215, but I will say
that that test was run with everything,
and I mean, everything open on my Mac,
which is damn impressive, and then the i5 Mac Mini was 129.
Hang on, wait, what?
The 2018 i5 Mac Mini got a score,
one more than 2019 i9 16 inch MacBook Pro, wow!
For video editing and exporting,
first up, I used the Bruce X Benchmark,
which basically brings in a short
but fairly complex 5K sequence,
and then tests the export speeds,
the 16 inch Macro-Pro came in at 16 seconds,
the M1 Air at 21 seconds, the M1 Mac Mini at 13 seconds,
faster than everybody else so far,
and then the i5 Mac Mini at over one minute.
And here I just stopped testing the i5 Mac Mini
is the test just starting taking too long
and just don't buy an old Mac Mini,
unless you get a really good discount,
but just even then, I wouldn't really buy one.
I then try to export to one of my usual YouTube videos
with various effects and transitions and calibrators
such much like the one you're watching right now,
the 16 inch Mac Pro was six minutes and 30 seconds,
the M1 Air was nine minutes and 30,
the M1 Mini was six minutes and 22 seconds,
which let's just stop for a minute,
because it was six minutes and 22 seconds
for a machine that cost 1/3
of what the top of the line 16 inch MacBook Pro costs,
but what I will add to this is that I exported this
on the M1 Mini whilst I had all of these programmes open,
Notion, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Fantastical,
Safari with 23 tabs open,
Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, Calculator, Terminal,
One Night, Messages, Zoom, To Do List, Deliveries,
Discord, Indigo, SecuritySpy,
Plex, 7lab SMB, Sonar, Radar,
Adobe CS Cloud, 1Password, Stream Deck,
And that was everything, so six minutes and 22 seconds
beats the 16 inch MacBook Pro, but to do that
whilst also having over 25 other applications open,
all consuming memory, power, and processor and everything,
that's just incredible, and well there you just have it,
across all of the benchmarks,
and before we get into my real world use of these machines,
I want to know which one interests you the most now,
is it the M1 MacBook Air,
the MacBook Pro, which I'm yet to test,
but should be getting soon, or the one Mac Mini,
or maybe one of the rumours so far unannounced products,
which may actually be on the way this year.
Okay, so to summarise my thoughts,
don't buy a 16 inch MacBook Pro right now,
unless you really need that dedicated graphics
or the 16 inch screen, because between the pullback tree,
the fan noise and the high price,
there just really isn't that many reasons
to buy one right now, the M1 Mac Mini is a fantastic option
to go with as gateway to the Apple ecosystem
or as a dedicated, super powerful machine,
which I'll talk about in just a moment,
and the is the same really, is such a good option
for those wanting, you know,
portable, affordable Apple laptop,
it is a great recommendation and the Intel i5 Mac.
Again, I don't really see any real reason to buy one,
unless you can pick up one second hand,
because just the power consumption
and performance just isn't there,
where you can compare against any of the M1 Mac lineup.
So now you've got a good idea on paper
about how these perform,
well, what about in the real world,
because we all know how great benchmarks
and everything can sound,
but that real-world experience can mean so much more.
Well, what I've done here is essentially
taken my 16 inch MacBook Pro,
which I do absolutely everything on,
I use it for six hours per day, editing videos,
web browsing, email, listening to music,
watching 4K videos, video calls,
just all of the things that you can do with a Mac,
but I've also taken my Intel i5 Mac, which I have here,
which I had as a dedicated separate machine
that ran all my home automation systems,
controls all my lights and heating and staircase and power,
and the lawn mower, just everything in this house,
it also holds my Plex library
of TV and movies, my CCTV system ,
as well as just some other kind of admin tasks,
and I kind of set myself a challenge
of can I take both of these machines and just run with one,
and the answer to that question is, well, yes
and actually really, really well.
I'm genuinely surprised this Mac Mini,
which I have behind me, because I'm actually using it
is now the only machine that I use,
and for all of the above
I've yet to see it skip a beat or slow down
or anything really.
The only issues I have seen
which are worth addressing of course,
is first that when you connect anything into the USB A ports
on the back of the Mac Mini,
it completely screws up the onboard Bluetooth
to the point where my mouse and keyboard
will just skip around,
and basically just stops you using anything on the Mac
until you disconnect USB A devices.
Now, I believe there is a software fix
coming from Apple soon,
though, honestly, I wouldn't really hold my breath
because I know it's been outstanding for a long time
and it didn't actually just affect these M1 Macs,
it was also affecting the, you know,
the older generation Intel Mac Minis.
But thankfully I've been able to work around that for me
by connecting my Caldigit TS3, it'll be down below.
The dock, just use all of the USB As on there as set,
link in the description for one of those,
and also just following on from a video I made around this,
the Samsung G9 screen,
I am guessing the full resolution 120 Hertz
through the Caldigit dock,
something I couldn't get for whatever reason
from my six inch MacBook Pro,
the only other negatives I have around the M1 Mac Mini
and actually it applies to the whole one Mac range
is there software support.
I'm still waiting on some specific video editing plugins
to work on the M1 processor,
but the one thing that really does grind my gears
is Google File Stream, which at the time of this video
does not work on any of the M1 Macs,
it will instal but you just can't sign in
and actually use it.
Now you can use Google Drive, which I don't want to
because File Stream is actually what I need,
and Google have said that they have a fixed version coming,
supposedly in April, 2021,
but I've also seen other suggestions,
that it could be more towards like the end of 2021,
which is just incredible if that's true.
But yeah, other than those issues,
it's been pretty smooth sailing
and Microsoft 365 apps will work just fine,
the Adobe apps run okay, yes perhaps they're a little slow,
but they are already releasing Beta M1 compatible versions
which do perform well,
and most software is now getting an M1 release
to fully support the Apple Silicon processes,
but as always, I would recommend you check
with any specific software before purchasing.
Now I know that obviously I don't get the possibility
of the 16 inch MacBook Pro, but what I have done here
is go and buy a higher spec and one Mac book Air
which should be here in a few days time hopefully
so that I can run those same benchmarks on all those two,
if you want me to, so just comment below
if that's something you're into,
but even with buying a technically top spec M1 Mac Mini
and technically top spec and one MacBook Air,
this combo still comes in way, way underneath
the cost of just the 16 inch MacBook Pro by itself,
so for me, it's just a no brainer.
I hope you enjoyed this video,
if you did, then why not take a look at this video
where I check out the new iPad Air versus your iPad Pro
or for something different,
my review of these stupidly expensive
Apple AirPods Max headphones.
Please do subscribe to this channel for more videos,
give the video a thumbs up if you did, or if you didn't,
let me know how it can make your life feel better
by leaving a comment down below.
Thanks for watching,
and I'll see you in the next video, bye-bye.