Apple’s M1 Mac Mini has been completely changing the personal computing game
since it was released a couple of months back. At just $699, it offers the absolute best bang
for the buck that you can get if you want a Mac machine, or maybe even a DIY Windows PC.
Now that might sound a bit unrealistic, but I’ll explain my reasoning in just a minute.
In this long term review, I want to discuss the major benefits as well as the issues
with the M1 Mac Mini, because it’s definitely not perfect,
and at the end, I’m gonna discuss who SHOULDN’T buy the M1 Mac Mini and why.
But First, let me give you a quick rundown on
this machine and why I think there is so much value in it.
The design is very sleek and compact compared to most computers out there,
with a premium aluminum finish. Around back, you get some ports including two Thunderbolt ports,
two USB A, HDMI 2.0, ethernet, and of course, a headphone jack.
The entire system is cooled by just one fan, but because of the extremely efficient Apple M1 chip,
it never runs loud enough to hear it, even while running performance tasks.
The reason for that is because this chip is the first of its kind.
While most traditional computer chips are built on the x86 architecture, this one
is built on Apple’s ARM-based architecture that they’ve been working on for years now.
It’s basically a suped up iPhone or iPad chip but with added components that help
make it a fully-capable computer, like the I/O chip, the Thunderbolt controllers and more.
And because it shares the same core architecture as an iPhone,
it can actually run your favorite iPhone apps, which wasn’t possible before.
Mac apps run great as well, even ones that haven’t been updated for these new chips, and in our
experience, this M1 Mac Mini feels more snappy than our $15,000 Mac Pro for day to day work.
For example, some apps like Audacity and Photoshop
open around twice as fast on the mini, which was completely unexpected.
And if you’re wondering how that’s possible, it’s because Apple’s M1 chip
has an incredibly high single-core score, in fact, the highest out of any Mac ever.
But it’s not just single-core, the multi-core performance is also
incredibly high, outperforming the absolute best chip in the previous Intel Mac Mini.
So as you can tell, the value is definitely there, but the even more
impressive part is the performance of Apple’s built-in 8-core graphics chip.
It absolutely destroys the previous best graphics performance in the Intel mac Mini,
being over 4x as fast, and that’s because the Mac Mini is way too small and compact
to be able to fit a dedicated graphics card or chip,
so Mac Mini’s have always suffered in terms of graphics performance.
But now, that problem is solved thanks to Apple’s new M1 chip,
and the performance we’re getting is very similar to the base 5300M graphics in the 16” MacBook Pro,
which is really impressive for integrated graphics.
So with the combination of a premium and compact design, the very reliable macOS software,
and very impressive performance, you’re truly getting a lot of value for $700.
And because of that, I want to focus a lot of this review
comparing the value aspect to other machines in its price range.
Let’s just say you have a parent or relative who needs a basic computer to browse the web,
do some business or school-related work, or anything like that.
I strongly believe that this M1 Mac Mini is the absolute best choice.
A similarly priced Intel NUC is gonna have much lower performance,
just like Intel Mac Mini. A prebuilt PC like this one for a similar price is
first of all very large, the fans are gonna run loud, and it’s gonna run much slower.
So compared to those pre built machines,
the m1 Mac Mini is a far better deal, so I took this to the next level.
A few months back, we made a video where we built a custom gaming PC
with the goal of being the best budget gaming PC.
Right now, the components for the build come out to over $700 in total, more than the M1 Mac Mini.
But keep in mind that we had to spend a few hours building it, troubleshooting and setting it up.
The Ryzen 3100 CPU is known as one of the best bang for the buck processors,
but the M1 chip is still around 37% faster in terms of the Cinebench R23 stress test.
The RX 560 graphics card is actually weaker than the M1’s graphics
in terms of GFXBench, so the Mac Mini is still more powerful in every way.
And those are actually some of the best budget components we could find
right now. We even had to cheap out on basically everything else like the case,
the motherboard, the power supply and the SSD to get the price anywhere near the M1 Mac Mini.
And that’s without paying for a Windows 10 license, while the Mac obviously gets it included.
So as you can see, basically every Windows system you can get right now
is a much worse value than the M1 Mac Mini.
But besides that, this Mac is a whole lot more reliable because Apple controls both the software
and the hardware so it works extremely well together and gives you incredible reliability.
With windows machines, you usually have a bunch of different third-party components
working together, and those parts are much more likely to go bad
and have software issues with different drivers and things like that.
But on the other hand, the mac mini is actually very similar to a PC,
since you can pick and choose the mouse, keyboard and display that you use with it.
And having the freedom to choose whatever component you want
can really help bring the price down if you’re on a budget.
So based on everything I discussed, the M1 Mac Mini ultimately gives you
excellent performance and reliability for the price,
making it in my opinion, the new standard for a personal desktop computer.
However, while it is great, it’s definitely not perfect,
so let’s get into some of the issues that we’ve experienced with it.
The biggest issue is a lack of ports, with the M1 Mac Mini only offering two Thunderbolt ports
instead of the previous maximum of four.
So this means that if you’re using a display that uses Thunderbolt, like we do here in the office,
you only have one Thunderbolt port left. And because the M1 Mac Mini doesn’t have the option of
a 10gigabit ethernet port, we had to use the other Thunderbolt port for our RAID storage server.
So just like that, we have no USB-C ports left over.
Now for most people, this isn’t a big deal at all because most people on a budget will be
using an HDMI display, leaving two Thunderbolt ports left over,
and most people don’t use storage servers. Those ports are mostly just for accessories,
so it’s totally fine since you also have two extra USB-A ports as well.
But for that one person who really needs those extra ports,
we found the perfect solution for this problem.
OWC’s new Thunderbolt Hub literally turns one Thunderbolt port into 3,
and then adds an extra USB-A port for $150, so while that isn’t cheap,
it’s the only way to get extra full-speed Thunderbolt ports.
This can also help fix the problem of limited displays,
with the M1 chip only being able to support 2 displays total.
If you’re someone who really needs more than 2 displays,
there are many people out there who have been connecting up to 6 displays to M1 Macs using
hardware adapters and special software with really good results, so that’s great to hear.
One of the issues we’ve experienced is bluetooth connection problems,
but we really only noticed it with third-party accessories.
We used our M1 Mac Mini with Apple’s magic mouse and had basically no issues.
But now, Apple has just released an update that improves bluetooth reliability,
and users are reporting that the issues seem to
finally have been fixed, with one user going two days without a disconnect.
Another one of the issues that people found was with video editing.
People reported that the encoding quality was worse on M1 Macs compared to previous Intel Macs,
but we ended up doing some in-depth testing and found that the M1’s encode better than
Apple’s Mac Pro, which basically shows that it’s just fine, so there are no issues there.
Another issue we had was with certain plugins
not being supported on Apple Silicon Macs, like mCallouts which we use in a lot of our videos.
As of right now, most plugins have been updated to support Apple Silicon, but there are still
some plugins that are outdated, but thankfully, we found a solution on the Mcallouts FAQ section.
You can run a script for either Final Cut Pro or Motion, which will force it to run using Rosetta,
thus allowing those plugins to run again, and the performance under Rosetta is still very fast.
So those were the main issues that we’ve been experiencing,
and a lot of them have either been fixed or have easy solutions to them,
and most of them don’t even matter to the average consumer who just needs a reliable computer.
And now if you combine the performance, the efficiency, and the reliability,
you’re truly getting a ton of value for the cash, especially compared to other desktop
Windows PCs you can get right now, and because of all of that, I’ve gotta say that the M1 Mac Mini
is by far, the best computer to buy for someone looking for a budget PC right now.
But with all of that said, there are actually some people
who shouldn’t buy this M1 Mac Mini, so let’s get into that.
If this M1 seems a bit limiting, in terms of the performance or anything else,
we are expecting Apple to release a more powerful M1X Mac Mini in the future,
potentially even later this year, so keep that in mind.
On top of that, we’re already expecting a new iMac
coming out within the next few months, so if you don’t already have a keyboard,
mouse and a display on hand, the iMac will be a better value if you want a high-quality display.
But if the performance of the M1 is enough for you, then I would totally
just buy the M1 Mac Mini right now and enjoy a reliable computer for the next 5+ years.
So there you guys go, hopefully you enjoyed this review, and if you did,
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like this one. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next video!