It's official, my Mac Pro is retired, and only one year after I got it, and it's now
listed for sale. Replacing it is a tiny box that uses less power at full load than my
previous aluminum beast when it's sitting there doing nothing!
I have to be honest and let you know that no, the M1 mac mini doesn’t smoke the mac
pro in every possible way like it does with the previous Mac Mini that costs way more,
or with a lot of iMacs, but it does excel in many ways, and with a price tag of only
$899 for my 16GB model it's unbelievably good for the price.
In this video I’ll tell you everything. Both the real world issues that I faced with
the Mac Mini, which ones I solved and others that I haven’t, the ways the Mac Pro smokes
the M1 Mini in my workflow, the many benefits of making this switch, and a very helpful
tip for those of you who are using m1 Macs.
First, if you enjoy our content and haven’t subscribed yet, which about 80% of you haven’t,
hit that subscribe button and help us reach our goal of 600K subs before our official
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Let's start with the easy stuff and then get into what really pushes the machines, but
first let me be honest and get it right out there. The biggest reason to sell this beautiful
machine is the money. Once it sells I’ll have a bunch of cash in my account to buy
more tech or put into the house that we’re building.
If it was a straight trade for the Mac Mini there's no way I would do it, even though
the mini does speed up my workflow in multiple ways, the ability to easily expand the ram
and ssd, upgrade the graphics card and add in additional PCI cards is great and what
really sets the Mac Pro apart from most Macs.
But that doesn’t mean it's not worth getting rid of it right now, which I have a few more
good reasons for that I’ll talk about in just a bit.
Let me tell you the biggest difference I personally noticed once I swapped to the mini in day
to day use, and that's how snappy it is.
You would think the $15K Mac Pro would be quick at simple tasks like opening folders,
accessing my server, opening apps, and even surfing the web is noticeably snappier on
the m1 mini.
For example, Photoshop takes about 6 seconds to fully open on the Pro, and only 3 on the
mini. Lightroom classic takes just 4 instead of 8 seconds.
Not only that, but the editing experience is also smoother which is nuts.
The same thing goes for other applications I use all the time, for example opening a
large wav file in Audacity takes just 5.5 seconds compared to 10 on the Mac Pro, and
to denoise that file it's just 29 seconds compared to 46 seconds.
So how is this possible when these programs are designed and optimized for the X86 processor
in the Mac Pro. Well in this case, its sheer single core power and the unified RAM which
I’ll talk about in just a bit.
If we compare the single core performance, Apples M1 is insane, performing 56% Faster
in a wide variety of tasks tested by Geekbench 5.
Now It's hard to quantify web browsing differences, and it seems silly to do that, but running
a benchmark we see Apples Silicon is 72% faster when you combine its raw performance with
software that is optimized for it.
An absolutely crazy example we’ve shown in the past is Xcode, where our real-world
Xcode benchmark project gets compiled faster on the M1 Mini than the 12 core Mac Pro beast,
and keep in mind this isn’t a single core efficiency task, this is maxing out all of
the cores.
This is where the 12 Xeon cores pulling 193 watts should have the advantage But nope,
the 15 Watt $899 m1 takes the win despite the Mac Pro being 63% faster in mixed multi-core
tasks and a whopping 83% faster in 100% CPU rendering tasks like 3D rendering.
But of course I’m not a coder or a 3D graphics designer, I’m a content creator focused
on video, so surely the Mac Pro that is tailored for this with its crazy powerful graphics
card should smoke the consumer focused mini right?
Well yes, kinda, sometimes, let me explain..
When I first got this Mac Pro, which was just a year ago, it smoked everything we compared
it to as it should, and it was actually a better bang for the buck than a higher end
iMac Pro even if you include a display, but tech moves fast and in this case way faster
than usual.
Not only did software improve its efficiency and reliance on hardware decoders, but we
got newer faster graphics card options in other Macs that really sped things up, and
at the same time all of the recent cameras being released are using new codecs that are
tough for older computers but easy for these new ones.
And then less Apple hit us with these new M1 macs that are both insanely powerful for
the price and masters of efficiency.
Once I tested out the 16GB mini I knew right away that this is my next video editing computer
for two reasons, but there was one issue that stopped for about a month and a half but now
its fixed and the Mac Pro can be let go of.
The first and biggest reason is how insanely well this thing cuts through modern footage
from cameras like our A7S3 and EOS R5.
This is the same format of footage that people really struggle with from GoPro’s and DJI
drones, but these cameras take it to the next level being able to shoot 4K at 120 frames
per second with 10-bit 422 recording, and this absolutely destroys even modern computers
including my $15,000 Mac Pro.
As you can see, we get a huge stuttery uneditable mess with Cannons footage even in Final Cut
Pro, and just like most people with MacBooks and iMacs I had to transcode this footage
before editing it.
Since I have 12 cores and a beastly graphics card I could do this much faster than most,
and two hours of footage took two hours to transcode before I could start editing, but
when I tested the same task on the new M1 Mini took just 52 minutes, more than twice
as fast on a machine that costs less than 1/15 of the price.
But the kicker is that with it, you don’t have to transcode since even the toughest
10-bit H.265 4:2:2 footage cuts like a hot knife through butter.
Now for the most part, we’re not working with Sony Cameras that let you shoot a variety
of codecs so we’ve been able to use other lower quality ones to edit smoothly, but the
few times that I accidentally selected the highest quality like for our iPhone 12 review,
we were left struggling and lost so much time due to this.
With the new M1 Mini I can even play back 4K that is encoded at realtime 120 frames
per second with audio embedded at the best possible video quality with no issues whatsoever
which my mac pro can’t do.
Now along with that, we use effects and animations like titles, color grading, luts, and more,
so how does the mini’s much weaker graphics handle these? Well, for the amount that we
use 99% of the time, it's just as good as the Mac Pro.
And to prove that the Graphics card isn’t a limitation, I exported the same exact project
with all the effects we usually use and with the raw footage by itself which made a massive
difference with the previous Mac Mini, and the time was exactly the same meaning the
graphics chip wasn’t limiting it.
Now the Mac Pro is still a little bit faster, but barely and this is a real world project
that uses H.264 footage.
When we take this same project but encode it into 8 bit H.265 the M1 Mini takes the
win this time.
And taking it a step further, if you’re working with that new footage our new cameras,
the M1 mini, absolutely embarasses the Mac Pro finishing the project close to 3 times
faster.
With that, something I do very often is stabilizing clips to make them look their best, and the
new M1 mini can do this 65% faster.
Now I also have to be real and say that many people who bought Mac Pro’s work with footage
like RAW video from say RED Cinema cameras, and with these kinds of projects the raw GPU
power allows it to absolutely smoke the Mac Mini so nothing has changed there, but what
has changed is for the footage that 95% of people work with, the Mac Pro no longer gives
you an advantage like it did just a year ago.
So as you see, in these tasks that I spend most of my time doing, the mini is better
in pretty much every way, and that's with only 16GB of RAM compared to 192GB in the
Mac Pro which really surprised me.
I’ve had about 20 tabs open, a youtube video playing music, Photoshop, and final cut pro
and I had no issues with performance, and one big concern I had was how many projects
I can keep open in final cut pro without it auto closing to save on ram, and it’s the
same amount as with my Mac Pro.
So what are the issues with the Mini, and how did it get fixed? Well the first and most
obvious one is the lack of ports, having only 2 thunderbolt ports and no 10gbe like before
which made it impossible for me to use in a professional environment.
Thankfully, OWC made a simple thunderbolt 4 HUB that gives me exactly what I need and
leaves out what I don’t, keeping the price tag at a very reasonable $150. Since the Mini
uses thunderbolt 4, just one port gives me 3 which I can connect my 6K display to, my
112TB server, and a high speed thunderbolt 4 ssd plus I get another usb port which runs
at twice the speed of the ones in my Mac Pro and surprisingly everything works perfectly.
You could even use two of these to have a ton of connectivity and the total price is
still only $1200. There were a few other issues we mentioned
in our top 10 M1 mac issues video, and I’ll just say that the display glitching when opening
the launcher is still an issue, but video encoding has either been fixed or its just
plain better than my Mac Pro’s AMD encoders, which I’ll explore in detail in my full
review of the M1 Mac Mini so enable those notifications to see that video.
Lastly, the last thing that really stopped me from changing were plugins not working,
and companies have been updating them constantly and for the 1 plugin I’m still waiting on,
I can run final cut pro in rosetta emulation mode if I need to use it which is a tip for
all you M1 Mac owners.
Now the other reason I knew I had to sell it was simply because if the Mac Mini performs
this well, once we get M1X macs or an Mac Pro with up to 32 Apple Silicon cores, that
will innahiate the Mac Pro and most likely cost less as well.
I love my Mac Pro, it's a beautiful machine that has served me well and that I’m proud
of owning, but If I don’t sell it now I believe the used price will drop dramatically,
and for those that need to have crazy amount of ram or up to 4 graphics cards this will
still server them well and is worth the cost.
But for me, after these fixes and updates, the mini is now not only way cheaper but substantially
faster for everything I do, and allows me to cash out of my mac pro while the resale
price is still decent, which is why and how the M1 Mac Mini replaced my $15,000 Mac Pro.
Click above to subscribe if you want to see my full long term review of the M1 mac mini
with more detailed info, or check out how it compares to other macs right over there.
This has been Max and I’ll see you in the next video.