- Bold claims ladies and gentlemen. This is it.
The Apple Mac mini with their new
Apple Silicon M1 processor.
That's right, my friends.
Apple says CPU performance up to three times greater.
GPU performance up to six times greater.
And neural processor, machine learning performance
up to 15 times greater.
That's right.
All of that and more can be yours for just, what is it?
699? 699 US?
Is that right?
Well, from the outside, it's a Mac mini all right.
Wow. Yeah, really not much to make it stand out
from the previous Mac minis that we've been using here
at the office as ingest stations
for the better part of a year now, I guess.
Black stand.
Got a little cover over the IO.
And this is of course where the disappointment starts.
Now, it's nothing to do with the performance
of the Apple Silicon M1, but for me,
one of the big highlights of the latest generation
Mac minis has been the ability to equip them
with 10 gigabit networking.
That's something that we use specifically for our use case
where we wanted Mac OS footage ingest stations
that we can offload footage from to our network storage.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason,
and I'm sure this is something that's going to be explored
in depth over the coming weeks,
Apple was not able to or didn't want to
equip the new M1 Mac with a 10 gigabit option even.
So you're stuck with one gig networking.
You've got two Thunderbolt ports.
Although exactly what is different about them
we don't know but we do know they have no support
for external GPU's at least at this time.
HDMI.
A couple of USB three ports,
which normally I would gripe about
but you've got Thunderbolt, which is also
a type C slash USB 4.
The nomenclature's getting really confusing there.
So you can break these out into a dongle
or whatever the case may be.
A cooling vent as well as a headphone jack.
Now Apple to my knowledge has only really quoted
performance per watt, at least on the product page.
Assuming a 10 watt TDP for the M1 chip.
But what we also know is that it could potentially
be configured with a greater TDP
and that's something we'd be more likely to see
on a device that doesn't have to rely on
a battery for power.
For all I know they might just go with the same approach
on all of them just to keep things from getting confusing.
Of course, there's a power button.
And before we even fire it up, I kind of want to open it up.
You got that iFixit kit?
- [Jono] There you go.
- Yeah, just like Apple. Apple likes iFixit kits, too.
You guys see that?
Ah, the delicious irony of Apple featuring iFixit
in their promotional video, launching the M1 processor.
I personally really enjoyed that.
Wait, before we do that, maybe I should at least
finish unboxing the thing.
So we got a power cable.
Nice environmentally conscious packaging though.
All of this appears to be paper.
Quite literally all of it.
That's fantastic.
This video is brought to you by Private Internet Access.
PIA is a VPN that allows you to access services
and websites as though you were in a different country.
It encrypts all of your internet traffic
and uses a safe, protected IP and allows you to connect
up to five devices at once with clients
for Windows, Mac OS, that's right, Android, iOS and Linux.
Buy a one-year plan for 39.95 and get three months for free
at the link in the video description.
(soft guitar music)
Appears to be some kind of cover for the wireless antenna.
Ah, that makes sense because the entire rest of this device
is encased in metal and your wifi won't work
very well like that now will it?
Are you excited to see the insides, Andy?
- [Andy] Oh yeah.
- Yeah? Please tell me this is just taped on.
Sorry, give me a sec here.
Oh cool. It just pops out.
Sorry, I couldn't really get you a good look at that.
See, it just goes into these little clips
and then looks like they've given you enough slack.
Uh, almost. Yeah, there you go.
To just put it aside and get access to the inside.
Wow. There is a whole heck of a, not a lot in here.
Wow. Got a little speaker right there.
Got a little CMOS battery right there.
So this is the power supply right over here.
Cooling fan.
If Apple was a PC manufacturer they would probably say,
"Oh wow, look at all this space we've got in here.
We could put like a, you know, two and a half inch
drive bay for expansion."
For all I know this thing doesn't even have
a SATA controller on it though.
I don't see why it would.
I mean, that's the thing.
When you make your own bespoke silicon
you don't have to build in any legacy
or unnecessary features that you're not planning to use
in your devices.
So why would you have a SATA controller?
Look at this, the cooler's like half of the internals.
If nothing else, ladies and gentlemen,
can you respect the cable management?
I mean, yeah, it only has four cables or whatever,
but boy are they managed (laughing).
Now Anthony needs to do thermal testing
in our full review of this thing.
Which means that I unfortunately cannot pop the heat sink
off of the SoC.
As much as I would love to look at it.
But with everyone out there who got units early
already covering this thing,
I'm sure you'll be able to find a picture
of it if you really want to.
(tape peeling)
Okay. I guess I just void the warranty probably.
- [Jono] Oh no.
- Well, what, what did you think was gonna happen Jono?
You gave me an iFixit kit and a Mac mini.
You think the warranty was going to be intact
by the time I was done?
- [Jono] Yes.
- All right. Well, that's it.
That's the whole darn main board.
As we talked about in our coverage of Apple's launch event
for their M1 Max, which I was not a fan of, by the way.
Anytime a company comes out and presents unlabeled graphs
or vague comparisons against their competitors.
I find it, A, suspect. And B just unnecessary.
If you're confident in your product,
just come out and give us the real goods.
I mean, either way, I've got it in my hands now.
So soon enough, we're gonna be able to run
our own comparisons.
But as we discussed in that video,
there is not a whole lot to this.
No M.2 expansion slot or even proprietary expansion slot.
No SODIMM slot.
That was something that we were a big fan of
on the previous Mac mini.
Sorry, I don't really have a great angle for you of the back
of the board there, but you'll have to trust me.
There's no SODIMM slot.
That's another really funny thing.
I saw people kind of criticizing me
for complaining about that.
They were like, "Um, Linus, Macbooks haven't had
upgradeable memory in years."
Right.
Which is true, but Apple also launched a Mac mini
and the previous Mac mini looked to us
like it was a step in the right direction
in terms of user upgradability.
It just had easily accessible SODIMM slots.
This one does not. There's no expansion whatsoever.
And you're stuck with either eight gigs
or 16 gigs of memory built right into the M1 SoC.
Of course, one of the advantages of the M1
is the fact that the DRAM is built right into the SoC.
So, the bad part of that is no future expansion,
no upgradability, nothing like that.
But the good part of it is that everything from the CPU,
GPU, neural processor, everything has direct access
to that memory.
Which, as we've seen exploring AMD's
what did they, (beep)
what's their stupid branding for that again?
Smart Access Memory.
As we discussed, when we tested Smart Access Memory
which allows an AMD Radeon CPU to have full access
to a Radeon 6,000 series GPU's memory,
there can be significant performance gains.
We saw anywhere from low to mid single digit
performance gains in games using that feature.
So depending on how this is laid out,
Apple could have even more available bandwidth on its hands.
Because if you look at something like a GPU
it's connected using PCI express 16X.
And even a gen four link is nothing compared
to the type of memory interface you can build
by putting a core right next to DRAM
and linking them up directly.
Of course, we didn't see any performance improvement
in productivity applications using Smart Access Memory.
So as always, it's gonna come down to developer support
as well as the specific architecture to determine what kind
of performance improvement you're going to see.
Now, one of the things I've seen speculated
about the M1 is that because it shares a lot of its heritage
with Apple's A series of mobile first SoCs,
well, that is to say I mean, Macbook Air is technically
a mobile device, but I think you guys know what I mean,
like iPhones and iPads, is that, that could be part
of the reason why IO seems at least on first glance,
fairly limited because something like
being able to have four thunderbolt ports
on an iPad is obviously a pretty low priority.
So it might've been a lot of work to bolt on.
And there might've been internal bottlenecks
that you would have hit
if you tried to actually daisy chain, you know, what is it?
Six times, 24 devices off the bloody thing.
Of course my expectation was that
this is a very first generation attempt at this.
And we're going to see big improvements down the line.
And I did predict that Apple will abandon
these first-generation M1 series products
relatively quickly.
Which isn't to say, though, that I think that
they're going to abandon it, you know
immediately like something like, I mean, what's an example
of a product that got abandoned completely immediately?
Remember that Lenovo Fab thing
with like Google Project Tango augmented reality?
Okay. That's a product that got really abandoned.
I think that this is just going to be
Apple's kind of abandoned.
So if you look at something like the software support
of the iPad first gen versus the iPad 2.
It's like not even close.
That's kind of my expectation here, but I would love,
I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
Ask for the performance, as for the app compatibility.
I mean, the embargo just lifted like a couple of hours
before I filmed this thing.
Apple did a great job of delivering our system on time.
So at least credit to them for that.
So I'm going to be leaving that to Anthony,
to test on his own.
One of the big features here is
of course, is that you're not going to be able to
run just arm compatible versions of programs on this.
So Photoshop is something that is notably missing
a native app for the new M1 version Macs.
But also x86 compatible apps.
So you can run Photoshop using Rosetta 2.
And also iPad and iPhone apps.
So theoretically, this could be like the device
that kind of runs it all.
Just, it remains to be seen with what kind of performance
and with what kind of compatibility.
It was kind of inevitable
if you think about it though.
I mean it's not like Apple is the first to say
okay, you know, screw it, screw x86.
We're going arm.
I mean, Amazon's doing it.
Like, it's already happening.
Graviton chips, man.
If I'm Intel and AMD,
I'm sort of wondering what my jam is gonna be
if x86 loses its dominance at this point.
Have fun Anthony.
This one is going to be an adventure, I think.
Speaking of adventures.
Make sure you're subscribed to Short Circuit
so you don't miss any of our first hands-on impressions
and adventures with new devices like this one.
Man, it has been a busy tech-tober all the way
into like tech-vember.