- It's been about nine months
since I purchased the M1 Mac Mini,
the absolute base model with eight gigabytes of RAM,
256 gig hard drive, the cheapest computer I've ever used,
and also arguably the most powerful computer
that I've ever used.
So after nine months,
does the Mac mini, Mac me-need more power?
So if you were to ask me, do I still like this computer?
Do I still recommend this computer?
Do I still think it's an awesome value?
Should you get it, if it seems like something you need?
My answer is yes.
(cue end screen)
But we could probably dive into things
with a little bit more detail.
And there are a handful of issues that have popped up.
Nothing that would stop me from recommending this computer,
but definitely things that I just hadn't had time to
experience when I made my initial review
about a month after getting it.
So the first thing to address is the performance
of the computer and this thing is completely ridiculous.
It still has never made a sound.
It's never gotten hot.
In my first video about it,
I kind of put it through a stress test where I was like,
let's open up Final Cut Pro and Photoshop and Adobe Audition
and a whole bunch of Chrome tabs
and just all this stuff at once
and I thought, you know,
who in their right mind would end up doing these things?
Well it turns out
that when you have a computer capable of doing those things,
you actually ended up doing it a lot.
Ultimately the reason I like it so much,
aside from being a good value,
is because it does that thing,
which is really important for a technological tool to do.
And that's get out of the way.
I don't have to spend a lot of time
thinking about my computer.
I can spend more time working on what I want to work on.
You know, making a video, building a website.
Whatever it is that I'm doing.
The computer gets out of the way
and lets me do that, for the most part.
For the most part.
Now the biggest question I've been getting is,
is eight gigabytes really enough?
And my answer, short answer is yes, because that's,
I'm still using that same base model.
Video's not sponsored or anything.
Had a whole bunch of
people saying that I was like
paid by Apple to make my last video.
I bought my computer at Best Buy for full price.
So, didn't even buy it directly from Apple,
which I normally would do,
but they just didn't have any in stock.
The other big change to my workflow has been with video
because I got a new camera last spring.
So about three or four months after getting the computer,
I got the Sony a7SIII, which is a 4k camera.
And basically my video workflow
had been dealing with upscale 1080 footage,
and now it deals primarily with full on native 4k footage.
The files are big and the files are very tough to edit.
And that has been where the computer
sometimes stutters just a little bit.
It basically just means in Final Cut Pro,
if I'm not using proxies, I need to import the footage
and wait for it all to render out.
The only other hiccups are when I have like
layers and layers of 4k footage.
So if I have like three, four, five layers, plus audio,
and I'm just constantly like
cutting and moving, cutting and moving.
Sometimes Final Cut needs a little bit of time to catch up.
That is totally fine with me
because it's still relatively smooth.
I did rent a Blackmagic 6k Pro
earlier this spring for a while
and I was editing 6k RAW footage on it.
The computer handled it totally fine.
I've been doing a lot of streaming with the computer
and I even did do a stress test live stream
where I basically
opened up all the applications I could while streaming.
So I was running Ecamm Live
and then I started editing and exporting 4k video,
working in Photoshop, working in Adobe Audition.
There, now I'm recording in Audition
and I have Ecamm streaming
and I have Final Cut over here.
And then I've got,
yeah, Audition is recording and Photoshop is Photoshopping.
That was pretty good.
I also do have Chrome open.
I have multiple Chrome tabs open, so, for the stream.
So it's pretty good.
Long story, super long.
Eight gigabytes is more than enough.
However, I do think that if you have the budget for 16 gigs,
this is one of those rare cases
where Apple isn't totally overly pricing their memory.
So if that's in your budget and the computer's available,
I don't think you'll regret that.
For me, I wanted to buy the cheapest computer possible
because I was a little dubious of the M1 chips at the time.
I didn't know if it was like all hype or not.
And also there were no 16 gigabyte ones available.
If I ordered one,
it was going to be a few months before I got it.
And this is not to sound boastful or anything,
but I really don't think most people push their computers
as hard as I do on a regular basis.
That's not like, look at me, I deserve a medal for that.
But it just means like,
every day I'm doing all kinds of video stuff,
graphic stuff, design stuff.
And even if you don't do those things,
those are really hard tasks
for computers to process and handle.
So if it's handling that well for me,
there's a really good chance
it will handle what you need it to handle.
But of course,
if you're using very specific software
or you're working for a company
that uses some kind of proprietary software,
you know, it's going to be up to you
to kind of see if that's actually going to work out.
But I did mention that I'd had
a few issues with the computer.
None of these would make me not recommend the computer,
but it's definitely worth bringing up.
There's really about three things that have happened.
The first one is kind of weird
and I'm not sure if it just has to do with my keyboard
or the computer or those like
Bluetooth connectivity issues that you kind of heard about
with some of the M1 things.
But every once in a while,
like maybe two or three times a month
when my computer has been asleep for a long time,
like overnight and I come in in the morning and turn it on,
the keyboard suddenly has a crazy amount of lag to it.
So if I type something in here,
it's like five to seven seconds before it sort of like,
quickly fills in on screen.
Fortunately, all I have to do is restart the computer
and the problem is totally fixed.
It hasn't happened as much lately.
So I don't know if a recent software update has fixed it,
but it's something that's happened a few times a month
since I've gotten the computer.
In a similar fashion,
another thing to do with the sleep system on the computer is
sometimes when I wake the computer from sleep,
the computer wakes up and I can push keys on the keyboard
and hear it making sounds and everything.
But the display doesn't wake up.
The way I solve that as I just reached behind my display,
unplug the power cable and plug it back in
and the display turns on and everything's good.
That also probably happens like two or three times a month.
The biggest issue I've had
is a little weirder and more concerning
and I've seen reports of this happening on every M1 model.
So it's not just the Mac Mini.
It's, high-end specked out computers.
iMacs, MacBooks, whatever.
I've seen people talking about this.
And that is that sometimes,
I've had this happen three or four times
over the past nine months,
it will just randomly restart
in the middle of whatever you're doing.
Had it happen during a live stream once.
Suddenly the computer just restarted.
So I don't know what happened.
You could probably go back in the stream and literally see,
which is, suddenly my monitor went green.
And then the computer just restarted for some reason,
which has has never happened before.
Fortunately it restarted so fast
that I was actually able to just continue the stream
with only like a one minute interruption.
That was cool.
And when the computer restarts,
I get the dialog box that says,
"Your computer restarted because of a problem."
And when I click "Show More,"
it says, "AP Watchdog Error Timeout," or something like that.
And I looked that up
and I actually found a lot of threads online
of people talking about this issue,
including a pretty extensive thread
in Apple's own community discussion support forums.
And unfortunately there's not really a solution,
but what has been narrowed down is
I believe the "Wireless AP" thing is,
the AP stands for "Access Point,"
and the error has something to do with
the computer's wireless,
I don't know if it like times out
and thinks that some certificate has expired
and then it needs to reboot.
It's weird.
It's super unpredictable.
I cannot make it happen.
I never know when it's going to happen
but like I said,
it's only happened three or four times in nine months.
I haven't seen that addressed in a specific update.
I haven't found solutions to that online.
And I have seen lots of other people have that same issue.
So that's, that's really the biggest one to be aware of.
But again,
it wouldn't really stop me from recommending the computer.
And then the last thing to address is really all of the,
the large number of messages I got,
more so than usual telling me that I am an idiot
and I don't know what I'm talking about
after making my first video about the M1 Mac Mini.
And what I have noticed is the M1 chip
or the M1 architecture really does require a shift
in how you look at computers.
Eight gigabytes of RAM on an M1 chip
is not the same and does not work the same
as eight gigabytes of RAM on an Intel chip.
It just doesn't.
As someone who is used both for an extended period of time
for a lot of projects, it just doesn't work same.
And the other controversial thing about the M1 computers,
especially the lower specked out RAM models is SSD swapping,
which I didn't know about when I got the computer
and a bunch of people talk to me about it,
very politely, as I'm sure you can imagine,
saying that
one of the reasons the computer can run so efficiently
with very little RAM
is because it basically uses the SSD as RAM
and it kind of swaps that around and does that.
And I was like, okay, I don't care, that's fine.
But the concern is that by doing that,
it's putting a lot of wear and tear on the SSD,
which could then cause it to fail soon, which is a problem
because the SSDs are just soldered
directly into the computer.
They're not super replaceable or anything.
So I looked into this and I found some articles and stuff.
This was a few months ago,
so I'm sorry I don't have specific links.
But a lot of what I found was on
the MacRumors.com message boards.
There were people running their own experiments
and linking the articles
so I'm sure if you go to MacRumors,
go to their forums and search up and stuff, you could find
a lot of info about the, like,
SSD swapping with the RAM and stuff.
And basically, what I found was
as is the case with most things, there was some truth to it.
Swapping out RAM with SSD does put wear and tear
on the internal hard drive.
However, I have not found that to be an actual issue
because one, now M1 computers have been out for like a year
and haven't heard about this widespread SSD issue.
(knocking) Knock on wood.
By the time I put this video out,
but also think about how disastrous it would be for Apple to
totally shift everything they're doing to this new chip.
Market it as the next best thing.
People start singing the praises
and then everything just starts, you know, totally failing.
So basically the
best example I found was someone did a simulation with,
you know, SSD swapping on a base model,
Mac Mini or M1 computer,
and found that it would shorten the SSDs' life
to only about 8 to 10 years.
If it turns out that I spent six or $700
on a computer that just works really, really well
and makes my life easy, but only lasts for 8 years.
I will totally feel like I have gotten my money's worth.
Like that computer will have paid for itself
many, many times over in that amount of time.
And I don't know if this helps with that or not,
but I am still using the Hagabis Hub, "Hubgabis,"
and this has a one terabyte hard drive
that I put inside of it.
And then it also has extra USB ports
and card readers and stuff.
This has worked great.
It's not a powered hub though.
So certain things like old,
non SSD hard drives don't work incredibly well off of this.
I need to plug those directly into the computer itself,
which by the way,
I've mounted the computer under my desk and out of the way.
That's been super cool.
Just really streamlines everything.
That mount was a very game-changing accessory.
So definitely recommend that.
Ultimately, that's where we are after nine months.
I hope that I have not just jinxed myself
and now everything's just going to blow up
and be terrible after this.
But if you're still on the fence over whether or not these
relatively affordable base model computers
are capable machines that can do what you need to do.
I can tell you that yes, they are.
And as time goes on and newer versions come out,
those are only going to be better and more powerful
and more efficient and you should just totally,
totally dive in.
The M1 is for m-nyone.
If you made it all the way to the end,
thank you so much to everyone who supports my channel.
I really, really appreciate that.
It's also just super fun to get to know everybody
and kind of like, build little online friendships and stuff.
And of course,
if you want to know more about workflows
and computers and things,
I've got a few videos for you that will
tell you more about computers and workflows and stuff.
Check them out.