Apple Silicon M1 Mac Mini Review

As some of you have been aware, I purchased an M1 Mac Mini shortly after watching a few initial reviews. This writeup will serve to talk about my experience with the machine, the use cases and my overall opinion on the product.

I’m not a commercial news site who profits over the amount of minutes you spend reading my garbage articles, so to save you some trouble I’m going to put a summary with what you do need to know.

Conclusions

The M1 Mac Mini is an excellent machine. Unless you have a heavy need to run virtual machines, depend on using ancient drivers that haven’t been updated for Big Sur, stuck using music software that might not even be updated for Catalina within the next century, or desperately need to play those awful cashgrab DLC filled pieces of DRM known as “triple A games”, you will have a great time on M1, and the Mac Mini could be the most cost effective and expandable way to enjoy it.

Pros

• Remarkable Performance per Dollar
• Incredible performance per watt
• Near silent operation
• Barely gets warm
• Rosetta 2 as a software compatability layer is insanely impressive
• Native arm/Universal software adoption has been really fast

Cons

• x86 Virtual Machine support probably won’t happen for a while
• Running bootcamp is obviously not an option for x86 windows, and performance on Windows for Arm is probably going to be dogshit
• iOS app support is generally disappointing, with the possiblitiy of Apple killing your ability to sideload apps in the future
• Logitech G Hub is a giant piece of garbage, this isn’t a con of the Mac Mini itself, but the fact is that it’s bothered me so much I have to say this
• Expandability is still slightly limiting. You can connect a dozen hubs, but if you have anything remotely latency-sensitive (eg. instruments and interfaces) its going to be tight. Also max of 2 screens might be a huge downside for some power users.
• Apple’s software is dogshit and this stupid operating system will crash randomly if you have an external drive plugged in with a SOCD timeout. Also if you happen to have updated to MacOS Monterey, enjoy your memory leaks.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

This is just one of the nicest machines I’ve ever used. Performance is super stable, in general it exudes the Apple “It just works” magic. The fact that they’ve performed an architecture transition this well for their first consumer product on Apple Silicon is just impressive. A lot of the things I listed also apply to the M1 Macbook Air and M1 Macbook Pro 13, so if you’re considering those and have figured out how to live with only having two Thunderbolt ports, I would recommend those as well.