We Need To Talk About This M1 Mac Mini: My First Impressions
The new Macs with M1 processors are making headlines in the technology press, and with good reason: Apple has surprised locals and strangers with the bet materialized in its new M1 chips, and among them, the most often talked about is MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Energy efficiency, mobility performance, battery … there are many more points to consider in a laptop and that is why they have been placed at the forefront of many media.

We have already seen the transparency and simplicity of adapting all the applications in our first contact with laptops, so what difference is there with this Mac mini? We are facing the first desktop with an Apple Silicon chip, to which we already have to connect a monitor, speakers, and other accessories separately.

The Mac mini’s box and its unboxing leave no room for doubt: as with laptops, Apple doesn’t label its switch to proprietary chips at all. In fact, we don’t even have the memory and SSD storage labels, if we want to read the details of the machine we have to look for the fine print. It details that we have a Mac mini “with 8 CPUs, 8 GPUs, 256 GB of storage, and 16 GB of RAM.” Nothing else.

Connecting all the accessories has not been a problem for me. The initial setup has been done surprisingly fast, taking less than five minutes from when I first turned on the Mac mini until the macOS Big Sur desktop appeared. The only possible bump that we can find with this Mac mini is that we will need a wired keyboard to be able to do the initial configuration, something that I have been able to solve easily with my USB mechanical keyboard.

By default, macOS applies the retina effect at 4K resolution, turning it into a 1080p monitor. Personally, I have preferred to scale that resolution somewhere between that 1080p (too big for 27 inches) and the native 4K resolution (too small): I have kept the 2560x1440p resolution with which I already worked on the 27 inches of my iMac, and Thanks to the 4K resolution I get anti-aliasing that improves (and quite a lot) the general quality of the image.

With the general use of the system, I have noticed, and I say this without hesitation, a noticeable increase in the overall system. Intel applications run without us even realizing that they are emulated under the Rosetta layer, and applications already compiled for the M1 chip launch instantly, with the snap of the fingers.

It does not matter what application we are talking about, whether it is Twitter or Pixelmator Pro: both start so fast that it is absurd to time it. I am not one of those who is going to always demand maximum power from this chip, but it is clear to me that I have made a leap in performance as I have rarely experienced. I’ll break down the GeekBench results.

GeekBench Results Mac Mini M1 Chip 2020. Source: GeekBench

In Geekbench we have slightly better results than the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, probably thanks to the ventilation that the device has. Although I have to say that I have not heard absolutely any noise from that fan during the tests, the Mac mini has endured them without messing up. The only effect I have noticed has been that the computer has warmed slightly in its rear area, very little. During the rest of the activity, such as while writing this article, the computer has been cold.

In the absence of working more time with it and while we wait for those new iMac, I do not hesitate for a second to say that this Mac mini is the almost-perfect desktop for any general user who works at a table many hours a day. It has envelope power even for those who dare to edit photo and video, so we could even recommend it for the small professional.

The only question I have left is: if this Mac mini is an entry model, what does the future hold? What will Macs be like with chips that prioritize performance over efficiency? The transition to Apple Silicon is just the beginning and the M1 chip is just a glimpse into the future.

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['Mac', 'SEO', 'Technology', 'Future', 'Apple']