The Cheapest M1 Mac Mini 9 Months Later - Any Regrets?
/It's been about nine months since I purchased the M1 Mac Mini– the absolute base model with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB hard drive. It’s the cheapest computer I've ever used, and also arguably the most powerful. So after 9 months, 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.
But we can 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.
The first thing to address is the performance of the computer which 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 with Final Cut Pro, Ecamm Live, Photoshop, Audition, and a whole bunch of Chrome tabs. While doing this I thought, who in their right mind would end up doing these things at the same time?! Well it turns out that when you have a computer capable of doing those things, you actually ended up doing it a lot and this is now a normal part of my workflow.
Ultimately the reason I like this computer so much, aside from being a good value, is because it just gets out of the way. I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about my computer and instead I can spend more time working on what I want to work on– making a video, building a website, whatever I need to do.
Now the biggest question I've been getting is, is eight gigabytes really enough? And my short answer is yes. About three or four months after getting the computer, I got the Sony a7SIII, which is a 4k camera. Up until then my video workflow had been dealing with upscaled 1080 footage, and now it deals primarily with full native 4k footage. The files are big and can be very tough to edit. That’s 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, sometimes Final Cut needs a little bit of time to catch up. I did also 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.
Long story, super long, 8GB is more than enough. However, I do think that if you have the budget for 16GB, 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 personally, 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 all hype or not.
Now I did mention that I've had a few issues with the computer. None of these would make me not recommend the computer, but they’re definitely worth bringing up. The first one is kind of weird and I'm not sure if it just has to do with my keyboard or the computer, but every once in a while, like maybe two or three times a month, when my computer has been asleep for a long time and I come in in the morning and turn it on, the keyboard suddenly has a crazy amount of lag to it. If I type something it takes from 5 to 7 seconds before it populates on screen. Fortunately, all I have to do is restart the computer and the problem is totally fixed.
In a similar fashion, another issue with the sleep system on the computer is that sometimes the display doesn’t wake with the computer. The way I solve this is just by unplugging and then plugging in my display again. Much like the keyboard problem, this usually only happens 2 or 3 times a month.
Now the biggest issue I've had is a little weirder and more concerning. I've seen reports of this happening on every M1 model, so it's not just the Mini. 3 or 4 times over the past 9 months, the computer will just randomly restart in the middle of whatever I’m doing. After the computer restarts, I get a dialog box that says, “AP Watchdog Error.”
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 “Wireless AP” stands for “access point,” and the error has something to do with the computer’s wireless. That’s really the biggest issue to be aware of, but again, it wouldn't really stop me from recommending the computer.
What I have noticed is that the M1 chip or the M1 architecture really does require a shift in how you look at computers. 8GB of RAM on an M1 chip is not the same and does not work the same as 8GB of RAM on an Intel chip. It just doesn't. You should still definitely get the best specs you cna afford, but don’t look at specs and performance through the same lens you’ve been looking at other computers in years past.
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