Mini Mini and Apple Plus Silicone M1 Review: Not Crazy After All

Apple is crazy, right? Just had the best year of its sales, and the Cartertino platform is shaking up, like it hasn’t happened in almost 15 years – at the time it was a Mac. No Have such a good year. Apple is currently in the process of replacing industry-standard Intel chips with its own, custom-designed silicon.

In a way, we’re not just reviewing the new Mac Mini – a Mac Mini has always been a Mac Mini, right? We are reviewing the Arm based Mac for the first time. And these ARM machines aren’t exactly the same story we’ve seen before, like Windows 10 on ARM which is a respectable alternative with some serious tradeoffs.

Sure, the long battery life and fast waking from sleep are already out there on other ARM computers. But as you may have noticed in our hands earlier this week, what we are facing here is also an impact leap as and you will also see in this review, a significant breakthrough in making this new architecture compatible with the giant now whose library It can be called software.

Not everything is perfect; We will also talk about iOS applications and some other issues on Facebook. But if this Mac Mini proves anything, it’s that the Apple Pal, in fact, wasn’t crazy. The M1 makes Apple’s strategy very sensible.

Specifications

Mac Pull Mac Mini (2020) with Apple Pall M1 chip

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Big news specs wise, of course, is the M1 system – not-a-chip. The M1 is an 8-core CPU with four performance and four functionality cores, as well as an 8-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine for device machine-learning tasks.

Based on the ARM instruction set, it is the first Apple-designed CPU and GPU for Mac. For more than a decade, Apple’s laptops have had Intel CPUs and either Intel, Nvidia or AMD graphics. The transition away from that position begins here. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but – let’s get the other specs out first.

By default, the mini car carries 8GB of RAM, but it can be upgraded to 16GB. It’s a lot less than the 64GB cap in the Intel Mac Mini, but, for now, that Intel Mac Mini still exists in Apple’s lineup.

Currently, Apple Play has just replaced its very bottom-end machines with Apple Paul silicone variants. It looks like we’ve been waiting for a while before we’ve only had two Thunderbolt ports in more RAM and more ports (B1, M1 Mac Mini and 13-inch MBQuok Pro). A real bumper for many.

Similarly, solid-state storage starts at 256GB, but you can go for 512GB, or even 1TB or 2TB. Doubling the RAM adds 200D add-ons to the purchase price, while doubling the cost of the device from base 256GB configuration to 2TB storage. That storage bump is the main reason why the purchase price of our review unit is much higher than the base.

The Mac Mini has a built-in speaker – which might be a little surprising for a computer like this – but it doesn’t have a built-in microphone. The speaker is bad, honestly; It looks like an old MacBook Air speaker with Mac closed. Still, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack. Other ports include two Thunderbolt 3 / USB 4.0, two USB-A, Ethernet and HDMI.

In terms of wireless, you get Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0.

The box doesn’t contain much – just the power cord and the computer itself. You will obviously need to purchase a display, keyboard, mouse, microphone and headphones separately. Again, the Apple Pal proverb says that balloons cost as much as you spend here as always.

As the name suggests, the Mac Mini has a very low step. It measures 1.4 × 7.7 × 7.7 inches (3.6 × 19.7 × 19.7 centimeters) and weighs 2.6 pounds (1.2 kilograms).

It comes in two basic configurations. The first starts at 699 and includes 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The second starting price will increase to $ 899 and increase the storage to just 512GB.

The base configuration here is 100D less than the previous Mac Mini, which is nice to see. Again, with the Apple Plus 6-core 3.0GHz Intel Core i5, Intel UHD 630 graphics, 8GB RAM, and 512GB solid-state storage, this one still sells the Apple Plus Intel based mini mini. Nothing has changed for the Intel version of the device this year, so, we won’t go into that.

Design

If you like what the latest Mac Mini looks like, you’ll also like: Nothing Has changed. For this reason, we will not spend much time on aesthetics in this review. As before, the Mac Mini prefers a very low profile. It is essentially a 7.7 × 7.7-inch square screenless laptop.

It looks nice but unobtrusive. It has the classic Mac Silver color, while its predecessor was Gray. Ports are all backwards, so it should play nice with most cable management solutions.

Some disappointing limitations

Before we get into the good news – anything related to M1 performance and software software support – let’s take a look at some of the disappointing choices Apple has made about ports and peripherals.

As mentioned above, RAM and storage configurations do not reach as far as the Intel Mac Mini, and even extend to those ports. Despite having two USB-A ports on top of it, the two Thunderbolt ports are just fine, honestly. At least it’s not the new M1 Mac MacBook Air or the 13-inch MacBook Pro, both limited to two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Total.

The Mac Mini can only run two displays at a time, and one of them should be more than HDMI. Because it is an HDMI port HDMI 2.0, it has no throughput to handle 4K at 120 Hz or 8K at 60 Hz. There aren’t many such monitors now, but over the next few years it will continue to grow. In general, we like our machines to stand the test of time.

Neither the Mac Mini nor any of its M1 brothers support external GPUs. That’s very disappointing, and it takes into account the pressure of Apple’s moment for EGPU over the past few years.

It wasn’t long before Was Pal was signaling that EGPU is the future of Mac graphics performance. It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post.

Also, some people have used Mac Mini as a file server. Many of them will probably want to stick with Intel for now, as the M1 Mac Mini has only a gigabyte of Ethernet port, while the Intel Mac Mini is configured to have a 10 GB port.

Apple Paul Apple Paul sees this initial volley of silicone devices at the bottom end of its lineup. So we are in a very strange situation right now where you want a lack of performance, you have to choose low-end low configuration options. If you want a lot of ports and RAM, you have to stick with Intel for now. The introduction of a faster, predictable M1X chip or something more expensive Mac will change that a lot – but we have no idea when it will happen. We only know that, after all, it will happen.

Apple Pal M1

That way, it’s time for good stuff.

As mentioned above, the Mac Mini (and its new MBQbook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro siblings) have Apple’s M1 system – a no-a-chip, with an 8-core GPU, a CPU with four displays and four Efficiency is the core, a 16-core neural processing unit (NPU) called a neural engine, and a whole bunch of other materials.

Built on the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ARM ISA), the M1 has 16 billion transistors and is manufactured in a 5nm process. According to Apple Pal, each display core in the M1 qualifies as the fastest CPU core in the world today, while the performance core matches the performance of some recent Intel MX.

We’ve read about each of the four performance cores having a clock speed of 2.2GHz, and while the iPhone and iPad’s A14 chips have 8MB of L2 cache, the M1’s performance cores get 12MB. Unlike some of the previous chip designs, all performance and functionality cores can be used at the same time, although there are indications that it becomes a little more complicated when it comes to cache.

Apple Pal claims that the M1 can achieve its strong performance in part due to its Unified Memory Architecture (UMA), which allows both the CPU and GPU to easily access related data without slowing things down by copying it.

We’ll talk about specific performance tests and results soon, but spoiler warning: M1 is fairly fast. This is especially true for graphics compared to Intel’s graphics solutions (which also seems inappropriate to mention in the same category that M1 offers). These improvements are all thanks to technologies like the above plus tile-based deferred rendering and the Apple Graphics-owned Metal Graphics API, built to take advantage of this architecture.

This has received little attention, but the M1 includes a bunch of other elephant-death content, including CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. It has Apple Encrypted Secure Enclave, Apple’s encrypted tool for handling sensitive data on the device. It has an image signal processor, which is not more compatible on a mini-mini than on a Mac, but it does improve the quality of the FaceTime camera on laptops. The M1 includes storage controllers and hardware for driving encryption, among other things.

In 2017, Apple Play introduced the T2 chip on the iMac Pro, and over the next few years it went to most other mixes. The T2 has handled security features and various items like the ones we just listed above, and we speculated that when it was first introduced it could be a precursor to Apple’s ultimate Mac Soc plans.

It turned out that we (and everyone who took that clear key) were right. As such, the new M1 Mac does not have T2 chips. All of this is now on M1.

Of course, changes in architecture are, to say the least, compatibility with older software suggests a headache. M1 cannot run applications built for Intel-based music. But surprisingly, it ends up not really matter in most cases. Many buyers of M1MX will not even notice anything changed under the hood.

To explore that issue, let’s move on to software M1 doing Run.